The Expedition 38 astronauts wrapped up the workweek Friday aboard the International Space Station with biomedical research and robotics, while their Russian colleagues entered the homestretch of preparations for a spacewalk they will conduct Monday. Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy donned their Russian Orlan spacesuits for a “dry run” dress rehearsal to test the suits in advance of Monday’s spacewalk to reinstall a pair of cameras as part of a commercial endeavor between a Canadian firm and the Russian Federal Space Agency. The cameras will be used to downlink Earth imagery to Internet-based subscribers. The two cosmonauts also plan to retrieve an experiment package housed on the Zvezda service modules hull. Monday’s excursion will be the 178th spacewalk in support of station assembly and maintenance, the sixth for Kotov and the third for Ryazanskiy. The cosmonauts will wrap up their preparations on Sunday as they take care of some final details and study the timeline. Live NASA Television coverage of the spacewalk begins at 8:30 a.m. EST Monday, with hatch opening scheduled for 9:10 a.m. Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata spent much of their day inside the Japanese Kibo module working once again with a pair of basketball-sized, free-flying satellites known Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES. For this experiment session, the astronauts equipped one of the two SPHERES with a pair of stereoscopic goggles dubbed the Visual Estimation and Relative Tracking for Inspection of Generic Objects, or VERTIGO. As the second SPHERES tumbled and spun, the VERTIGO-equipped robot attempted to map it and perform relative navigation around it. Read more: go.nasa.gov/1jtgtIa
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 21:11:04 +0000
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