Week Wraps with Light Science, Housekeeping as Crew-8 Awaits Return
The 11-member Expedition 72 crew wrapped up the workweek with light science duties and standard housekeeping tasks aboard the International Space Station. Meanwhile, four members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-8 mission continue preparing for their return to Earth.
Most of the orbiting crew had a light duty day with research taking a back seat to orbital maintenance on Friday. NASA Flight Engineers Don Pettit, Nick Hague, and Matthew Dominick mainly focused on lab upkeep stowing hardware for an advanced life support investigation, swapping orbital plumbing components, and replacing a failed ventilation fan. Pettit and Dominick also collected their blood, saliva, and urine samples for processing and analysis while Hague measured the temperature of a biology imaging device.
Commander Suni Williams and Fight Engineer Butch Wilmore, both from NASA, both worked half a day on Friday with experimental work and maintenance tasks. Williams first took a cognition test measuring her abilities such as memory, reasoning, decision-making and more then checked connections on radio frequency identification hardware. Wilmore activated a fluorescence microscope to observe how particles of different sizes gel and coarsen.
NASA Flight Engineers Mike Barratt and Jeanette Epps also had a light shift on Friday. Barratt spent about an hour servicing spacesuit helmet components while Epps assisted with blood sample collections then swapped cables on a station computer.
In the Roscosmos segment of the orbiting lab, Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner partnered together for a blood pressure study then split up for life support maintenance and cargo stowage. Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov checked pressure reading readings in the Nauka science module while fellow cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin worked on the ventilation system inside the Rassvet module.
In the meantime, weather conditions remain unfavorable for the departure of the SpaceX Crew-8 mission. Dominick, Barratt, Epps, and Grebenkin are now targeting their undocking for no earlier than 3:05 a.m. EDT on Monday. The Commercial Crew quartet are preparing to complete a seven-month research mission and return to Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft.
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