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Good morning and welcome to Mission Control Houston
and the International Space Station update.
We're joining the International Space Station flight control team
in the space station flight control room here at the mission control center in Houston,
where the Orbit 2 team is on console at this time,
led again today by flight director Paul Dye with astronaut Shannon Lucid in the Capcom seat.
Space station's currently out of the range of communication with the team here on the ground,
so many of the team members are taking advantage of a quick break during that time.
But although we can't communicate
with them right now onboard the International Space Station,
the Expedition30 crew has been awake since midnight central time.
They're now more than halfway through their day, which is full experiment work and maintenance.
US Commander Dan Burbank as well as Russian Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov
and Anatoly Ivanishin are currently orbiting about 260 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean,
just having passed the southernmost portion of this orbit around the Earth,
now heading southeast toward the coast of Africa.
Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin launched to the station
in their Russian Soyuz TMA-22 vehicle on November 13,
and docked to the space station on November 15.
So they're working on their 25th day in space and their 23rd day on space station.
They've been alone on station since the Expedition 29 crew members left on November 21,
but they'll soon be joined by three new crewmates to replace those that left.
Flight Engineers Don Pettit, Oleg Kononenko and Andre Kuipers departed
from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia near Moscow today to head
to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where their Soyuz TMA-03M is being prepared
for the December 21 launch the space station.
Scheduled to go to the station and join Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin on December 23.
To get ready for that, the engines of the station's Zvezda service module are
to be fired tomorrow at 1:50 PM central time to raise the station to the correct altitude
to meet up with Soyuz on the 23rd.
They'll be fired for one minute and 22 seconds and raise the station's altitude by 2.8 miles
at the perigee, or lowest point in its orbit.
That's going to put the station in a 259.9 x 231.5 mile orbit.
Inside the station today Commander Burbank has been working diligently
with the Amine Swingbed prototype.
He was scheduled spent a great deal of time
on that today putting it together and checking it out.
That system's meant to test out in space technology that could eventually be used
to scrub carbon dioxide from the air inside the new Orion multi crew vehicle.
However it is a very complex piece of equipment,
and Burbank ran into some problems putting it together.
Said it's actually been put away for now while the team here
on the ground considers what the next steps in space should be.
Meanwhile on the Russian side of the station Flight Engineers Ivanishin
and Shkaplerov each had a few experiments and activities they were scheduled work on.
Shkaplerov was going to be spending some time today working with the Typology experiment,
which looks at how living in space affects astronauts' mental state,
and also the Coulomb Crystal experiment.
And Ivanishin meanwhile was scheduled to spend some time unpacking the Progress 45 vehicle
and the Soyuz that he and his crewmates arrived on, and also working with the Seiner experiment,
which is a test of information support procedures that is used to gain data
for the scientific community and fishing operations performed
at the state fish fishery committee and ships in the world's oceans.
That's what's going on today in space, and this is Mission Control Houston