Astronauts Relax, Turn Attention to Monday’s Spacewalk

NASA spacewalker Flight Engineer Victor Glover is dwarfed by the main solar arrays on the International Space Station's far port-side truss structure.
NASA spacewalker Flight Engineer Victor Glover is dwarfed by the main solar arrays on the International Space Station’s far port-side truss structure.

Four Expedition 64 astronauts are winding down today following Wednesday’s near seven-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The other three crew members stayed focused on space research and lab maintenance throughout Thursday.

Spacewalkers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover spent Thursday relaxing for a few hours before turning their attention to the next spacewalk set for Monday. Their assistants, Kate Rubins of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of JAXA, joined the duo Thursday afternoon to review next week’s spacewalk.

The quartet first called down to mission controllers Thursday and discussed the previous day’s spacewalk when Hopkins and Glover installed a science antenna and readied the station for solar array upgrades. Rubins, with Noguchi as her back up, operated the Canadarm2 robotic arm, and assisted the spacewalkers in and out of their spacesuits.

Hopkins and Glover will exit the station again on Monday after they turn on their spacesuit batteries about 7 a.m. EST. They will spend six-and-a-half hours finishing battery maintenance and installing high definition cameras as Rubins and Noguchi monitor the duo. NASA TV will go on air at 5:30 a.m.

In the midst of the spacewalk preparations, NASA Flight Engineer Shannon Walker has been conducting microgravity science. Today she worked on a technology demonstration that seeks to simplify life support systems using capillary action and fluid dynamics to separate liquids and gases.

Commander Sergey Ryzhikov worked on Zarya module power systems while continuing to pack the Progress 76 resupply ship ahead of its Feb. 9 departure. Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov started the day on Russian plumbing tasks then checked radiation hardware and measurements.



from Space Station https://ift.tt/2YpAGIw

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Astronauts Complete Spacewalk, Dragon Launch Moves to Nov. 7

Image
NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli (top) and Loral O’Hara (bottom) team up during their first spacewalk for maintenance on the outside of the space station. Credit: NASA TV NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara concluded their spacewalk today at 2:47 p.m. EST after 6 hours and 42 minutes. Moghbeli and O’Hara were able to complete one of the spacewalk’s two major objectives, replacing one of the 12 trundle bearing assemblies on the port solar alpha rotary joint, which allows the arrays to track the Sun and generate electricity to power the station. Mission Control told the station crew that the solar array is functioning well after the bearing replacement. Spacewalkers also removed a handling bar fixture to prepare for future installation of a roll-out solar array and properly configured a cable that was previously interfering with an external camera. The astronauts had planned to remove and stow a communications electronics box called the Radio Frequency Group, but there w
Read more

Crews Study Eyes, Physics and Prep for Cygnus Cargo Mission

Image
Astronauts (from left) Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara are pictured inside the International Space Station’s cupola holding NASA’s first graphc novel, “First Woman.” Human research and space physics were the dominant science topics aboard the International Space Station on Thursday. The Expedition 70 crew is also preparing for a U.S. cargo mission targeted to launch next week. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov took turns as crew medical officer on Thursday and performed eye scans of their crewmates using the Ultrasound 2 device . Moghbeli operated the device imaging the eyes of Commander Andreas Mogensen and Flight Engineer Satoshi Furukawa . Borisov also scanned Roscosmos Flight Engineer Nikolai Chub’s eyes. Doctors on the ground monitored and assisted the diagnostic exam in real-time. The ultrasound scanning procedure uses high-frequency soundwaves to observe how microgravity affects a crew member’s eye structure. Afterward, Mogensen
Read more

Spacewalkers Installing Solar Array Live on NASA TV

Image
Astronaut Stephen Bowen is pictured exiting the space station’s Quest airlock and beginning a spacewalk on April 28, 2023. NASA Television coverage of today’s spacewalk with NASA astronauts  Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg is now underway and is also available on the  NASA app , the  space station blog  and the agency’s  website . The crew members of Expedition 69 are preparing to exit the  International Space Station ‘s Quest airlock for a spacewalk expected to begin about 9:15 a.m. EDT and last about seven hours. Bowen and Hoburg will install an IROSA (International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array) to augment power generation for the 1A power channel on the station’s starboard truss structure. The new arrays are 60 feet long by 20 feet wide (18.2 meters by 6 meters) and will shade a little more than half of the original arrays, which are 112 feet long by 39 feet wide. Each new IROSA will produce more than 20 kilowatts of electricity, and once all are installed, will enable a
Read more