HOUSTON, Oct. 31, 2026 — Astronauts Anil Menon of NASA and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency will install the space station's eighth and final roll-out solar array on Thursday, Nov. 5, "increasing the station's power generating capacity from 160 kilowatts to about 215 kilowatts," NASA said in a space station blog post Friday.
The pair spent seven hours and 11 minutes outside Thursday installing the seventh array, which is now generating power, NASA says. The upgrade began in June 2021.
After the spacewalk, the crew turned to plant research. Menon studied how microgravity affects cell division in green algae and tobacco cells, work that "may support the production of food crops on the Moon and Mars," NASA says. Luke Delaney inoculated thale cress plants with a fungal pathogen to study how to prevent plant diseases in space.
Launchpad covered Thursday's spacewalk here.
Sources: NASA space station blog, Oct. 30, 2026.
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