A helping hand

Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut and Expedition 65/66 flight engineer, takes a specialised augmentedreality headset for a test drive on the International Space Station. This new technology will help astronauts perform complex tasks autonomously, without guidance from Earth, and will be vital for deep-space exploration. Here McArthur is trying out Microsoft’s HoloLens headset, delivered to the ISS in April 2021 as part of the T2 Augmented Reality (T2AR) experiment. The impressive headset runs a custom-built AR software that can help astronauts inspect and fix pieces of equipment without the need to call ground control or look up the instructions.