Expedition 16 To Return April 19

Following last Thursday’s successful docking, the Expedition 17 crew members spent their first full day aboard the International Space Station familiarizing themselves with their new home and working on a variety of experiments.

NASA reports the combined Expedition 16 and 17 crews began work on Bioemulsion, a Russian microorganism project, and ELITE-S2, an Italian Space Agency project that studies connections between the brain, motion and visualization in the absence of gravity.

Expedition 17 Commander Sergei Volkov and Expedition 16 Flight Engineer Yuri Malenchenko installed a temperature sensor switching unit as well as other hardware into the newly arrived Soyuz. Volkov also performed a Soyuz communications link check with Expedition 17 Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko.

Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson and Expedition 17 Flight Engineer Garrett Reisman participated in interviews with a New York radio program and a television station in Iowa. Whitson also performed some maintenance work on the US spacesuits.

Whitson, Malenchenko and South Korean 'tourinaut' So-yeon Yi are scheduled to return to Earth in the Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft on April 19.

FMI: www.nasa.gov