Station Crew Gets Ready for Dragon Relocation and Cargo Missions
The Expedition 72 crew is getting ready for a port relocation maneuver this weekend as a new cargo mission counts down to a lift off next week to resupply the International Space Station. Meanwhile, stem cell research, a spacesuit check, and a host of lab maintenance kept the astronauts and cosmonauts busy on Wednesday.
NASA Flight Engineer Nick Hague will command the SpaceX Dragon Freedom spacecraft when it undocks from the Harmony module's forward port at 6:35 a.m. EST on Sunday. He, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will take a short ride in Freedom and redock to Harmony's space-facing port at 7:18 a.m. The port relocation maneuver opens up Harmony's forward port for the upcoming Dragon cargo mission.
Hague and Wilmore took turns on Wednesday preparing for the Dragon cargo mission arriving soon after Sunday's Dragon Freedom relocation. The duo trained on cargo operations then reviewed rendezvous procedures and monitoring tools for the approaching SpaceX Dragon cargo craft. Hague also downloaded his health data collected from electrodes and the Ultrasound 2 device for analysis by researchers.
Science and maintenance rounded out the schedule on Wednesday as Commander Suni Williams serviced stem cells and checked out a spacesuit. She worked with Wilmore inside the Kibo laboratory module inserting stem cell samples into a microscope to image for a blood disease and cancer study. Following that, Williams entered the Quest airlock and resized and configured a spacesuit ahead of spacewalks planned for 2025.
NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit, on his fourth spaceflight, spent his morning removing the small satellite deployer from Kibo's airlock that had earlier deployed several CubeSats into Earth orbit for a series of technology studies. Afterward, Pettit worked on orbital plumbing tasks flushing resupply tanks and transferring water to life support components.
Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner continued maintenance and inspection activities in the aft end of the Zvezda service module. Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov completed an experiment run and deactivated hardware that imaged the Earth's nighttime atmosphere in near-ultraviolet wavelengths.
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