Two NASA astronauts are gearing up this week for the first spacewalk of the year at the International Space Station. The Expedition 72 crew members also started the week working on botany, combustion, and human research and practicing departing the orbital outpost.
Flight Engineer Nick Hague and Commander Suni Williams are scheduled to set their spacesuit batteries to internal power at approximately 8 a.m. EST on Thursday to officially begin their science and maintenance spacewalk. They will exit the Quest airlock into the vacuum of space and spend about six-and-a-half hours servicing astrophysics gear including the NICER X-ray telescope and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The pair on Monday organized and configured spacewalking tools inside Quest as NASA Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore charged and installed the lithium-ion batteries that will power their spacesuits. NASA+ begins its spacewalk coverage at 6:30 a.m. on Thursday.
Hague and Williams also spent the first half of their day focusing on research to improve spacecraft safety and sustain crews on long term missions. Hague opened up the Combustion Integrated Rack and swapped samples of materials to observe how they burn in weightlessness. Understanding how flames spread in space may improve fire safety on crew missions. Williams installed new hardware and supplied water to the Advanced Plant Habitat for a space botany study exploring how different water levels affect plant growth to provide food for crews on long-term space missions.
Wilmore had earlier started his shift collecting potable water samples for analysis then inspecting emergency gear such as fire extinguishers and breathing masks. NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit joined cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and conducted emergency training in the unlikely event the trio would have to evacuate the orbital outpost inside the Soyuz MS-26 crew ship and return to Earth.
Ovchinin and Vagner later attached sensors to themselves and measured how microgravity affects blood flow through the tiniest vessels in the human circulatory system for a Roscosmos human research investigation. Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov worked on life support maintenance throughout the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment on Monday.