Expedition 72 Welcomes New Crew, Crew-8 Departing Quickly – Area Station

The seven astronauts and 4 cosmonauts representing the Expedition 72 crew slept in on Monday working half-a-day through the afternoon following Sunday’s arrival of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission.

The International Space Station’s two latest crew members, Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos, launched to the orbital outpost aboard the SpaceX Dragon at 1:17 p.m. EDT on Saturday. The duo docked to the Harmony module’s ahead port at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday starting a five-month area analysis mission.

Hague, on his second spaceflight, started his day on Monday afternoon becoming a member of NASA Flight Engineer Jeanette Epps as she demonstrated find out how to function the advanced resistive exercise device to take care of muscle and bone mass in weightlessness. Afterward, he joined NASA Flight Engineer Matthew Dominick and transferred commonplace emergency gear contained in the newly arrived Dragon spacecraft.

Gorbunov kicked off his first full day on the orbital lab getting accustomed to life on the area station and studying its methods and procedures. Subsequent, he joined fellow cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin who started handing over his mission duties to Gorbunov.

Flight Engineers Mike Barratt and Butch Wilmore with Commander Suni Williams, all three from NASA, helped unpack cargo and recent scientific samples from Dragon. The trio eliminated and stowed a wide range of crew provides and station {hardware} then transferred portable science freezers containing the analysis samples and put in them inside station science freezers for preservation and later evaluation.

Having been aboard the area station since Sept. 11, NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit spent his shift on orbital plumbing duties, analyzing station water for microbes, and configuring specialised watches that monitor a crew member’s sleep/wake cycle. His Soyuz MS-26 crewmates, Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, spent the day servicing electronics methods and Earth observation hardware.

The following crew to depart the orbital outpost, SpaceX Crew-8, has been stepping up its cargo packing duties and mission handover duties the final a number of days. NASA and SpaceX are evaluating departure alternatives earlier than Dominick leads Barratt, Epps and Grebenkin again to Earth inside Dragon ending a six-and-a-half-month mission orbiting Earth.

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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