Three new crew members are on their way to join their Expedition 33 crewmates onboard the International Space Station. They launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft at 6:51 a.m. EDT (5:51 p.m. Baikonur time) Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.
Flight Engineers Kevin Ford, Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin will orbit the Earth for two days before docking to the Poisk module at 8:35 a.m. Thursday. The new trio will join Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malenchenko who’ve been residing at the orbital laboratory since July 17.
The three crew members now onboard the station, Williams, Hoshide and Malenchenko, are busy with their daily science and maintenance tasks. Key events lay ahead for the crew including the unberthing of the SpaceX Dragon capsule on Sunday and a Nov. 1 spacewalk to repair a radiator ammonia leak.
Williams began her work day repairing a leaky valve in the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly. She also conducted a robotics test in cooperation with the European Space Agency. That test commands a rover on the ground in Munich, Germany, from space. Williams then worked on the VIABLE experiment which evaluates microbial biofilm development on space materials.
Hoshide worked in the Kibo lab module to retrieve biological samples from a science freezer for the Resist Tubule experiment. He also exercised for the VO2Max experiment which measures an astronaut’s aerobic capacity in microgravity.
Source: NASA
No comments:
Post a Comment