Astronauts Relax, Turn Attention to Monday’s Spacewalk

NASA spacewalker Flight Engineer Victor Glover is dwarfed by the main solar arrays on the International Space Station's far port-side truss structure.
NASA spacewalker Flight Engineer Victor Glover is dwarfed by the main solar arrays on the International Space Station’s far port-side truss structure.

Four Expedition 64 astronauts are winding down today following Wednesday’s near seven-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The other three crew members stayed focused on space research and lab maintenance throughout Thursday.

Spacewalkers Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover spent Thursday relaxing for a few hours before turning their attention to the next spacewalk set for Monday. Their assistants, Kate Rubins of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of JAXA, joined the duo Thursday afternoon to review next week’s spacewalk.

The quartet first called down to mission controllers Thursday and discussed the previous day’s spacewalk when Hopkins and Glover installed a science antenna and readied the station for solar array upgrades. Rubins, with Noguchi as her back up, operated the Canadarm2 robotic arm, and assisted the spacewalkers in and out of their spacesuits.

Hopkins and Glover will exit the station again on Monday after they turn on their spacesuit batteries about 7 a.m. EST. They will spend six-and-a-half hours finishing battery maintenance and installing high definition cameras as Rubins and Noguchi monitor the duo. NASA TV will go on air at 5:30 a.m.

In the midst of the spacewalk preparations, NASA Flight Engineer Shannon Walker has been conducting microgravity science. Today she worked on a technology demonstration that seeks to simplify life support systems using capillary action and fluid dynamics to separate liquids and gases.

Commander Sergey Ryzhikov worked on Zarya module power systems while continuing to pack the Progress 76 resupply ship ahead of its Feb. 9 departure. Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov started the day on Russian plumbing tasks then checked radiation hardware and measurements.



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