May 1, 2024

Russian Cargo Mission Nears Launch During Human Research on Space Station

NASA astronaut and Expedition 68 Flight Engineer Nicole Mann postures inside BEAM, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, throughout freight activities aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
NASA Flight Engineers Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada started the early morning by collecting and processing their blood samples prior to keeping them in a science freezer for future analysis. The two astronauts then joined Frank Rubio of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for a vision test utilizing a standard eye chart.
Rubio and Cassada ended the day setting up helmet lights and resizing a set of spacesuits ahead of scheduled future spacewalks. Mann gathered garbage for packing inside the next Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vehicle targeted to launch in November. Wakata performed research into using synthetic intelligence to make fiber optic cable televisions in space prior to cleaning the within the of Microgravity Science Glovebox.
Cosmonaut Anna Kikina, who introduced to the station on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, invested a portion of her day servicing video and computer hardware prior to filling data to enable operations with the European robotic arm. She finished up her work shift observing Earths nighttime atmospheric glow in the near-ultraviolet wavelength.

Russias Progress 80 resupply ship blasted off in February from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA TELEVISION
The next freight objective to resupply the Expedition 68 crew is prepared to launch to the International Space Station (ISS) on the evening of Tuesday, October 25. In the meantime, the seven people onboard the orbital lab began the work week servicing a pair of spacesuits and dealing with a host of human research study studies.
Counting down to its liftoff at 8:20 p.m. EDT (5:20 p.m. PDT) on Tuesday, the ISS Progress 82 freight spacecraft stands atop its rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA TV, on the companys app and site, begins its live launch broadcast at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
Leader Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin signed up with each other on Monday and practiced remotely controlling the Progress 82 cargo craft on a computer system. The set of cosmonauts were inside the Zvezda service module training on the telerobotically run rendezvous unit, or TORU. This will be required in case the Progress 82 spacecraft is unable to immediately dock to the spaceport station by itself.

Counting down to its liftoff at 8:20 p.m. EDT (5:20 p.m. PDT) on Tuesday, the ISS Progress 82 cargo spacecraft stands atop its rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA TV, on the agencys app and website, starts its live launch broadcast at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. NASA Flight Engineers Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada began the morning by gathering and processing their blood samples prior to keeping them in a science freezer for future analysis. The two astronauts then joined Frank Rubio of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for a vision test utilizing a basic eye chart.