Friday, May 23, 2003, Mission Control Center, Houston, TX
Four
weeks into their mission, the two-man crew of the International
Space Station has moved beyond an orientation and familiarization
schedule and into an agenda of operations that reflects the range
of activities they’ll pursue on orbit during the remaining
five months of their flight.
Each day this week Expedition 7 Commander Yuri Malenchenko and
NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu completed a variety of maintenance
tasks to keep their home on orbit in good shape, from monitoring
the operation of life support systems to testing the quality of air
and water.
In the coming week mission managers plan to have the crewmembers
replace a storage battery in the Zvezda Service Module. As training
for a contingency spacewalk, they also will have Malenchenko and Lu
get into, and then out of, the American spacesuits. In their
pre-flight training Malenchenko and Lu always had help donning and
doffing the Extravehicular Mobility Unit. No spacewalks are planned
for this increment.
The science mission of Expedition 7 picked up this
week. Malenchenko took part in Russian biomedical experiments
gauging the impact of the microgravity environment on blood cell
count and body mass, while Lu began a new series of experiment runs
with the InSPACE experiment in the Microgravity Sciences Glovebox
(MSG) this week.
The MSG is a sealed container in the Destiny laboratory housing
experiments involving materials that need to be isolated from the
station environment. InSPACE, or Investigating the Structure of
Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions, which was started
during Expedition 6, studies how particles that are capable of
being magnetized respond when a magnetic field is pulsed on and
off.
Scientists hope to develop better fluids for systems that are
routinely exposed to magnetic fields, such as automobile brake
fluids and vibration damping systems, and to develop new
applications such as vibration damping systems for buildings in
earthquake-prone areas.
Wednesday morning the Expedition 7 crewmembers discussed the
progress of their mission and its scientific research with the BBC
Radio’s World Service and WHEC-TV in Rochester, N.Y., near
Lu’s hometown of Webster, N.Y. Thursday they took part in an
educational event, answering questions from students gathered at
the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.