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Good morning and welcome to Mission Control Houston
and the International Space Station update hour.
We're here with the International Space Station
flight control team inside
of the space station flight control room
where flight director Judd Frieling is leading the team
today with help from Capcom Anna Fisher.
Things are back to normal today onboard the space station
with the three members of the expedition 34 crew.
They are more than halfway through their day
and currently orbiting 256 miles
above the South Pacific off the coast
of Australia and New Zealand.
They are Commander Kevin Ford
and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn of NASA,
Russian Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin
and Roman Romanenko and Canadian Space Agency Flight Engineer
Chris Hadfield.
Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin have been at the space station
since October when their Soyuz TMA-06M vehicle docked
with the Russian Poisk module.
They're now working on their 119th day at the space station
and their 121st day in space, and they were joined in December
by Marshburn, Hadfield and Romanenko
who docked their Soyuz TMA-07M
to the stations Rassvet module on December 21.
That group is on their 64th day in space
and their 62nd at the space station.
When we wrapped up on Tuesday the station had been
experiencing communication issues for about two hours due
to a glitch in the software update the crew had been
installing with the ground's help.
After the team here in mission control got another chance
to talk with the crew as they passed
over Russian ground stations, they were able to walk them
through the final steps needed to fix the issue
and normal communications were reestablished
at 11:34 AM central time.
The ground is picking back up with the software update today.
Other activities on the crew's agenda for today include a range
of science, maintenance and prep work.
On the science end of the spectrum,
Commander Kevin Ford is working again today
with the InSPACE-3 experiment which looks
at how magnetic fluids are influenced by magnetic fields.
InSPACE has been a recurring theme in the past couple
of space station expeditions but today marked the final run
for Expedition 34 and Ford had some word of thanks to offer
down to the team on the ground who's been supporting him.
FORD: Huntsville, station from Destiny for InSPACE.
PAYCOM: Yes sir, go ahead.
FORD: Well I'm not sure back when you guys started this.
Suni was doing this experiment when I got up here,
and she gave me a good handover on it.
And I've done a lot of them since I've been here.
Chris has done some of them as well.
So at least I know Expeditions 33
and 34 have been part of InSPACE.
I'm going to tell you what it stands for.
It stands for Investigating the Structure
of Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions.
And we had some good training on this before we flew.
And it's got some really interesting things about it.
But the bottom line is there are a lot
of terrestrial applications
in suppressing vibrations and stuff like that.
And doing things with shock absorbers and doing things
with seismic dampeners that can be used to make improvements
like in airplane landing gear and robotic devices.
Has unfathomable applications on the planet.
And I know this is a bunch of good data and I'm proud
to be a part of it, 33 and 34's proud to be a part of it.
And thank you guys for letting us do the work onboard,
and I can't wait to see what the future holds
for this study and further studies.
PAYCOM: Wow, I think almost everyone down here
in the room is in tears.
That was amazing, Kevin.
Thank you for all that you have done and Chris has done
and all the crew members before you.
I know this is the third round of InSPACE,
and every time you guys do anything
for it they just get more and more science and better data
and are extremely thankful
for all the hard work you guys put in for us.
FORD: Okay, well I guess that it was a pleasure,
and it was a pleasure training it before flight,
and I remember standing up in the SSTF practicing
with the magnet, and everything we practiced
down there we used up here.
So it was a pleasure.
Congratulations to you guys and we'll talk to you on the ground.
PAYCOM: Excellent.
Thank you very much, Kevin.
We'll see you when you come back.
COMMENTATOR: That again was Commander Kevin Ford talking
with Chrissy Stinson
of the Payload Operations Control Center
at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
That was earlier this morning
after Ford completed the final session
of the InSPACE-3 experiment.
In addition to InSPACE,
Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn was working today
with the Circadian Rhythms experiment which looks
at how astronauts are affected by living
on the space station outside of the regular day/night cycle
that we're used to here on Earth.
And most of the crew members were also either preparing
for the arrival of the SpaceX Dragon next week
by prepacking items that will return to Earth on it
or practicing for its robotic arm assisted berthing
to the Harmony module, or they were packing
or unpacking a Progress
on the Russian side of the space station.
And to round off today's list of activities Chris Hadfield
and Tom Marshburn were each involved in maintenance work.
Hadfield was replacing a rotator belt exchange
on the station's biological experiment laboratory
in the Columbus module
and Marshburn was replacing the common cabin air assembly
on the Destiny laboratory temperature
and humidity control equipment.
That's what's been going on in space this week,
and this is Mission Control Houston.