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This is Mission Control Houston.
This week has been a very busy week for the Expedition 34 crew
with a wide range of activities being completed by the crew.
One of the biggest activities
of this week was being the undocking and docking
of the Progress spacecraft.
That swap kicked off last weekend with the undocking
of the Progress 48 spacecraft, which undocked
from the space station last Saturday.
With its successful deorbit completed,
the Progress 50 spacecraft launched Monday
at 8:41 AM central time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
in Kazakhstan to send the Progress on an accelerated 4-
orbit six-hour rendezvous to the International Space Station.
That single day launch-to-docking went
by the book with the cargo craft docking
to the orbiting complex's Pirs docking compartment
on Monday afternoon, bringing with it nearly 3 tons
of supplies and equipment.
The crew performed leak checks
and opened the hatches Tuesday morning,
which kicked off the extensive unpacking
that has continued throughout the week.
Ultimately the crew will transfer more than 1,700 pounds
of propellant, a hundred pounds of air and oxygen,
900 pounds of water and 3,000 pounds
of supply items and equipment.
While the cosmonauts primarily led
that unpacking effort their US counterparts have spent a fair
amount of time this week with prepack activities
for the next visiting vehicle, the Dragon spacecraft.
That vehicle is now planned to visit the station in early March
and the team is already making preparations for that visit.
Astronaut Tom Marshburn and Chris Hadfield spent a lot
of time gathering supplies and equipment that will be loaded
onto that vehicle which has the added capability being able
to return supplies and equipment samples to Earth.
In addition with Commander Kevin Ford the three spent time this
week performing refresher training
on the robotic arm operations, performing numerous sessions
of onboard computer-based simulation and working
with the ground robotic specialist to coordinate
and fine tune the procedures for that upcoming spacecraft,
which will need the robotic arm to retrieve
and dock it to the space station.
Other activities this week included continued extensive
work by Kevin Ford on maintenance
of the Internal Thermal Control System, checkouts with Robonaut,
the onboard humanoid robot, and experiments.
Maintenance work with the Combustion Integration Rack
experiment facility as well as Water Processing Assembly
and laptop swaps in the Columbus module were also completed.
Experiment work this week was on a variety
of experiments including the Binary Colloidal Alloy [Test]
study and InSPACE, a study of the behavior
of physical properties of fluids in response to magnetic fields
in space which may ultimately lead to improvements
in the ability to design structures,
such as buildings and bridges on Earth.
The International Space Station is an official US national
laboratory supporting a wide range
of active experiments at any time.
For a complete rundown of all the experiments and facilities
on the space station, you can visit our webpage dedicated
to the research
on the International Space Station website
at www.nasa.gov/station and click
on the research tab on the upper left.
The crew's weekend will include a few routine housekeeping tasks
and family conferences but otherwise off-duty time
after the busy workweek.
This is Mission Control Houston