‘Photo or it didn’t happen’: astronauts share selfies from a spacewalk outside the ISS

“Photo or it didn’t happen,” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir joked after sharing selfies taken more than 400 kilometers above Earth on Sept. 1, 2026, partway through a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Meir and ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot spent six hours and 49 minutes outside the station that day, swapping out a degraded camera and installing new docking hardware while their helmet cameras caught the kind of view neither Instagram nor a mission patch can quite convey.

The excursion was the sixth all-female spacewalk in human spaceflight history, and Meir had a hand in the first three. Back in 2019, she and crewmate Christina Koch spent a combined 21 hours and 44 minutes outside the station on three separate walks, the debut of an all-woman EVA team after decades in which none had happened at all.

A retroreflector on Harmony and a camera on the truss

Adenot and Meir’s main job was to install a new retroreflector on the Harmony module’s forward port, hardware that lets approaching spacecraft measure their speed and position for a safe docking. A retroreflector carries no electronics of its own; it simply bounces a visiting vehicle’s laser or radar signal straight back, which is exactly why the worn unit had to be swapped by hand rather than reset or rebooted from inside the station. They also pulled a degraded high-definition camera off the station’s main truss and bolted on its replacement, restoring one of the exterior views mission controllers use to monitor the outpost.

Before any of that started, at roughly 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, the pair had already run through the checkout that turns a spacesuit into a one-person spacecraft. NASA’s mission blog logged the outing as the 284th spacewalk devoted to station assembly and maintenance, with Adenot identifiable by red suit stripes as crew member one and Meir working unmarked as crew member two.

A snagged glove heater trapped Sophie Adenot’s shoulder

Partway through the work, Adenot lost mobility in her left shoulder joint. Meir diagnosed the problem in real time, reporting that “the glove heater harness was likely getting caught and causing limited movement in the left shoulder joint.” She unzipped the outer sleeve layer of Adenot’s suit, freed the snagged harness, and restored full arm motion before the pair pressed on with the remaining tasks.

Not every item on the day’s list got finished. A microbial swab of the station’s exterior and a partial run of jumper cables for onboard electrical systems were completed, but guide-stud installation ahead of a future Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer radiator swap was deferred so engineers could revise the plan first. Prepping that job in stages, rather than finishing it in one walk, is standard practice for station maintenance that touches cooling hardware, where a rushed step outside can cost far more repair time than a delay inside ever would.

Jessica Meir’s seventh walk, and third with the record

Meir trained as a marine biologist before she trained as an astronaut, earning a Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography for research on how emperor penguins and elephant seals manage oxygen while diving, then studying high-altitude physiology in bar-headed geese as a postdoctoral researcher. She joined NASA’s 21st astronaut class in 2013 after a stint on the Harvard Medical School faculty, then flew to the station for the first time in 2019.

The September walk was her seventh, and now ranks her third among NASA’s female astronauts for cumulative spacewalking time. It came roughly seven months into her second long-duration mission, a stint she began by commanding the SpaceX Crew-12 flight that carried her, Adenot and two other crewmates to the station in February, after Meir spent 205 days aboard the outpost during her first flight in 2019 and 2020.

Sophie Adenot flew helicopters before she flew in orbit

Before ESA selected her as an astronaut candidate in November 2022, Adenot spent years as a search-and-rescue and test pilot in the French Air Force and as a cockpit design research engineer at Airbus Helicopters, logging roughly 3,000 flight hours across 22 different helicopter types, a resume built around the same instinct for diagnosing a mechanical problem mid-flight that she and Meir needed when the shoulder joint locked up. She earned her astronaut certification at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in April 2024, less than two years after starting training.

She launched to the station on Feb. 13, 2026, for a nine-month mission ESA calls εpsilon, joining Meir and two other crewmates aboard the SpaceX Crew-12 flight that Meir commanded. September’s spacewalk was her third, and with roughly four months left on the mission clock, Sky at Night Magazine’s account of the outing did not report a date for whichever excursion outside the station comes next.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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