Anil Menon and Jessica Meir completed a 6 hours 27 minutes U.S. Spacewalk 96 or extravehicular activity (EVA) on Thursday (Aug. 6). The NASA astronauts exited the International Space Station (ISS)’s Quest airlock to modify the 3B power channel on the Starboard 6 truss, preparing the station for the installation of a seventh ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) later in the year.

Since 2021, astronauts on prior spacewalks have deployed six of the iROSA assemblies, leaving now just two awaiting delivery to the station later this year. The ISS relies on eight individual power channels fed by primary solar array wings deployed between 2000 and 2009. Over decades in low Earth orbit, radiation and thermal cycling gradually reduced the efficiency of these original arrays.

Thursday's spacewalk began at 1233 UTC when the astronauts switched their spacesuits to internal battery power. A veteran astronaut, Meir served as EV-1 and wore a spacesuit with red stripes; this is her sixth spacewalk since her first ISS mission between 2019 and 2020. Menon, a U.S. Space Force colonel and physician, is on his first mission to space and wore an unmarked spacesuit as EV-2.

Meir and Menon assembled the modification kit for one of the space station's eight power channels, which will allow for the future addition of a new iROSA. They worked to assemble and bolt together the triangular brackets on the 3B power channel, located on the far right, or starboard (S6) segment of the station's backbone truss.

Menon was positioned on an articulating portable foot restraint (APFR) atop a worksite interface (WIFEX), providing a stable angle to work from the truss.

Once the modification kit structure was built and secured to the 3B mast canister, the two spacewalkers routed cabling that will carry the electricity from the future iROSA into the 3B power channel and then covered the struts with multi-layer insulation to protect them from micrometeoroid strikes.

The iROSA wings sit forward of the legacy solar arrays, augmenting their electricity generation rather than replacing it. The station's eight original arrays began showing degraded power output as they exceeded their 15-year design life. When used in tandem with the new iROSA wings, the upgraded system will increase the station's electricity supply by 20% to 30%.

The other power channel currently without an iROSA deployed is 2A on the left, or port side, of the station.

"Anil, you can see the moon to the — well, I am not sure what way you're facing, but…," said Meir, taking a short break during the spacewalk to notice NASA's next destination for astronauts under its Artemis program.

"To my right. Yeah, I see it — thanks for the heads-up," said Menon. "I can see a future moon base there."

"I can see it, too!" Meir said.

Meir later turned her attention to Mars with her closing words of the day.

"On this day in 2012, NASA's robotic rover Curiosity successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of understanding if the planet could have fostered life. Curiosity achieved that goal within a year," she said. "One day, humans will visit Curiosity, propelled by the groundbreaking science, technology demonstrations and operations conducted here on the International Space Station for almost 26 years now."

"Today, we made one more step toward expanding the ISS power system, further sustaining our human presence in low Earth orbit, as we prepare to take those next steps," said Meir.

Meir and Menon upgraded the ISS power infrastructure to support critical operations, including life support and scientific experiments, as the station ages. This upgrade is critical for sustaining the station’s power margin through its planned controlled deorbit in late 2030, requiring additional energy for attitude control and avionics during reentry.

After collecting their tools and reentering the Quest airlock, the spacewalk concluded at 1900 UTC.

This was the first spacewalk for the space station's Expedition 75 crew; the 96th U.S. EVA and 281st spacewalk overall in support of the space station's assembly, maintenance and enhancement.

There are two more U.S. spacewalks scheduled for this month: EVA 97 will work to replace a space-to-ground antenna on Aug. 13, and EVA 98 will connect power channel cables and data relay systems as part of ongoing maintenance, including preparations for the station's future deorbit, as well as replace a navigational aid used for spacecraft docking on Aug. 25.

Rocket Lab launched the QPS-SAR-13 (nicknamed Mikura-I) satellite on Thursday (Aug. 6), completing its 92nd overall Electron mission. The launch, dubbed "The Grain Goddess Provides," lifted off from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 0918 UTC, deploying the satellite into a 575-kilometer circular low Earth orbit at a 42-degree inclination.

Operated by the Tokyo-based company iQPS, MIKURA-I named after a Japanese goddess associated with abundance and prosperity, uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to provide high-resolution, near-real-time Earth imagery through clouds and adverse weather. 

iQPS is building a constellation of 36 such SAR satellites in low Earth orbit. Electron is the primary launcher for this network; "The Grain Goddess Provides" was the eighth of a total of 15 launches that Rocket Lab will conduct to help assemble the constellation.

Thursday's launch was the 13th Electron flight of 2026 for Rocket Lab. It followed a last-second abort on June 30, 2026, when an earlier attempt to launch Mikura-I was halted after the first-stage Rutherford engines ignited. Following the abort, the company conducted inspections and addressed the cause of the failure before rescheduling the flight.

A ~4,000 kilogram (kg) upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket impacted the Moon near the Einstein Crater on Wednesday (Aug. 5), at about 0635 UTC, traveling at roughly 8,690 kilometer/hour(km/h). The object, which had been drifting since its launch on January 15, 2025, was carrying the Blue Ghost 1 lander for Firefly Aerospace and the Resilience lander for ispace toward the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services.

The rocket stage remained in space because the high-energy mission required extra thrust, leaving it in a deep-space orbit where gravitational forces and solar radiation gradually nudged it into a collision course.

NASA confirmed the impact poses no danger to Earth and is expected to create a crater approximately 18–27 meters wide and 4 meters deep, blasting a dust plume up to 100 kilometers into space.

To dissect what exactly happened, scientists are utilizing NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri (Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter) to capture before-and-after imagery of the impact site. This accidental collision provides a rare opportunity to study lunar impact dynamics, regolith ejection, and the potential hazards of space debris for future Artemis missions and lunar bases.

While the impact flash was likely obscured by daylight, astronomers aim to analyze the dust plume and crater formation to refine models for planetary surface evolution and debris mitigation.

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery."

This was certainly not the original intended outcome for this rocket's upper stage. But it presents an opportunity for researchers, who plan to take advantage of it to learn more about the moon.

"NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office will attempt to image the impact around the predicted time using ground‑based telescopes at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville [Alabama]," Garner added. "Because the impact flash and plume are expected to be faint, the chance of seeing anything from Earth remains low, and local weather can affect observations as well. Any data collected will help scientists better understand impacts from artificial objects and the potential effects on future lunar exploration."

So far, observations from Earth have revealed some information. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

Such images of the event would provide "an opportunity to test pipelines for measuring flash properties to locate impact events seismically, and to better understand the multi-modal hazards posed to future lunar infrastructure and astronauts from space debris impacting the moon," researchers led by Benjamin Fernando of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico wrote in a recent paper discussing the then-upcoming event.

While you've likely seen the first stages of Falcon 9 rockets gracefully land back on Earth for reuse, the rocket's upper stage is disposable. Typically, it's sent to burn up in our atmosphere after its missions are over.

In a post on X, SpaceX wrote, "On January 15, 2025, Falcon 9 successfully deployed Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s RESILIENCE lunar landers on a trajectory to the Moon from pad 39A in Florida.

"For most of our missions, we plan a controlled deorbit of the Falcon second stage so it safely reenters over the ocean. For higher energy missions like those to a lunar transfer orbit, nearly all performance on the vehicle is devoted to successfully placing the payload in the intended orbit, and a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible.

"We actively work to be as responsible as possible with hardware left in space to ensure space safety, including for more complex missions. In this case, over time, solar activity and gravity led the second stage toward the Moon. Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution.

"Our focus remains on advancing reliable access to space while working toward even more sustainable operations with Starship in the future. As a fully reusable vehicle, Starship is designed to eliminate expendable upper stages entirely, reducing hardware left in orbit and enabling even more missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond."