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>> It's Thursday, July 25,
the International Space Station's Expedition 36 crew
members have split their attention today among continuing
science operations, their daily maintenance of their home
on orbit, and preparations for the departure
of one of their cargo ships.
The hatch to the Russian cargo craft Progress 50 was closed
on Wednesday morning after the crew members had finished
filling that vehicle with trash and other items
that are no longer needed on board.
On Thursday morning, station commander Pavel Vinogradov
and flight engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin had a conference
with the team at the Mission Control Center outside Moscow
to review procedures that they might have to follow
in the event that there was an issue during the undocking
and the crew members had to take over manual control
of that progress in order
to re-dock the vehicle to the station.
But they will be standing by when the 50P disengages
from the Pirs docking compartment
at 3:44 Houston time this afternoon.
The Progress vehicle will then follow its programmed course
to back away from the station and begin the final leg
of its journey, which will end with a destructive entry
into the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean.
That docking port at the aft end of the Pirs module will be taken
by another Progress vehicle this coming Saturday night,
and since the crew members will be working
to support those docking activities over the weekend,
Vinogradov, Yurchikhin,
and flight engineer Alexander Misurkin all had a half a day
off duty on Thursday and are scheduled
for a full day off duty on Friday.
Flight engineer Chris Cassidy started his Thursday
with science operations.
He worked to set up hardware in the Kibo laboratory module
for upcoming runs with the Marangoni experiment.
In that investigation,
scientists are using the Marangoni confection
to study the properties of heat transfer that take place
in a microgravity environment.
Flight engineer Luca Parmitano spent his morning
at the combustion integrated rack.
He was working to install new hardware components
in an apparatus known as the
"multiuser droplet combustion apparatus,"
which you see in his hands.
He's installing new components there for the next set
of combustion experiment runs.
There are several such investigations currently
on the schedule, all of them dedicated
to learning the details about how different fuels burn
in the absence of gravity.
That's all designed to improve fire safety
and fire suppression techniques,
but also to increase the efficiency of engines
which use liquid fuels.
The plan for flight engineer Karen Nyberg's morning was
devoted to preparing for next month's arrival
of the H2 transfer vehicle; that is the fourth cargo ship
to the station provided
by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Nyberg and the Japanese flight control team ran
into some difficulties powering
up the HTV's hardware control panel on both the primary
and the backup system.
There is a cable that is suspected of being bad.
Well, there are several other spare cables on board,
but the troubleshooting of that apparatus is still underway.
Nyberg also spent time checking out the laptop computer
that she'll use in her refresher training of HTV grapple
and berthing operations.
She'll be at the command of the station's arm
for those operations next month.
After their lunch, Nyberg and Cassidy took time to talk
about the progress of their mission in interviews with the
"Washington Post" and the Portland, Maine, "Press Herald,"
a newspaper in Cassidy's home state.
Throughout the day, all six crew members got
in their two exercise sessions, getting a workout either
on a stationary bike, a treadmill, or resisted exercise;
something that all crew members do every day in order
to keep generally fit and also to try to keep them
in good shape for when they encounter gravity again
at the end of their missions.
On Friday, the Russian crew members will be off duty
but will take care of their weekly housecleaning that's
usually scheduled for Saturday.
Meanwhile, Chris Cassidy and Karen Nyberg are scheduled
to conduct more troubleshooting on the spacesuit
that leaked water into Luca Parmitano's helmet during a
spacewalk last week, as the crew members work in coordination
with the ground teams in Houston to try to isolate the source
of that leak, the cause of the problem.
Parmitano on Friday will work
on the surface tele-robotics experiment, and from orbit,
he will remotely drive a rover that's on a test ground
at the Ames Research Center in California.
All of the crew members looking forward to the arrival
of a new load of supplies that is due to arrive at the station
in a new Progress vehicle scheduled to dock
to the Pirs docking compartment on Saturday night Houston time.