The Expedition 70 team ends the week primarily focused on two upcoming spacewalks. While there is still time for research and cargo operations aboard the International Space Station (ISS), AxiomSpace has announced future private mission dates. NASA astronauts Loral O'Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli spent Friday afternoon organizing the tools they will use during a planned spacewalk on October 30.
The picture shows the Canadarm2 robotic arm extending from the International Space Station and operating 260 miles above the Pacific Ocean near the Aleutian Islands. Image source: NASA
The pair will exit Discovery's airlock and spend six and a half hours removing electronics and replacing the orbiting laboratory's solar array hardware. Before preparations for the spacewalk began, O'Hara checked the hardware on board the human research facility, recorded her daily food and medication intake, and passed medical data down to researchers on the ground. Mogbeli begins the day with blood pressure measurements, continues with life support maintenance, and then changes to a vest and headband equipped with sensors to comfortably measure his health throughout the day.
Pictured here is Northrop Grumman's Cygnus space cargo spacecraft and its cymbal-shaped UltraFlex solar array connected to the Earth-facing port of the International Space Station's Unity module. When this photo was taken on September 1, 2023, the International Space Station was soaring 261 miles above the storm in the Atlantic Ocean. Image source: NASA
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa studies the movements he will use to operate the Canadarm2 robotic arm when O'Hara and Moghbeli conduct a maintenance spacewalk later this month. He also filled the Cygnus space cargo spacecraft with trash and discarded gear, then stacked the cargo for loading and return on the next SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, scheduled to launch on November 5.
ESA's Commander Andreas Mogensen continues to test a specialized camera that can capture images at 100,000 frames per second. Working in the cupola, he pointed his camera at Earth, photographing thunderstorms and their electrical activity to advance knowledge of the atmosphere and facilitate future space applications.
Andreas Mogensen, commander of Expedition 70 from the European Space Agency (ESA), assists NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli in trying on a spacesuit and testing components of the spacesuit on the International Space Station's exploration airlock in preparation for an upcoming spacewalk. Image source: NASA
Astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub spent all day Friday preparing for the spacewalk scheduled for October 25. Flight engineers donned Oran spacesuits inside the Poisk airlock and practiced spacewalks for next week. During the spacewalk, the pair of cosmonauts from Roscosmos will install scientific hardware, deploy a small satellite and inspect a backup radiator that is leaking coolant. Flight engineer Konstantin Borisov worked with them to assist the astronauts in donning and doffing their space suits and to check their spacewalk procedures.
The NASA, AxiomSpace and SpaceX team aims to launch the private astronaut mission Axiom Mission 4 to the orbiting laboratory by October 2024. The next private astronaut mission, Axiom Mission 3, led again by former NASA astronaut and commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, is scheduled to launch from Florida no earlier than January 2024.