The Expedition 68 astronauts are cleansing up following three days of superior bone restore research whereas preparing for an upcoming spacewalk. The Worldwide Area Station’s three cosmonauts continued their house physics and Earth imagery work, in addition to maintained orbital lab programs.
NASA Flight Engineers Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio are cleansing up biology analysis {hardware} and finalizing pattern processing after three full days of bone therapeutic analysis. The duo labored contained in the Kibo laboratory module servicing the samples then stowing them into science freezers. These samples might be packed on a future SpaceX Dragon cargo mission for return then analyzed and in comparison with management samples in laboratories on Earth. The 2 astronauts additionally cleaned Kibo’s Life Science Glovebox and its parts the place the intensive bone investigation work occurred this week.
Cassada additionally labored on house agriculture at this time gathering leaves from thale cress vegetation housed contained in the Superior Plant Habitat for stowage and evaluation on Earth. He later tended to tomato vegetation rising contained in the Veggie house botany facility for the Veg-05 experiment. Each research are happening contained in the Columbus laboratory module.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Company (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata explored methods to allow on-demand manufacturing of vitamins for astronauts on long-term missions to the Moon, Mars, and past. The know-how demonstration makes use of engineered microbes, or yeast, to make sure a secure and easy meals manufacturing setting in house and offset the degradation of vitamins stowed over lengthy intervals.
The following spacewalk to proceed upgrading the orbiting lab’s energy era system is deliberate for Feb. 2. Two spacewalkers will exit the Quest airlock of their Extravehicular Mobility Items (EMUs), or spacesuits, to complete putting in a modification package on the starboard truss construction. The {hardware} set up job will prepared the house station for its subsequent roll-out photo voltaic array. Forward of the upcoming spacewalk, spacesuit gloves and tethers have been inspected.
Commander Sergey Prokopyev continued extra space physics experiment runs on Thursday as he explored how clouds of extremely charged particles, or plasma crystals, behave in microgravity. Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin of Roscosmos spent his day on life help upkeep earlier than partnering with fellow cosmonaut Anna Kikina for ultrasound eye scans. Kikina resumed her Earth observations utilizing ultraviolet imaging {hardware} to acquire a map of the nighttime glow of Earth’s environment.
Be taught 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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