Astronauts Take Day Off Following Spacewalk

The waxing gibbous Moon is pictured above Earth's horizon as the space station orbited 271 miles over southern Argentina.
The waxing gibbous Moon is pictured above Earth’s horizon as the space station orbited 271 miles over southern Argentina.

Four Expedition 68 crew members took Monday off following a busy weekend of spacewalk activities. The rest of the International Space Station crew focused on electronics, life support, and Orlan spacesuit maintenance.

NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio are relaxing today following a spacewalk on Saturday that saw the successful installation of a roll-out solar array on the station’s Starboard-4 truss segment. The duo then spent Sunday cleaning up after the spacewalk in the Quest airlock and discussing the results of the excursion with specialists on the ground. Flight Engineers Nicole Mann of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) also took Monday off having assisted the spacewalkers over the weekend.

The next spacewalk is planned later this month to relocate a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin are replacing pumps inside their Orlan spacesuits today as they prepare for that spacewalk.

Flight Engineer Anna Kikina spent the day servicing a variety of electronics and life support hardware aboard the orbiting lab. She replaced gear and reconfigured cables then worked on the Nauka module’s ventilation system.


Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog@space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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