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Crew Relaxes Day Before Three Tons of Station Cargo Arrives

The Expedition 67 crew is taking a well-deserved day off following a busy few weeks of commercial crew and private astronaut missions. Meanwhile, the next cargo craft to resupply the International Space Station stands ready to launch from Kazakhstan on Friday morning.

The seven orbital residents are relaxing today following an intense period that saw three different SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicles come and go, as well as the arrival and departure of Boeing’s Starliner crew ship. Axiom Mission 1 arrived first at the station on April 9, aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour for a two-week stay. Following that, Crew-4 docked to the station inside the Dragon Freedom on April 27. On May 5, Crew-3 ended its six-month mission after undocking aboard the Dragon Endurance. Finally, the station crew welcomed NASA’s and Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 for a five-day mission when it docked on May 20.

Three tons of food, fuel, and supplies are packed inside the Progress 81 cargo craft destined to replenish the station residents on Friday. The Progress is counting down to a liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:32 a.m. on Friday. After just two orbits, the space freighter will approach the Zvezda service module’s rear port for an automated docking at 9:02 a.m. The  Progress 79 cargo craft undocked from Zvezda early Wednesday ending its 214-day stay.

Commander Oleg Artemyev and Flight Engineer Denis Matveev will be on duty Friday morning monitoring the space freighter’s arrival. The duo from Roscosmos has been reviewing approach and rendezvous procedures as well as practicing manual docking techniques with Zvezda’s tele-robotically operated rendezvous unit, or TORU. NASA TV begins its live Progress 81 launch coverage at 5:15 a.m. on NASA’s app and website.

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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Mark Garcia

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Station Preps for Progress and Dragon Cargo Missions

There are now four spacecraft parked at the International Space Station today after a Russian cargo craft undocked Wednesday morning. A fifth spaceship will arrive on Friday to replace it and replenish the Expedition 67 crew with food, fuel, and supplies.

The ISS Progress 79 resupply ship undocked from the rear port of the Zvezda service module at 4:03 a.m. EDT today completing a 214-day cargo mission at the station. The trash-filled space freighter reentered Earth’s atmosphere just over three hours later for a fiery, but safe demise over the Pacific Ocean.

A new resupply ship, the ISS Progress 81 (81P), stands at its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan counting down to a lift off at 5:32 a.m. on Friday. The 81P will dock three-and-a-half hours later to the same Zvezda port vacated by the 79P. The launch and docking activities will be broadcast live on the NASA app and on the NASA website.

Less than a week later, SpaceX will launch its 25^th commercial resupply mission to the space station. The Cargo Dragon will launch atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida at 10:45 a.m. on June 9. It will arrive the next day at 1:30 p.m. automatically docking to the Harmony module’s forward port previously occupied by Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. NASA TV will broadcast both the Dragon’s liftoff and its arrival at the station.

Meanwhile, the seven station residents orbiting Earth started their shifts today with body mass measurements. The crew mates took turns attaching themselves to a mass measurement device that applies a known force to the individual with the resulting acceleration being used to calculate body mass. The measurements are based on a formula using Newton’s Second Law of Motion (force equals mass times acceleration).

Lab maintenance took precedence today for NASA Flight Engineers Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins as they worked throughout Wednesday on life support gear and orbital plumbing components. Lindgren and Hines also had time for blood sample collections as well as tending to the XROOTS space botany experiment.

ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti also worked on the space botany study as she checked and photographed the growing plants. The two-time station visitor from Italy also analyzed changes in her body composition for the NutrISS investigation then checked out a robotics control terminal.

Commander Oleg Artemyev and Flight Engineer Denis Matveev took turns today studying future planetary piloting and robotic control techniques. Flight Engineer Sergey Korsakov serviced power supply systems inside the Zarya module then replaced a laptop computer battery in the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.

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Mark Garcia

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