WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will participate in a news conference from orbit at noon EDT, Monday, Oct. 21, following their Friday spacewalk – the first to be conducted by two women.

The news conference will air live on NASA Television and on the agency’s website.

The 30-minute news conference will take place three days after the spacewalk, in which Koch and Meir replaced a faulty battery charger on the International Space Station’s truss structure, restoring power capabilities for station operations and ongoing research.

Media may ask questions in person from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, as well as by phone.

To attend the briefing at Johnson, U.S. media must request credentials from the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 9 a.m., Oct. 21. To ask questions by phone, media must call the Johnson newsroom no later than 11:45 a.m.

Koch and Meir replaced a battery charge/discharge unit (BCDU) that failed to activate following the Oct. 11 installation of new lithium-ion batteries on the station’s exterior structure. The BCDUs regulate the amount of charge put into the batteries that collect energy from the station’s solar arrays to power station systems. The spacewalk was Koch’s fourth and Meir’s first.

Meir became the 15th U.S. woman to spacewalk, during the 43rd spacewalk to include a woman. Women have been performing spacewalks since 1984 – Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya spacewalked that July, and NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan spacewalked in October that same year.  

For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv 

Learn more about International Space Station research, operations, and its crew at:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

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SOURCE NASA