Crew Prepares for Progress Departure, Arrival
With snow flurries falling from a chilled, leaden grey sky, the
ISS Progress 45 cargo craft and its Soyuz booster rolled out to the
launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9 p.m. EDT
Thursday (7 a.m. Friday Baikonur time) for liftoff, today, Sunday
at 6:11 a.m. to the International Space Station.
The unmanned cargo vehicle is stocked with 2.9 tons of food,
fuel and supplies for the station crew, including 1,653 pounds of
propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen, 926 pounds of water and 3,108
pounds of maintenance gear, spare parts and experiment
hardware.
Meanwhile aboard the orbiting complex, the Expedition 29 crew
members set their sights on Saturday’s undocking and deorbit
of the ISS Progress 42 cargo craft, which clears the way for the
arrival of Progress 45. The crew closed the hatch between the Pirs
docking compartment and the Progress Friday at 10:25 a.m. and
conducted leak checks. Loaded with trash and gear set for disposal,
Progress 42 is scheduled to undock from the station Saturday at
5:04 a.m. for a destructive re-entry into Earth’s
atmosphere.
Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa conducted a
training session with the telerobotically operated rendezvous
system in the Zvezda service module. This manual system would be
used in the unlikely event that Progress 45 encounters a problem
with its automated docking.
Commander Mike Fossum swapped out the camera battery, checked
samples and downloaded imagery associated with the Binary Colloidal
Alloy Test-6 science payload. In this experiment, also known as
BCAT-6, station crew members photograph samples of polymer and
colloidal particles as they change from liquids to gases, to model
that phase change. The results will help scientists develop
fundamental physics concepts previously cloaked by the effects of
gravity.
Fossum also spoke via amateur radio with students at the
Herzliya Science Centre’s Space Laboratory in Herzliya,
Israel.
Thursday, he spoke with children from the Cherry Creek School
District in Centennial, Colo. in a conversation coordinated by
Amateur Radio on International Space Station.
The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft carrying three new station crew
members is set to arrive in mid-November. Flight Engineers Dan
Burbank, Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin will join Fossum,
Furukawa and Volkov on Nov. 16.