As NASA gears up for an all-women spacewalk aboard International Space Station Friday, Nov 18, the contact with the space mission has apparently been lost.
A message posted on NASA website reads, "The High Definition Earth-Viewing (HDEV) experiment on the International Space Station has experienced a loss of data, and ground computers are no longer receiving communications from the payload."
It further said, a team of engineers are reviewing the available health and status information from HDEV to identify what may have occurred and stated that more updates will be published as they become available.
Otherwise, NASA is hosting a media teleconference at 4:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, Oct. 17, to discuss this week's first all-female spacewalk at the International Space Station and it is not clear whether the audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on the agency's website as scheduled.
On Friday, NASA's women astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will venture outside the International Space Station at 7:50 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 17 or Friday, Oct. 18. Live coverage will begin at 6:30 a.m. on NASA Television and the agency's website.
Space station managers have postponed three spacewalks earlier to replace a faulty battery charge/discharge unit (BCDU) though its failure has not impacted station operations, safety of the crew, or the ongoing experiments aboard the orbiting laboratory, many in preparation for future human missions to the Moon and Mars, said NASA in a statement. The spacewalk will be Koch's fourth spacewalk and Meir's first.
