International Space Station Status Report #05-38, 22-07-2005

International Space Station Status Report #05-38

3 p.m. CDT, Friday, July 22, 2005

Expedition 11 Crew

Expedition 11 Commander Sergei Krikalev and Flight Engineer John Phillips
got ready this week for two upcoming Space Shuttle launches and a Space
Station spacewalk, and supported two different continuing science
investigations.

With the 100th day of their six-month mission coming up on July 23, the
International Space Station crew members reported in a Friday interview that
they are eagerly anticipating Discovery's arrival next week with tons of
supplies, a new experiment rack and a replacement Control Moment Gyroscope
(CMG) for the Station's navigation system. They have been packing equipment
that will return home on Discovery to free up much-needed space inside the
outpost, and this week they began packing for the STS-121 mission of
Atlantis that will follow.

Earlier in the week, Krikalev and Phillips made a short foray in their Soyuz
return craft, moving it from the Pirs docking port, which doubles as an
airlock for Russian-suit spacewalks, to a Zarya docking port to configure
the Station for an August excursion. The pair undocked from Pirs at 5:38
a.m. CDT Tuesday, and smoothly redocked at the nearby Zarya control module's
Earth-facing port at 6:08 a.m. CDT.

The post-Discovery spacewalk by Krikalev and Phillips will involve retrieval
of materials exposure experiments, installation of a television camera for
the European Space Agency's cargo-carrying Automated Transfer Vehicle and
relocation of a cargo boom adapter.

Phillips supported research this week by setting up a digital still photo
camera in the Destiny Laboratory's window for the continuing EarthKAM
student experiment. After the crew mounts the window camera, middle school
students research requests for specific geographic targets, and with the
help of university students, uplink commands to a laptop computer connected
to the camera. The camera takes pictures at specified times, and the images
are downlinked to the ground to be posted on the Internet for the public and
participating classrooms around the world. The current EarthKAM run has
taken photo requests from 43 schools.

Krikalev spent time setting up and activating a plasma crystal experiment so
that it could conduct automated experiments using radio frequency waves to
affect crystal formation in microgravity. The experiment is a joint project
of the Russian and German space agencies.

Information on the crew's activities aboard the Space Station, future launch
dates, as well as Station sighting opportunities from anywhere on the Earth,
is available on the Internet at:
http://www.nasa.gov/station

The next Station status report will be issued after STS-114, or on Friday,
July 29, if there is a launch delay.

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Jacques :-)

www.spacepatches.info