Astronaut Raja Chari, a Cedar Falls native, spacewalks for second time in career

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION — Cedar Falls native Raja Chari “spacewalked” for nearly seven hours Wednesday.

The NASA astronaut, a 1995 Waterloo Columbus High School graduate, and astronaut Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency exited the International Space Station at about 8:30 a.m. to make upgrades and repairs on the station.

The commander of the SpaceX Crew-3, Chari has been in space since Nov. 10 on a six-month mission.

Chari and Maurer, the Expedition 66 flight engineers, finished their work at 3:26 p.m.

It was Chari’s second spacewalk and the 248th in support of space station assembly, upgrades and maintenance.

“My first spacewalk … didn’t disappoint,” Chari said on Facebook about his March 25 walk outside the space station.

“It was extra great as I got to work with NASA classmate and friend NASA Astronaut Kayla Barron to install structure for new solar panels on the International Space Station,” he wrote.

“Cameras (images) don’t really do the view justice but does give you a sense of how hard it can be to concentrate when there’s so much to look at around you,” he wrote.

He also thanked the training team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Working out in space felt a lot like our practice runs in the neutral buoyancy lab,” he said.

In preparation for an upcoming solar array installation, Chari's second spacewalk involved completing the crew’s “major objective” of installing hoses on a radiator beam valve module “that routes ammonia through the station’s heat-rejecting radiators to keep systems at the proper temperature,” according to a NASA blog post.

“The crew members also installed a power and data cable on the Columbus module’s Bartolomeo science platform, replaced an external camera on the station’s truss, and conducted other upgrades to station hardware," the blog post added.

The pair deferred a few secondary tasks, such as torque resets and cable routing, to a future spacewalk.

The astronaut’s work, NASA stated in the blog post, advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies “for future human and robotic exploration missions as part of NASA’s Moon and Mars exploration approach, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program."