Astronauts have completed the landmark 100th spacewalk at the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA astronaut Anil Menon, 43, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, 44, began their spacewalk outside the ISS airlock to install and then deploy a solar array. The crucial mission, scheduled to last about six hours and 45 minutes, would deploy the array to begin generating power to the research station.

Menon and Kutryk’s task involves a high degree of technical expertise where they are required to unbolt the roll-out solar array before remotely activating the power source. The landmark spacewalk is the first of two that are planned for the autumn.

It was also a major milestone for Kutryk, who had not completed a spacewalk before Thursday, while it was Menon’s third. The event was livestreamed by NASA with cameras following both Menson and Kutryk as they completed their tasks around the outside of the space station.

Menon and Kutryk were working as the ISS orbited the Earth at about 17,500mph. At that speed, collisions with debris where ones even the size of a grain of sand can be “life threatening” NASA warned.

Thursday’s spacewalk is the first of two that is aimed at completing upgrades to the ISS that will continue to power the station until its scheduled decommissioning in 2030. NASA said the arrays will increase the station’s power outage from 160 kilowatts to around 215 kilowatts.

The upgrade would support operations on the ISS until its “safe and controlled deorbit” when it is retired in the coming years. “Overall, these roll-out arrays increase our power generation capability up to 30 percent,” said Gaurang Patel, an operations manager at NASA during an earlier briefing on October 20.

The latest spacewalk was actually the 285th one overall, though it was dubbed US Spacewalk 100 due to it being the 100th conducted from the ISS’s Quest airlock without the space shuttle present. It has been a particularly busy year outside the space station with the latest spacewalk being the eighth of 2026.

Menon, a US Air Force lieutenant colonel and physician, arrived at the ISS in July. Kutryk, a Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, became the fifth Canadian astronaut to complete a spacewalk and the first since 2019.