Maurer starts the first external mission in space


ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer will be the fourth German to go out into space today for an external mission on the International Space Station ISS. The airlock is expected to open at 13:50 CET today. The mission can be followed in ESA’s live stream starting at 12:30 p.m. CET.

During the approximately six and a half hour mission around 400 kilometers above the earth, Maurer is to take over maintenance work together with the American Raja Chari. Among other things, it is planned to attach new hoses to a cooling system, replace a camera and set up power and data connections on the external European research platform Bartolomeo.

»It will be a big highlight of my space flight«(Matthias Maurer, ESA astronaut)

“It’s very exciting and I’m really looking forward to it,” Maurer said in advance in a short video published by the European Space Agency ESA. “It will be a big highlight of my space flight.” He and Chari would work at different locations on the ISS, Maurer said. According to the plan, he himself will “wander almost the entire space station” during the work, so that some people have joked that he should take his passport with him.

On November 11, 2021, Maurer flew with three colleagues from the US space agency NASA in a US spacecraft to the ISS, where he is to remain until the end of April. The 52-year-old from Saarland is the twelfth German in space and the fourth on the ISS. His three predecessors on the outpost of humanity had also completed a meticulously planned and physically demanding field assignment: Thomas Reiter (2006), Hans Schlegel (2008) and Alexander Gerst (2014). Reiter later described his mission as an “absolute highlight” – “You can’t get any closer to space”. Gerst spoke of the “most remote workplace in the world”.



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