Hearing assessments, eye exams, and cargo ops topped Tuesday’s schedule aboard the International Space Station. The Expedition 71 and Boeing Crew Flight Test crews also scheduled in some time to connect with students back on Earth and prepare for upcoming mission activities.
As part of regularly scheduled exams in low Earth orbit, NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Tracy C. Dyson all completed hearing assessments throughout the day. Epps prepped for upcoming Thor-Davis activities—an investigation that observes thunderstorms in Earth’s upper atmosphere—and reconfigured the EarthKam for future operations.
Dominick connected with students from St. Luke’s College in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during an Amateur Radio call, giving them an opportunity to ask questions about living and working in microgravity as the space station orbited overhead.
Barratt and Dyson teamed up in the afternoon to deconfigure spacesuit components after a water leak in Dyson’s service and cooling umbilical unit forced an early end to a spacewalk on Monday, June 24. The next spacewalk outside of the orbiting laboratory, with Dyson and Barratt, is scheduled for July 29.
Later in the evening, Barratt received an eye exam, guided by Epps, to help researchers better understand how microgravity affects vision. Meanwhile, Dyson was joined by Crew Flight Test Commander Butch Wilmore to load trash and discarded gear inside Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft. Cygnus is scheduled to be released from the Unity module later this month for disposal over the South Pacific Ocean, ending its five-and-a-half month stay at the orbiting lab.
Crew Flight Test Pilot Suni Williams spent a majority of the day on Starliner operations then assessed the air flow of the pump filter attached to the Advanced Plant Habitat. At the end of the day, Williams was joined by all eight of her crewmates for a conference with ground teams.
All three cosmonauts in microgravity donned acoustic monitors throughout the day to capture sound measurements around the station. In the Zvezda Service Module, Flight Engineer Nikolai Chub tested a 3D printer to assess its ability to manufacture space hardware, then later inspected and photographed panels and cable routes of a Roscosmos physics experiment that examines neutron radiation.
Flight Engineer Alexander Grebenkin continued hose replacement work on the water processing system, then studied the glow of Earth’s nighttime atmosphere in near-ultraviolet. Meanwhile, Commander Oleg Kononenko began loading trash and discarded gear inside Progress 87, which is slated to undock from the orbiting laboratory in August.
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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