NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Robert Behnken left the International Space Station on Wednesday for the second of two spacewalks in which they will have to replace batteries outside the complex.
Cassidy and Behnken began the spacewalk at 7:13 a.m. EST, and could spend up to seven hours on the mission.
It is the eighth spacewalk for each of the astronauts and the 229th Space Station construction and maintenance, NASA reported.
Astronauts will remove the six nickel-hydrogen batteries for one channel of the station and replace them with new lithium-ion batteries that arrived last month on a Japanese cargo ship.
The change will improve the station’s energy supply by installing batteries that store more of the energy generated by the solar panels.
Lithium-ion batteries are more efficient than the nickel-hydrogen batteries that were installed until now. These batteries power the station when it is on the night side of Earth, especially the microgravity laboratory.
Cassidy and Behnken will also route electricity and ethernet cables, and will do work to prepare for future updates to the power systems, NASA explained.
Behnken, along with astronaut Doug Hurley, joined Cassidy on the space station on May 31 after completing in Space X’s Crew Dragon capsule the first human launch from the United States in nearly 10 years.
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