Spacesuit upkeep and analysis {hardware} topped the duty record for the Expedition 68 crew on Thursday. The orbital residents aboard the Worldwide Area Station additionally labored on biomedical actions and ensured life assist programs proceed working in tip-top form.
NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann labored collectively all through Thursday servicing an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), or spacesuit, contained in the Quest airlock. The duo spent your entire day swapping electronics and life assist elements contained in the spacesuit forward of a spacewalk deliberate for Monday, Dec. 19. Two astronauts will exit Quest of their EMUs on that day and spend about seven hours putting in one other roll-out photo voltaic array on the station’s Port-4 truss phase.
NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio had his palms full throughout the day engaged on quite a lot of science gear supporting the whole lot from satellite tv for pc deployments, fluid physics, and ultra-high decision video know-how. Starting his day within the Concord module, Rubio disassembled a small satellite tv for pc deployer that had ejected 4 CubeSats from exterior the Kibo laboratory module final week. Subsequent, he opened up the Fluids Science Laboratory and put in samples to analyze the coarsening and coalescence of foams with potential purposes for the firefighting, petroleum, and drugs industries amongst others. Lastly, the primary time space-flyer assembled the SphereCam-1 to reveal capturing the very best decision, groundbreaking 12K views from a spacecraft supporting future area exploration missions.
Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company (JAXA) drew a blood pattern throughout the morning and processed it in a centrifuge earlier than the stowing the pattern in a science freezer for future examination. Wakata then labored on the Kibo lab’s water restoration system troubleshooting {hardware} contained in the life assist gadget. On the finish of the day, the skilled area station veteran collected a urine pattern and stowed it in a science freezer for later evaluation.
Commander Sergey Prokopyev carried out a leak verify on the docking interface between the Poisk module and the ISS Progress 82 cargo craft. Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin arrange a video digital camera contained in the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. Lastly, Flight Engineer Anna Kikina, with help from Petelin, connected sensors to herself and pedaled strenuously on the station’s train bike for a health analysis.
Study extra about station actions by following the area station weblog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, in addition to the ISS Fb and ISS Instagram accounts.
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