Dragon spacecraft operations had been underway aboard the International Space Station on Friday as 4 crew members put together to return to Earth and one other quartet prepares to swap docking ports. In the meantime, microgravity science continued apace because the Expedition 72 crew explored how weightlessness impacts stem cells, plant progress, and equilibrium.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission is about to finish a seven-month mission aboard the orbital outpost that started on March 3. The homebound quartet, with NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, accomplished closing evaluations on Friday for his or her departure aboard the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft focused for Sunday at 6:05 a.m. EDT.
NASA+ will stream Crew-8’s hatch closing and undocking from the Harmony module’s space-facing port starting at 4 a.m. on Sunday. NASA+ can even begin its reside protection of Crew-8’s return to Earth at 2:30 p.m. on Monday earlier than Dragon splashes down at 3:38 p.m., pending climate. Learn to watch NASA content by means of a wide range of platforms, together with social media.
The latest Dragon spacecraft to go to the orbital outpost, Freedom, will swap docking ports just a few days after Endeavour competes its mission. Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague from NASA will lead NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore together with cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard Freedom through the fast trip from Concord’s ahead port to the port vacated by Crew-8. The foursome spent about an hour on Friday coaching for his or her relocation actions. NASA+ will cowl the relocation actions reside when mission managers finalize a time and date for Dragon’s port swap.
The Dragon crew members are nonetheless part of the 11-member Expedition 72 crew and saved up their superior area analysis actions on Friday serving to NASA and its worldwide companions maintain people wholesome on and off the Earth. Williams and Wilmore serviced stem cell samples for microscope operations to discover ways to deal with blood ailments and cancers. Dominick and Epps had been again on area botany analysis investigating how plants absorb water in space to assist self-sufficient missions farther away from Earth. Barratt uninstalled and stowed {hardware} that enabled observations of how plants grow in the microgravity and radiation environment. Lastly, Hague joined NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit, who arrived on the orbiting lab aboard the Soyuz MS-26 crew ship, for eye scans with the Ultrasound 2 machine.
The 2 cosmonauts who launched to area with Pettit, Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, took turns exploring how the dearth of gravity impacts their sense of balance, imaginative and prescient, and different sensory cues. The pair connected sensors close to their eyes and ears and wore digital actuality goggles that tracked their eye actions to enhance astronaut coaching and adaptation and promote therapies for sufferers on 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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