Cardiac, Digestion Research Ahead of Space Delivery and New Crew

The seven-member Expedition 69 crew gather for a portrait. Clockwise from left are, Woody Hoburg, Dmitri Petelin, Sergey Prokopyev, Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, Sultan Alneyadi and Andrey Fedyaev.
The seven-member Expedition 69 crew gathers for a portrait. Clockwise from left are, Woody Hoburg, Dmitri Petelin, Sergey Prokopyev, Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, Sultan Alneyadi and Andrey Fedyaev.

A cargo craft is orbiting Earth today heading toward the International Space Station as the seven Expedition 69 crew members studied how weightlessness affects cardiac tissue and the digestive system. Meanwhile, a new crew counts down to its launch early Friday.

Three tons of space supplies are packed aboard the Roscosmos Progress 85 cargo craft and on the way to the orbital residents for a delivery scheduled at 11:50 p.m. EDT on Thursday. Station commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin will be on duty Thursday night monitoring the Progress 85 when it automatically docks to the Zvezda service module’s aft port. The duo will wait about two hours during standard leak and pressure checks before opening the resupply ship’s hatch and begin unpacking the new food, fuel, and other cargo.

While the cargo activities get underway, the SpaceX Crew-7 mission will launch at 3:50 a.m. on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Four Commercial Crew astronauts will be seated inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket awaiting a 24-hour trip to their new home in space.

NASA astronaut and Crew-7 Commander Jasmin Moghbeli will be leading Pilot Andreas Mogensen of ESA (European Space Agency) and Mission Specialists Satoshi Furukawa of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos aboard Endurance during the ride to the station. Endurance, with the quartet inside, will automatically dock to the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 2:02 a.m. on Saturday. The foursome will open the hatch about two hours later, enter the station, greet the Expedition 69 crew, and begin a six-month microgravity research mission.

Meanwhile, the crewmates living in space explored how microgravity affects cardiac cells and the digestive system to benefit humans living on and off the Earth. NASA Flight Engineers Frank Rubio and Woody Hoburg treated samples of stem-cell derived heart micro-tissues on Wednesday in the Kibo laboratory module. The Project EAGLE biology study takes place in Kibo’s Life Science Glovebox and may reveal potential therapies for space-caused cardiac abnormalities and Earth-bound heart diseases.

Prokopyev and Petelin started the day with ultrasound scans after breakfast to observe how the digestive system adapts to weightlessness. Prokopyev then partnered with Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev in the afternoon for more tests of the lower body negative pressure suit that may help crew members readjust to Earth’s gravity environment.

Fedyaev will be returning to Earth soon with Hoburg and astronauts Stephen Bowen of NASA and Sultan Alneyadi of UAE (United Arab Emirates). The quartet will enter the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft one week after Crew-7 arrives, undock from Harmony’s forward port, and splashdown off the coast of Florida to complete a six-month space mission. During Wednesday afternoon, the four crewmates inspected their SpaceX pressure suits they will wear inside Endeavour when they depart the station for the ride back to Earth.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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