Spacewalk Robotics Training, Red Lettuce Harvesting Kick Off Week
Preparations continue for a spacewalk to remove communications hardware and check for microbes outside the International Space Station later this week. Meanwhile, the Expedition 72 crew harvested red lettuce for a space agriculture study and continued its upkeep of the orbital outpost.
Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore are scheduled to begin a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk at 8 a.m. EST on Thursday. The NASA astronauts will remove a degraded radio frequency group antenna assembly and collect samples of potential microbes living outside of the orbital outpost. The duo reviewed on Monday the Canadarm2 robotic arm procedures necessary to support the removal of the degraded radio communications gear.
Flight Engineers Nick Hague and Don Pettit will be at the controls of the Canadarm2 on Thursday assisting and monitoring the spacewalkers. The two NASA astronauts also studied the robotics procedures and practiced on a computer the maneuvers they will use to guide the spacewalkers during their external maintenance activities.
There was still time during the day for Wilmore and Hague to join each other in the Kibo laboratory module and pick a small crop of red lettuce from the Advanced Plant Habitat. Wilmore started the harvesting job collecting the leaves, packing them in pouches, and stowing the samples in a science freezer for later analysis. Pettit finished the botany operations extracting roots from the Plant Habitat, collecting water samples for analysis, and photographing the research hardware. The botany investigation is assessing the nutritional value of food grown in space and may promote growing crops on future missions.
Williams and Pettit partnered together inside the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) cleaning and organizing a variety of cargo including food, electronics gear, science experiments and more. The PMM was launched to the station on space shuttle Discovery and installed on Unity module’s Earth-facing port March 1, 2011. PMM was relocated May 27, 2015, to its current location on the Tranquility module’s forward port.
Earth observations, space navigation, and lab maintenance topped the schedule for the three cosmonauts working in the orbiting lab’s Roscosmos segment. Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov outfitted a camera with specialized hardware and photographed Earth landmarks to study the effects natural and man-made catastrophes. Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin explored ways to acquire more accurate space station navigation data from ground and satellite navigation systems. Flight Engineer Ivan Vagner deactivated and dismantled obsolete communications hardware that has been replaced with an updated command and telemetry system.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
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