2020’s first spacewalk has all-female crew

A spacewalk, conducted entirely by female astronauts, got underway for the second time in history at the International Space Station on Wednesday.

Jessica Meir and Christina Koch, astronauts from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are scheduled to replace batteries on solar arrays on the outside of the International Space Station during the first spacewalk of 2020, reports the CNN.

In October last year, the same duo made history after successfully completing the very first all-female spacewalk. The moment came months after a planned spacewalk with an all-women crew that had to be cancelled in March because of a lack of suitable spacesuits.

The NASA said that Meir and Koch would be replacing nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries that store power generated by the solar arrays on the ISS's port truss.

They are scheduled to conduct another spacewalk on Monday to finish the battery replacement. These will be the second and third spacewalks for Meir and the fifth and sixth for Koch.

If the battery replacement goes as planned, NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and space station Commander Luca Parmitano from the European Space Agency will leave the station on January 25.

They are scheduled to finish installing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer's (AMS) new cooling apparatus and lines begun in November and December, and verify they are ready for use.

The spectrometer is searching for dark matter and antimatter in the universe. The NASA said that the Wednesday's spacewalk is the 225th conducted at the International Space Station.