Two astronauts will today undertake a spacewalk to install a revolutionary piece of Oxfordshire-built technology on the International Space Station and you can watch it happen live.

This new piece of Oxfordshire built technology marks the UK’s first major industrial contribution to the spacecraft and it was designed and built in the RAL Space clean rooms on the Harwell Campus near Didcot.

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This giant leap forward for research carried out in the Columbus module will allow astronauts and researchers to benefit from a dedicated link back to Earth at home broadband speeds. Currently, results are returned to earth on a hard drive, which could take months to receive, with data sometimes being lost in transit.

The space walk will be live streamed on Nasa TV online today so you can view this giant leap for Oxfordshire from your sofa. The spacewalk is due to start at 12:05 GMT on January 27, via: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/schedule.html.

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