Good morning and welcome to today's International Space Station update hour.
Getting a look now inside the International Space Station flight control room
as ground controllers monitor the systems on board the floating complex.
Today's team is currently being led by Flight Director Jerry Jason, and joining him at CAPCOM,
it's veteran astronaut Shannon Lucid.
Space station currently orbiting off the southeastern tip of Africa
at an altitude of about 260 statute miles.
It's moving into an orbital sunset, and then on board is the Expedition 30 crew.
Here you can see them now.
In the center is NASA astronaut and Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank,
and to the left is Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.
And on the right joining them is another Russian cosmonaut, Anatoly Ivanishin.
The three docked to the space station back on November 15 in their Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft
and then started their Expedition 30 increment last week after the departure
of Expedition 29 Commander Mike Fossum.
The remaining three members of Expedition 30 will launch on December 21 to join Burbank,
Shkaplerov and Ivanishin and round out the crew of Expedition 30.
Here you can see them with European astronaut Andre Kuipers,
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and NASA astronaut Don Pettit.
Again they will launch December 21 bringing the station back to its six-man crew rotation.
Fairly busy day today on orbit as the crew awakened about midnight Central time,
began their day with routine medical checks, taking body mass measurements
and other muscle measurements and then conducted a daily planning conference with control centers
around the world as they went over the day's activities.
NASA astronaut Dan Burbank started his day off with some camera positioning
as the crew is videotaping a lot of their exercise activities today.
He set up that camera to videotape the ARED,
which stands for the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, just one of the many exercise pieces
of equipment that they have on board the station.
You can see that now.
It functions as a squat bar as the astronauts can do muscle training to maintain bone mass
and muscle strength while in that microgravity environment.
He's also doing some extensive work today on the Combustion Integrated Rack
and the Fluids Integrated Rack, which together make up the Fluids and Combustion Facility,
and he's getting that ready for some upcoming experiment work.
That Combustion Integrated Rack has an optics bench, a combustion chamber and then fuel
and oxidizer controls for performing a variety of combustion experiments in microgravity.
He'll be installing some alignment guides as they prepare that for further utilization.
Following that, he'll be completing a periodic medical exam before moving
on to replace an air filter in the Waste and Hygiene Compartment,
which is one of the crew Waste Management System components.
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And following that, he'll move on to a Treadmill Kinematics experiment,
and this is a rigorous experiment which helps to quantify the biomechanics
of treadmill exercise conditions as these astronauts are
on board for long-duration space flights.
Here you can see the TVIS, which stands for the Treadmill
with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization.
That is a treadmill that the astronauts run on and is insulated so the microgravity experiments
on board the station aren't affected detrimentally from any vibration that is caused
by the astronauts running on those treadmills.
The objective of that experiment today will be
to determine the most beneficial exercise conditions that can be used to maintain
or improve crew member health during their long-duration space flight.
Later on in the day, Commander Burbank will be doing some inspections
of Portable Breathing Apparatuses as well as some work
in the Minus Eighty-degree Laboratory Freezer, or MELFI, which is used to sustain a wide range
of life science experiments by preserving biological samples that are collected
on board the station for later return and analysis back on Earth.
They store these samples at very low temperatures to maintain their integrity.
He'll finish off his day with some final work on that Combustion Integrated Rack,
relocating some gas delivery bottles and then doing some software upgrades on one
of the communication units on board the station.
His crewmate Anton Shkaplerov started his day off by rigging
up his Human Research Facility Holter monitor, which is a battery-powered,
non-invasive electro-cardiogram device that is used to accurately measure the heart rate
of crew members over an extended period of time.
He'll wear this for about 24 hours as part of an experiment to monitor his heart rate.
Following this, he completed a periodic health exam and then got some exercise on that TVIS,
that treadmill that we just showed you previously.
Then moving on through his day, he began the transfer of items from Progress 45,
which launched back on October 30 and docked with the station on November 2.
Progress is that cargo supply vehicle launched on the Russian rockets.
Here you can see it docked, and above it is the Soyuz TMA-22, which brought the crew
to the International Space Station back in November.
His day will be rounded out by changing a dust collector filter cartridge
on the Zvezda service module, which is one of the Russian segment pieces.
And then he will be copying some data from a micro-accelerometer experiment to a laptop
and then getting in one last bit of exercise on that ARED device.
Then the third member of the Expedition 30 crew Anatoly Ivanishin is also doing some dust
collector filter work but on the Zarya module and also getting some exercise in on
that ARED device and doing a monthly inspection of the TVIS.
He did that earlier this morning, checking device cables,
harnesses and the control panel and gyroscopes.
The rest of his day is taken up with some cargo transfer from their Soyuz spacecraft
and then doing some replacement work
with the air purification system in the Zvezda service module.
He'll then do one last update to the station's Inventory Management System,
get some exercise on the TVIS and that'll round out his day.
The crew will have one more daily planning conference with ground stations
around the planet before moving into their pre-sleep period where they will go
over the day's items and do any wrap-up work that's necessary before moving
into their planned sleep period, which will start at 3:30 p.m. Central time today.