The Expedition 69 crew is wrapping its work week loading a cargo craft for its upcoming return to Earth and cleaning up following Thursday’s spacewalk. Other activities scheduled for the International Space Station residents on Friday included a robotics competition and life support maintenance.
The SpaceX Dragon cargo vehicle will end its stay at the orbital outpost on June 29 after delivering two roll-out solar arrays and several tons of science gear, crew supplies, and station hardware on June 6. NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg began finalizing the cargo work inside the Dragon cargo spacecraft on Friday. At the end of the day, NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio joined Hoburg transferring research samples from the station’s science freezers into Dragon’s science transport freezers.
Earlier in the day, Bowen and Rubio worked together servicing power systems and life support gear. The duo started their work in the Destiny laboratory module replacing a remote power controller module that controls the flow of power throughout the orbital outpost. After lunchtime, the duo rejoined each other in the Harmony module swapping out hardware that circulates, cools, and dehumidifies air in the space station’s U.S. segment.
UAE (United Arab Emirates) Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi assisted the NASA astronauts with the cargo packing job then worked on orbital plumbing tasks throughout the morning on Friday. In the afternoon, Alneyadi powered up and activated the Astrobee robotic free-flyers located inside the Kibo laboratory module. Afterward, the UAE astronaut monitored the Astrobees as they performed maneuvers controlled by competition-winning algorithms written by students on Earth.
The orbital lab’s three cosmonauts slept in on Friday following a six-hour and 24-minute spacewalk the day before to replace science and communications hardware on the station’s Roscosmos segment. The spacewalk was Commander Sergey Prokopyev’s and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin’s fifth together. After they woke up mid-morning, the trio, including Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev, spent the rest of the day stowing spacewalk tools, cleaning spacesuits, and reorganizing the Poisk airlock.
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.
Get weekly video highlights at: https://roundupreads.jsc.nasa.gov/videoupdate/
Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here: www.nasa.gov/subscribe
