Celebrate Changing Of The Guard With Gourmet Meal
NASA reports crew members onboard the International Space
Station were busy last week with handover operations from the
Expedition 14 residents, to the newly arrived Expedition 15
crew.
As Aero-News reported,
Expedition 15 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Oleg
Kotov arrived at the station Monday after a Saturday launch from
the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. With them on their Soyuz
TMA-10 spacecraft was Spaceflight Participant Charles Simonyi, a US
businessman flying under a contract with the Russian Federal Space
Agency.
Yurchikhin, Kotov and Simonyi were greeted by the station's
current crew, Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and
flight engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Suni Williams. Williams, who
has served as an Expedition 14 crew member since December, will
remain on the station providing Expedition 15 with an experienced
flight engineer for the early part of its mission.
She is scheduled to return home aboard space shuttle Endeavour
this summer. Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin are scheduled to return home
in their Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft April 20. Simonyi will return with
them after spending approximately 11 days aboard the station.
Crews performed required station maintenance and spent
considerable time on scientific studies. Those activities began
with time-critical transfer of several experiments from the newly
arrived Soyuz to the station and station power.
On Tuesday, Tyurin conducted the Russian experiment Bioemulsion,
an effort to develop technology to produce microorganisms safely
for bacterial, fermental and medical preparations. On Wednesday,
Kotov set up the European Exhaled Nitric Oxide-2 experiment, which
measures nitric oxide exhaled before and after spacewalks. Its
objective is to better understand the potential for decompression
sickness.
Meanwhile, Tyurin worked with the Russian Pilot experiment,
which is designed to measure the long-duration spaceflight changes
in a crew member's ability to pilot a spacecraft. On Thursday,
Lopez-Alegria spent more than three hours resizing US spacesuits
for future users. The suits were worn on an unprecedented series of
three station spacewalks during a nine-day period beginning January
31.
Throughout much of the week, beginning with the crew news
conference on Tuesday, crew members took breaks to talk with news
media representatives. On Friday, the crew feasted on a special Martha Stewart-catered meal
of quail, duck, rice pudding and dried fruits.
Additionally, both crews performed their regular exercise
sessions this week. These sessions are particularly important for
Lopez-Alegria and Tyurin, who will soon return to Earth and the
effects of gravity. Williams is scheduled to run the Boston
Marathon using a station treadmill Monday at 0900 CDT
to coincide with the race on the ground. This will be the first
time an astronaut in space is an official participant in a
marathon.