Dragon Crew Ship Changing Ports, Cosmonauts Cleanup After Spacewalk
Four Expedition 69 crew members are reviewing the procedures they will use when they move the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to a new port on Saturday morning. The rest of the crew aboard the International Space Station is cleaning up after completing a spacewalk earlier this week.
NASA Flight Engineers Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg will respectively command and pilot the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft when it undocks from the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 7:10 a.m. EDT on Saturday. The pair will be flanked by UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev during the planned 43-minute relocation maneuver. Endeavour, with the four crewmates inside, will automatically redock to Harmony’s forward port at 7:53 a.m. NASA TV begins it live relocation coverage at 7 a.m. on the agency’s app and website.
The quartet began Friday morning simulating their spacecraft maneuvers in coordination with mission controllers on the ground. Afterward, the foursome held a space-to-ground conference with the controllers discussing training, procedures, and mission readiness.
Endeavour’s relocation will open up Harmony’s top port for the upcoming SpaceX CRS-28 cargo mission. This enables the Canadarm2 robotic arm to reach out and access the cargo inside the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship’s trunk. Inside Dragon’s trunk will be a new set of roll-out solar arrays that the Canadarm2 will grapple and temporarily stow on the station’s starboard-side truss structure. Two astronauts on a future spacewalk will permanently install the roll-out solar arrays on the starboard truss augmenting the orbital outpost’s power generation system.
Three cosmonauts reconfigured the Roscosmos segment of the space station following Wednesday’s spacewalk to move an experiment airlock. Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin deactivated and cleaned their spacesuits then stowed the tools they used during their seven-hour, 11-minute spacewalk. Fedyaev, who controlled the European robotic arm (ERA) during the spacewalk, spent Friday inside the Nauka science module removing cameras and powering down the ERA.
Prokopyev and Petelin have one more spacewalk to conduct this month when they exit the Poisk airlock on May 12 to deploy a radiator that was attached to Nauka during a previous spacewalk on April 19. Fedyaev will be inside the station monitoring the spacewalkers who will also fill the radiator with coolant and perform maintenance on the ERA.
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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Abigail Grace Graf
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