Two spacewalks are deliberate within the subsequent a number of days exterior the Worldwide House Station for the Expedition 68 crew. In the meantime, science was nonetheless ongoing at the start of the week with house botany and physics work aboard the orbiting lab.
On Wednesday at 9:20 p.m. EST, Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin will exit the Poisk module’s airlock of their Orlan spacesuits. They may spend about seven hours transferring a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. Flight Engineer Anna Kikina might be inside Nauka supporting the spacewalking duo by working the European robotic arm.
Prokopyev and Petelin spent Monday getting their fits and the Poisk airlock prepared for Wednesday’s tour. The duo configured their spacesuits’ life help and communications elements then collected and arranged the instruments they’ll use in the course of the spacewalk. In addition they closed the hatch and carried out leak checks on the ISS Progress 82 resupply ship which is docked to Poisk simply exterior its airlock. Kikina primarily spent the day on life help and air flow upkeep.
NASA Flight Engineers Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio can have their spacewalk collectively on Monday, Dec. 19. They may set up their second roll-out photo voltaic array, or Worldwide House Station Roll-Out Photo voltaic Array (iROSA), on the Port-4 (P4) truss phase. They put in their first iROSA on Dec. 3 on the station’s Starboard-4 truss phase reverse of the P4.
The 2 NASA astronauts spent a while on Monday reviewing the iROSA set up procedures and discussing the spacewalk with mission controllers on the bottom. Flight Engineers Nicole Mann of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company (JAXA) additionally participated within the assessment and the bottom convention and can help the 2 spacewalkers subsequent week.
Cassada kicked off the workweek watering dwarf tomatoes rising contained in the Veggie house botany facility for the Veg-05 experiment. Wakata transported physics analysis {hardware} from the Cygnus resupply ship to a analysis rack contained in the Kibo laboratory module. Rubio collected carbon dioxide samples from life help {hardware}. Mann additionally assisted the cosmonauts serving to them get their instruments prepared for Wednesday’s spacewalk.
Study extra about station actions by following the house station weblog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, in addition to the ISS Fb and ISS Instagram accounts.
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