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European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to perform a spacewalk on 18 August 2026.
The excursion, designated US Spacewalk 97, lasted six hours and twenty-three minutes outside the International Space Station.
She worked alongside NASA astronaut Anil Menon to replace an ageing Space-to-Ground Antenna on the station's Z1 truss.
The pair removed the failed antenna but ran out of time to install the replacement, which was deferred to a later spacewalk.
Adenot is the second European woman to walk in space, after Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti in 2022.
An EVA, or spacewalk, is any task an astronaut performs outside a spacecraft in a pressurised suit that serves as a self-contained spacecraft of its own - supplying oxygen, removing carbon dioxide, regulating temperature and shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. EVAs are used to install and upgrade equipment, repair failures that cannot be reached from inside, and run external experiments. They are planned to the minute because suit consumables are finite, which is why running out of time - rather than running into a mechanical fault - is a normal way for a task to be deferred. Crew inside the station support the spacewalkers by helping them suit up and by operating the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
Simple Analogy: The suit is not clothing but a one-person spacecraft, and the clock on a spacewalk works like the air in a diver's tank - when it runs down, the job stops wherever it has reached.
A joint programme of NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and CSA in low Earth orbit; its operations are the setting for every spacewalk of this kind.
NASA's arrangement under which SpaceX's Crew Dragon carries astronauts, including partner-agency crew such as ESA's, to the ISS.
India's human spaceflight programme; comparisons between Indian and European approaches to crew training and EVA capability are standard exam material.
The Canadian-built robotic arm used from inside the station to move astronauts and hardware during a spacewalk.
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Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk - work performed outside a spacecraft in a pressurised suit.
Space-to-Ground Antenna - the ISS antenna that carries high-speed data between the station and Mission Control in Houston.
A structural segment of the International Space Station on which communications and control equipment is mounted.
An intergovernmental space agency of European member states, headquartered in Paris; it flies its astronauts on partner vehicles rather than its own crewed spacecraft.