The Expedition 67 crewmembers aboard the International Space Station spent Tuesday predominantly on research, maintenance, and cargo transfer operations.
Research beneficial to humans on Earth and future crews in space is happening around the clock aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren used a majority of his day to service samples for the Immunosenescence investigation inside the Life Science Glovebox. Results from this study may one day inform treatments for accelerated aging processes commonly observed in microgravity and contribute to countermeasures for normal aging progression.
NASA Flight Engineer Bob Hines inspected the Cold Atom Lab (CAL) Moderate Temperature Loop Jumper to check for leaks. In the CAL, atoms are chilled to temperatures near absolute zero, allowing scientists to observe fundamental behaviors and quantum characteristics not possible on the ground.
Meanwhile, NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Watkins set up hardware and worked on the Space Fibers-3 space manufacturing study. ESA (European Space Agency) Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti took over Space Fiber-3 study runs later in the day.
Early in the day, Cristoforetti swapped samples inside the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, an advanced research device that enables high-temperature thermophysics studies.
A larger contingent of the crew — Cristoforetti, Hines, Lindgren, and Watkins — took turns transferring cargo from the SpaceX CRS-25 Dragon spacecraft.
Maintenance tasks continued in the Russian segment, with Commander Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos checking for leaks in the Zvezda service module and Flight Engineer Denis Matveev refilling freon bottles to maintain the orbiting laboratory’s air-conditioning system. Matveev also set up dosimeters for a long-running radiation detection experiment while cosmonaut Sergey Korsakov worked on the Cardiovector study.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
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