Astronauts Ready for Thursday Spacewalk as Biology, Earth Science Continues
Two NASA astronauts spent Wednesday finalizing preparations for a spacewalk to upgrade the International Space Station’s power generation capabilities and relocate a communications antenna. Expedition 73 Flight Engineers Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers began their shift staging their spacesuits and organizing their spacewalking tools inside the Quest airlock.
After a midday meal, McClain and Ayers teamed up with station Commander Takuya Onishi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and NASA Flight Engineer Jonny Kim and called down to mission controllers to discuss their spacewalk readiness. Onishi and Kim will be on duty Thursday helping the spacewalkers in and out of their spacesuits and monitoring their activities from inside the orbital outpost. The quartet also conducted a final review of the procedures necessary to ready the orbital outpost for a new rollout solar array and relocate an antenna that communicates with visiting vehicles. The planned six-hour and 35-minute spacewalk is set to begin at 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday and will be broadcast live on NASA+ beginning at 6:30 a.m.
McClain and Ayers also had a standard pre-spacewalk health checkout just before their lunch on Wednesday. Kim, a trained medical doctor, led the exams measuring the astronauts’ vital signs including temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rate.
Kim also had time to photograph tomato plants growing for a space agriculture experiment studying if crops can grow without photosynthesis in microgravity possibly increasing plant cultivation on Earth and in space. Onishi began his shift processing biological fluid samples for a biotechnology investigation that may lead to expanded research and commercial opportunities in space.
The station’s three cosmonauts from Roscosmos had a research-packed day studying the human cardiovascular system and photographing landmarks on Earth.
Flight Engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky took turns measuring each other’s blood pressure as electrodes monitored their circulation. The data will give doctors insight into how weightlessness affects blood flowing back and forth from the heart. The two crewmates later wrapped up their shift pointing their cameras toward Earth and photographing glaciers in the Patagonia region of South America.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Kirill Peskov was also on Earth observation duties on Wednesday. He first powered down a camera used for photographing natural and manmade disasters across the planet. Afterward, he set up a specialized camera and pictured regions throughout North and South America in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
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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Mark A. Garcia
