Spacewalking Team Relaxes Ahead of Monday Excursion
Relaxation and a host of lab maintenance tasks filled the end of the day for the dual crews living and working aboard the International Space Station.
Four NASA astronauts, all Expedition 71 Flight Engineers, are taking Friday and Saturday off in space following several days of spacesuit checks and spacewalking procedure reviews. Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt will be relaxing for two days before a busy day of spacewalk preparations on Sunday. The duo is scheduled to begin a spacewalk at 8 a.m. EDT on Monday to retrieve faulty radio hardware and collect samples of microorganisms.
The other two relaxing astronauts, Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps, will join the spacewalkers on Sunday for the preparations before practicing Canadarm2 robotic arm maneuvers they will use to support Dyson and Barratt on Monday. Dominick and Epps also will help the spacewalkers suit up in the Quest airlock as well as monitor Dyson and Barratt during their six-and-a-half-hour excursion.
NASA TV will begin its spacewalk broadcast at 6:30 a.m. on Monday. Live coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.
Boeing Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams, both NASA astronauts, spent Friday testing systems inside the Starliner spacecraft. The pair entered Starliner on Friday and worked throughout the day inside the spacecraft’s cabin. The experienced astronauts powered up Starliner while docked to the Harmony module’s forward port, checked its operations and hardware, then packed cargo inside the crew ship for a return to Earth.
In the Roscosmos side of the orbital outpost, cosmonaut and station Commander Oleg Kononenko spent his day configuring video equipment, setting up Earth monitoring hardware, then cleaning smoke detectors in the Nauka science module. Flight Engineer Nikolai Chub replaced medical and electronics hardware then wrapped up his day in the Zarya module inventorying space behind its panels. Flight Engineer Alexander Grebenkin pointed a pair of cameras outside a station window and programmed them to automatically take pictures of the Earth.
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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Mark Garcia
