space travel
German astronaut Maurer excited before ISS external mission
The German astronaut Matthias Maurer on the ISS. Photo: ESA/NASA/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
He will “walk along almost the entire space station”: the German astronaut Matthias Maurer speaks in a video about his first field mission on the International Space Station ISS.
The German astronaut Matthias Maurer (52) is looking forward to his first external mission planned for Wednesday on the International Space Station ISS.
“It’s very exciting and I’m really looking forward to it,” Maurer said on Monday in a short video released by the European Space Agency ESA. “It will be a big highlight of my space flight.”
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, the two are 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.
Hike along the space station
Chari and he would work at different places 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, 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).