The Worldwide House Station is because of welcome a U.S. cargo craft after it launches from Florida subsequent week. Within the meantime, the Expedition 68 crew is staying centered on finishing 5 extra spacewalks for meeting and set up work earlier than the tip of the 12 months.
The SpaceX Dragon resupply ship is because of elevate off from NASA’s Kennedy House Heart at 3:54 p.m. EST on Tuesday and take a daylong journey to the orbiting lab. It can mechanically dock to the ahead port on the station’s Concord module at 5:57 a.m. on Wednesday. Dragon is delivering new area agriculture and biotechnology research, in addition to the following pair of rollout photo voltaic arrays to enhance the station’s energy era system. NASA TV, on the company’s app and web site, begins its launch protection at 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday and docking protection at 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
After Dragon completes is supply mission to the area station, robotics controllers on the bottom will command the Canadarm2 robotic arm to extract two rollout photo voltaic arrays from contained in the U.S. area freighter’s trunk. The remotely managed Canadarm2 will then stage the rollout photo voltaic arrays on truss phase attachment factors to be retrieved on a pair of spacewalks deliberate for Nov. 29 and Dec. 3. Two yet-to-be-named Expedition 68 astronauts will take away the rollout photo voltaic arrays from their attachment factors then set up them on the base of the 2 important photo voltaic arrays on each the port and starboard truss segments.
NASA Flight Engineers Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann educated Friday on a pc for Dragon’s automated arrival on Monday. The duo studied method and docking procedures and reviewed the upcoming cargo unpacking actions. The astronauts have been joined on the finish of the day by Flight Engineers Frank Rubio of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company for a convention with NASA and SpaceX mission controllers.
Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin accomplished the primary of 4 deliberate Russian spacewalks this 12 months at 4:07 p.m. EST Thursday. The 2 Roscosmos cosmonauts spent six hours and 25 minutes of their Orlan spacesuits getting ready a radiator for its relocation from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module the place it is going to be put in on an upcoming spacewalk.
The duo has three extra spacewalks to finish earlier than the tip of the 12 months with the following tour set for Friday, Nov. 25. The Roscosmos spacewalkers, with help from the European Robotic Arm (ERA) managed by Flight Engineer Anna Kikina, will transfer the radiator from Rassvet to Nauka and make electrical and hydraulic connections. The subsequent two Russian spacewalks, on Dec. 6 and 21, will see Rassvet’s airlock transferred and put in to Nauka utilizing the ERA, then the deployment of the newly relocated radiator connected to Nauka.
Study extra about station actions by following the area station weblog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, in addition to the ISS Fb and ISS Instagram accounts.
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