Spacesuits, Science, and Cargo Ops Kick Off Week – Area Station

Monday was a busy day for the seven Expedition 70 crew members full of spacesuit work, microgravity analysis, and cargo operations. Two astronauts are additionally as a consequence of exit the International Space Station on Wednesday for a upkeep spacewalk.

Two astronauts and a cosmonaut joined one another on Monday afternoon training powering up spacesuits and suiting up their spacewalking crewmates contained in the Quest airlock. The trio of flight engineers, together with Jasmin Moghbeli from NASA, Satoshi Furukawa from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company), and Nikolai Chub from Roscosmos, activated go well with life assist and communications parts, checked water and oxygen ranges, then carried out a go well with match verify.

Moghbeli and NASA Flight Engineer Loral O’Hara are scheduled to begin a spacewalk on Wednesday at 8:05 a.m. EDT for about seven hours of communications and photo voltaic array work. The duo will take away an electronics field referred to as the Radio Frequency Group that was a part of a communications antenna system. In addition they will change certainly one of 12 trundle bearing assemblies on the station’s port photo voltaic alpha rotary joint. The bearings allow the station’s photo voltaic arrays to trace the Solar.

O’Hara took a time without work from spacewalk preparations on Monday and centered on area botany and cargo duties. She first changed parts contained in the Plant Habitat facility to arrange for an experiment investigating how tomato plants defend against disease within the weightless atmosphere. Subsequent, she swapped cargo out and in of the Cygnus area freighter. She lastly cleaned up cardiac and neuron cell analysis {hardware} to create space for an upcoming SpaceX Dragon cargo mission.

ESA (European Area Company) Commander Andreas Mogensen labored all through Monday staging gear that may quickly be packed contained in the visiting Dragon cargo spacecraft. He additionally readied {hardware} that will probably be used throughout Wednesday’s spacewalk. On the finish of the day, he joined Furukawa and practiced Canadarm2 robotic arm maneuvers on a pc to assist the spacewalkers.

Veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko started his day carrying a helmet full of sensors training piloting methods crew members would possibly use on future planetary missions. Afterward, he labored on Roscosmos Progress 85 cargo craft upkeep then practiced a medical emergency with O’Hara and Chub. Chub additionally labored on a 3D printing experiment testing manufacturing in area to scale back dependency on provides from Earth.

First-time area flyer and cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov spent an hour on an Earth images session throughout the morning. He would then spend the remainder of the day on quite a lot of life assist upkeep duties all through the station’s Roscosmos phase.

Study extra about station actions by following the area station weblog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, in addition to the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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