West Lafayette, Indiana - NASA astronaut and Purdue alumnus Drew Feustel will take part in a spacewalk Sunday (Sept. 30) that will become another historic record for a Boilermaker astronaut.
The 10th spacewalk of Feustel’s career is expected to tie him with former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria for most spacewalks by an American astronaut. Live coverage of the briefing and spacewalks will air on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
The purpose of the spacewalk is to make upgrades to the International Space Station’s power system. Together with Alexander Gerst, a European Space Agency flight engineer, Feustel will venture outside the Quest Airlock to install the adapter plates for new batteries, completing the upgrades to two power station channels.
Drew Feustel (NASA photo)
This is another example of a Purdue astronaut making history. Because of Purdue’s rich space history, Giant Leaps is the name of Purdue’s Sesquicentennial Campaign. Space: Earth, Exploration and Economics is one the celebration’s giant leaps themes. Feustel discusses his giant leaps in this video.
The equipment to be installed will be delivered on a Japanese cargo craft. The installation work will begin on Earth, when ground controllers use the station’s robotic arm to replace old nickel-hydrogen batteries with six new lithium-ion batteries.
Feustel, who received an honorary Doctor of Science from Purdue in May, is expected to eventually surpass Lopez-Alegria for overall spacewalking time and become the all-time leading U.S. spacewalker and second overall in spaceflight history.
He has spent a total of 220 days in space, including 91 days on this, his third mission. He is scheduled to return to Earth in October.
Before joining NASA in 2000, Feustel was a geophysicist for the Engineering Seismology Group in Ontario, Canada, and an exploration geophysicist for Exxon Mobil Exploration Co. His first spaceflight was the STS-125 final mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009, followed by Space Shuttle Endeavor’s final mission to the International Space Station on STS-134, where he served as the lead spacewalker in 2011.
Purdue, known as the Cradle of Astronauts, has graduated 24 NASA astronauts, including the first and most recent people to walk on the moon, along with hundreds of others who work at NASA and in the space industry. More than one-third of all U.S. spaceflights with humans aboard have included at least one Boilermaker. By the end of 2018, Purdue astronauts will have spent the equivalent of more than 1,100 days in space.