The week kicked off with lab maintenance aboard the International Space Station as the Expedition 71 and Starliner crews relocated science gear, cleaned crew quarters, and conducted inspections. Eye checks were also on the schedule at the end of the day for four orbital residents.
Three NASA astronauts took turns during the first half of Monday moving the NanoRacks external platform from the Tranquility module to the Kibo laboratory module. Starliner Commander Butch Wilmore of Boeing’s Crew Flight Test started the work moving gear and making space to access the NanoRacks Bishop airlock in Tranquility where the external platform was stowed. Afterward, station Flight Engineers Mike Barratt and Matthew Dominick removed the external platform from Tranquility’s airlock and installed it inside Kibo’s airlock. The platform from NanoRacks can host a variety of payloads exposed to the external space environment for science experiments, technology demonstrations, and more.
Dominick then spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning his crew quarters located in the overhead compartment of the Harmony module. NASA Flight Engineer Jeanette Epps started her morning also cleaning her crew quarters in Harmony’s deck compartment. The pair each worked half a day cleaning their living spaces’ ventilation systems and airflow sensors. Epps later set up the camera robot, which can capture imagery and real-time video for downloading to mission controllers, and checked out its free-flying operations in Kibo.
NASA Flight Engineer Tracy C. Dyson started her day servicing a research furnace before configuring panels inside the Destiny laboratory module. Dyson spent the rest of the afternoon deep cleaning the Unity module vacuuming dust and wiping down surfaces with disinfectant wipes. Starliner Pilot Suni Williams of NASA reconfigured power systems in the Columbus laboratory module, loaded software on a Microgravity Science Glovebox computer, then wrapped up her shift collecting station air samples for analysis.
At the end of the day, Dominick, Barratt, and Epps joined Roscosmos Flight Engineer Alexander Grebenkin for a regularly scheduled eye exam. The quartet took turns looking at a standard eye chart and reading characters off of it to test their vision acuity and contrasty sensitivity.
Commander Oleg Kononenko and Flight Engineer Nikolai Chub split their day on inspection activities in the aft end of the Zvezda service module where the Progress 87 cargo craft is docked. Kononenko also set up hardware to observe luminous clouds and Earth’s upper atmosphere while Chub checked out batteries and their cables inside Zvezda.
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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