Astronauts are taking a spacewalk outside their space station today. Watch it live!

NASA astronaut Bob Behnken is pictured during a spacewalk to swap batteries and upgrade power systems on the International Space Station's Starboard-6 truss structure, on June 26, 2020. Behnken was joined during the six-hour and seven-minute excursion by NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy (out of frame).
NASA astronaut Bob Behnken is pictured during a spacewalk to swap batteries and upgrade power systems on the International Space Station's Starboard-6 truss structure, on June 26, 2020. Behnken was joined during the six-hour and seven-minute excursion by NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy (out of frame). (Image credit: NASA)

Two NASA astronauts are venturing outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk today (July 1) to finish replacing old batteries on the station's solar arrays. 

Expedition 63 Cmdr. Chris Cassidy and Demo-2 astronaut Bob Behnken, who arrived at the space station on SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft in May, began at 7:13 a.m. EDT (1113 GMT) and will spend up to seven hours working in the vacuum of space. 

You can watch the spacewalk live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV. You can also watch it at nasa.gov/live and on the agency's YouTube.

Related: The International Space Station: inside and out (infographic)

This will be the second spacewalk for Cassidy and Behnken, who completed a 6-hour and 7-minute spacewalk together on June 26. During that spacewalk, the duo swapped out three old nickel-hydrogen batteries on the far starboard truss (S6 Truss) of the station for two more efficient lithium-ion batteries. Today, they will swap out one more battery and wrap up power upgrades that began in 2017. These batteries are designed to power the station through the end of its planned lifetime in 2024. 

The new lithium-ion batteries that Cassidy and Behnken are installing arrived at the International Space Station on Japan's HTV-9 cargo resupply spacecraft, which arrived at the station in May.  

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Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.