December 23, 2024

Russian Soyuz Space Station Crew Launch Set for Friday Following Tuesday’s Successful Spacewalk

By NASA
March 16, 2022

Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) collaborated for a muscle study happening in the Columbus laboratory module on Wednesday. The astronauts took turns measuring each others neck, back, and leg muscles to find out how microgravity impacts their biochemical residential or commercial properties. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei serviced microbe samples growing inside a specialized incubator for the Space Biofilms study that could improve spacecraft safety and crew health.
In the stations Russian segment, 2 cosmonauts, Commander Anton Shkaplerov and Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov, packed gear and gotten ready for their go back to Earth on March 30. Shkaplerov will lead the trip home flanked by Dubrov and Vande Hei inside the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship. Vande Hei went beyond NASA astronaut Scott Kellys single spaceflight record of 340 days on March 15 and will land in Kazakhstan with a NASA record-breaking 355 days in area.

NASA spacewalker Raja Chari is imagined tethered to the spaceport station with the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance behind him and the Atlantic coast of South America 268 miles below. Credit: NASA
The International Space Station is set to welcome three new crewmates who are set to introduce on Friday and show up just over three hours later on. In the meantime, the seven-member Expedition 66 team turned its attention to science duties following Tuesdays successful spacewalk.
The next team ship to launch toward the orbiting laboratory has rolled out and now stands at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft is counting down to take off on Friday at 11:55 a.m. EDT. It will carry three cosmonauts on a 10-minute and three-hour flight to the station where it will dock to the Prichal module. Veteran cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, with newbie station visitors Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, will open the hatch about two-and-a-half hours later on and start a six-and-a-half-month objective aboard the space station. NASA TELEVISION, on the app and the website, will begin its live launch protection at 11:15 a.m. on Friday.
Two NASA astronauts, Kayla Barron and Raja Chari, had a light schedule on Wednesday following Tuesdays six-hour and 54-minute spacewalk to set up the station for its next roll-out solar range. Barron then worked late in the afternoon in the Kibo lab module setting up the Confocal Microscope that looks at biological samples using spatial filtering methods.

2 NASA astronauts, Kayla Barron and Raja Chari, had a light schedule on Wednesday following Tuesdays 54-minute and six-hour spacewalk to set up the station for its next roll-out solar array. Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) teamed up for a muscle research study taking location in the Columbus lab module on Wednesday. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei serviced microorganism samples growing inside a specialized incubator for the Space Biofilms study that could improve spacecraft security and crew health.
Vande Hei exceeded NASA astronaut Scott Kellys single spaceflight record of 340 days on March 15 and will land in Kazakhstan with a NASA record-breaking 355 days in space.