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Good morning and welcome to today's International Space Station update hour.
Getting a look now inside the flight control room here in Houston Texas, as the Orbit 2 team
of personnel monitor systems on board the orbiting laboratory.
They're being led today by flight director Brian Smith, and seated to his right is Capcom serving
as the communication link between the astronauts up in space and controllers
on the ground here, and that is CJ Sturckow.
Currently on board, the crew of Expedition 30 is hard at work on a number
of biomedical experiments and maintenance work today.
And they're being led by Commander Dan Burbank, a NASA astronaut,
at front left of your screen there.
And standing behind him are Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin.
The three crewmates to the right recently joined the space station just in late December,
and they are, starting on the left, European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers,
Oleg Kononenko in the middle from the Russian space agency
and NASA astronaut Don Pettit all the way over there on the right.
So Commander Burbank, the Expedition 30 commander, started his day, and his major tasks
for the day is continuing the EPIC software upgrades,
EPIC standing for Enhanced Processor and Integrated Communications.
This is a major computer hardware overhaul that's been going on onboard the station,
improving its processing capabilities and reliability.
And then Commander Burbank today is working with the CUCU,
which stands for the COTS UHF Communications Unit.
That will be responsible for communicating with the upcoming commercial vehicles
as they visit the International Space Station.
He's doing a software update by loading the onboard computers with some updated firmware.
That's taking up a good portion of his day.
Along with that, Commander Burbank took some time out to talk
with reporters on the ground in a media event.
He did that alongside with Andre Kuipers and Don Pettit.
And that took place about an hour ago.
Anton Shkaplerov, the Russian cosmonaut, is spending most of his day doing some maintenance
in the Zarya module, also known as the Functional Cargo Block,
doing some filter change outs on some dust collectors
and cleaning some ventilation screens.
He's also participating in the BAR experiment, which is a Russian research method that looks
at the selection and testing of detections and the means for depressurization
of modules onboard the International Space Station.
Alongside him Anatoly Ivanishin is also working on that BAR experiment
and also spent a good portion of his day working in the Zarya module, cleaning some grids
on some fans, and also working on the gas liquid heat exchanger.
He also did some maintenance work on the Elektron,
which is the Russian oxygen generation system on the Russian segment of the space station.
The third Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Kononenko, started his day and spent much
of his time working on the Plasma Crystal 3 experiment, starting that up and executing it.
And that is a very complex study of wave propagation and dispersion
in a dust plasma in microgravity environments.
He's also doing some stowage work with the Progress 45 vehicle and prepping it
for its eventual undocking three weeks from now.
European astronaut Andre Kuipers finished up his Neurospat equipment storage,
and transferred the data from that which was taken yesterday, and is spending much
of his time today setting up and running the Integrated Cardiovascular Ambulatory Monitoring
System, which is a biomedical experiment though looks at cardiac atrophy
and other heart related functions in the astronauts on board the space station.
Rounding out the crew, Don Pettit began his day immediately after wake up,
collecting some more human research samples and storing them in the MELFI,
which is the Minus Eighty Degree Laboratory Freezer,
and also doing some familiarization work with Vessel Imaging, which is an experiment
that looks at the central and peripheral blood vessel wall properties,
which is another biomedical experiment that focuses on how the body changes
over the course of long-duration spaceflight.
The crew will end their day today with a daily planning conference, talking to controllers
on the ground around the world before their scheduled sleep period
at 3:30 p.m. central time.