Spacewalk Nears as Starliner Crew Begins Extended Stay
The Expedition 71 crew is getting ready for a spacewalk this week while two Commercial Crew astronauts will spend a few extra days aboard the International Space Station. The orbital residents also continued their advanced space research and conducted eye and ear exams on Monday.
On Friday, June 7, Expedition crew members completed installation of the spare pump carried aboard Starliner for the urine processing assembly on the orbital outpost, and the hardware is functioning properly.
NASA Flight Engineers Tracy C. Dyson and Matthew Dominick are preparing for the first of three planned spacewalks for science and maintenance on the orbital lab. The astronauts are expected to set their spacesuits to battery power at 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday officially beginning their scheduled six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. The spacewalkers will retrieve faulty communications hardware, also known as the radio frequency group, and swab station surfaces to determine the ability of microorganisms to survive the extreme microgravity environment.
Mission managers will discuss the upcoming spacewalk details during a news conference at 4 p.m. on Tuesday. Live coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.
NASA Flight Engineer Mike Barratt assisted Dominick as he tried on his spacesuit during a standard fit check in the Quest airlock on Monday morning. During the afternoon, the two spacewalkers joined Barratt and NASA Flight Engineer Jeanette Epps and reviewed Canadarm2 robotic arm procedures necessary to retrieve the radio gear.
Earlier, Epps attached an acoustic monitor to herself measuring the sound environment she’s exposed to aboard the station. Afterward, she collected lab water samples to test for microbes then conducted a hearing exam listening to tones on a pair of headphones connected to a computer. Dyson joined cosmonaut Nikolai Chub at the end of the day and peered at a standard eye chart reading characters to test their visual acuity.
New station visitors Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both veteran NASA astronauts, learned on Sunday they will orbit Earth until June 18 before returning home aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. The extra days in space will allow teams more time to checkout Starliner’s systems and free up the Expedition crew’s schedule for more spacewalk preparations.
Wilmore and Williams started Monday with health checks measuring their temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate. The duo then split up as Wilmore worked on computer maintenance inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox and Williams installed hardware to support a space fire investigation.
In the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment, Chub transferred water stowed inside the Progress 88 resupply ship to tanks inside the Zvezda service module. Flight Engineer Alexander Grebenkin cleaned vents and air ducts then checked lighting systems in the Zvezda, Nauka, and Poisk modules. Station commander and veteran cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko studied plasma physics in the Columbus laboratory module then wore a sensor-packed cap and explored futuristic spacecraft and robotic piloting techniques.
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 Garcia
