Busy Monday Follows a Relaxing Weekend

The current residents of the International Space Station (ISS) had a busy day Monday after taking the weekend off. Maintenance and cleaning chores were the order of the day for the crewmembers of NASA Expedition 71 and Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test.

Tracy Dyson and Matthew Dominick of NASA loaded discarded gear and trash into the Cygnus (Northrop Grumman) for robotic disposal over the South Pacific. Starliner’s astronauts, commander Butch Wilmore and Pilot Suni Williams, tidied up and organized stowage in the Permanent Multipurpose Module. Wilmore then disassembled a NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer to ready it for upcoming missions.

NASA’s Jeanette Epps and Mike Barratt also disposed of trash and organized gear around the Station. Epps held an amateur radio session with students from the Moroccan School of Engineering Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco. No word if the students were tuning in from Rick’s in Casablanca. Barratt and Epps then cleaned some sections of the air duct system and replaced some of the housing panel fasteners on the system as well.

All in all, a busy but routine task kind of day for the astronauts.

The next spacewalk is scheduled for July29 with Dyson and Barratt. They will continue troubleshooting the water leak in one of the umbilical units that forced an early termination of the June 24 spacewalk.

In the Russian section of the Station, known as Roscosmos, commander Oleg Kononenko and engineer Nikolai Chub inventoried audio equipment and routine cleaning in the Zvezda service module. Engineer Grebenkin replaced some hoses on the water processing system.

The Progress 87 cargo craft lifted the ISS to a higher orbit by firing its thrusters for 9 minutes and 10 seconds on June 29. This sets up the correct phasing for the launch and rendezvous with Progress 89 scheduled for mid-August.

FMI:  blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/