The next freight mission to provide the crew of Expedition 68 is ready to be launched to International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday evening, October 25. Meanwhile, seven astronauts on from orbital laboratory started this week’s work, serving two spacesuits and conducting a lot of human research.
In the countdown to launch at 8:20 pm ET on Tuesday, the International Space Station's Progress 82 cargo spacecraft has appeared at the launch site of the Baikonur Space in Kazakhstan. Before docking with the Poisk cabin at 10:49 p.m. Thursday, the Russian Space Agency's 's supply ship will orbit the earth for two days. NASA TV will broadcast the launch process live on the agency’s apps and websites at 8 p.m. Tuesday. It will also report on the docking event from 10:15 p.m. Thursday.
Commander Sergey Prokopyev and flight engineer Dmitri Petelin joined each other on Monday and practice remote control of the Progress 82 cargo spacecraft on computers. The two astronauts trained a rendezvous device operated by remote robots in the Zvezda service compartment, namely the TORU. If the Progress 82 spacecraft cannot automatically dock with the space station on its own, this device will be required.
On Monday, the schedule of four astronauts living and working on the space station began with the biomedical study. NASA Flight Engineers Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada began collecting and processing their blood samples in the morning and then stored them in a scientific refrigerator for future analysis. The two astronauts then performed vision tests with NASA's Frank Rubio and Koichi Wakata from Japan's aerospace research and development agency (JAXA). Next, Rubio assisted Mann with stepping on a motor cycle to explore how weightlessness affects the cardiovascular and respiratory system. Mann installed biomonitoring sensors for himself during exercise and recorded physiological data, which will be downloaded to doctors on Earth for analysis.
Rubio and Cassada installed helmet lights at the end of the day and adjusted the spacesuit before the planned future spacewalk . Mann collected some trash and was ready to load into the next Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in November. Wakata conducted research on the use of artificial intelligence to make optical cables in space before cleaning the inside of microgravity science glove box.
, astronaut Anna Kikina, who was launched on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the space station, spent part of the day repairing videos and computer hardware before loading data to implement the operation of the European robot arm . She finished her shift and observed the Earth's night atmosphere at nearly ultraviolet wavelengths.
