Good morning and welcome to Mission Control Houston.
We're inside the International Space Station flight control room.
This team is monitoring systems onboard the space station
and following along with activities of the crew.
All the systems are functioning well onboard the spacecraft and the team is not working issues
at this time, just working through the scheduled activities for the day.
The team is being led by flight director Ron Spencer.
He's in the darker shirt at the flight director console.
And next to him is the Capcom or spacecraft communicator, astronaut Kjell Lindgren
who is serving as the interface between the mission control team
and the crew on board the station.
The crew members are working through the midafternoon of their day aboard the complex.
There are six crew members living and working aboard the space station.
Three of them are preparing to return to Earth after their five
and half, five and half month mission.
That include three crew members on the left in this view.
The crew includes station Commander and NASA astronaut Dan Burbank who's seated
and his fellow cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin.
They have been aboard the station since mid- November, then they were joined
by these three crew members in December, astronaut Don Pettit
and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers.
Those three crew members will be remaining aboard the space station until July.
The preparations to return to Earth include getting the Soyuz spacecraft ready
that brought Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin to the station and packing up equipment
that will be returned Earth with the crew members.
The cosmonauts completed an adjustment to one of the seat liners inside the Soyuz
and are finishing up some packing, additional packing today.
Also completed use of the lower body negative pressure device that simulates gravity
by pulling the body's fluids toward the feet
that the cosmonauts used before returning to Earth.
Shkaplerov and Ivanishin did that yesterday
and Kononenko's helping close out that equipment today.
The crew members are also working on preparing for the next visiting vehicle
to the station, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX and NASA agreed that after SpaceX needed to delay from the targeted launch of April 30
that May 7 would be the target launch date that they are working to now.
So the crew members onboard the space station are continuing to prepare
for that vehicle's arrival at the station for its first demonstration flight
of rendezvous and berthing to the complex.
Another cargo vehicle is at the space station called the Automated Transfer Vehicle
from the European Space Agency.
It brought up tons of cargo to the station, and is also being used with its propellant onboard
and thrusters to reboost the space station periodically, and that was done this morning
to prepare for the arrival of that Dragon vehicle and also the next Soyuz and crew
so that the space station is in the correct position in space for those visiting vehicles.
The crew members are also working on some maintenance onboard the space station.
Astronauts Don Pettit and Dan Burbank doing some maintenance of the Waste and Hygiene Compartment
which is one of the toilet facilities aboard the station.
And Burbank participated in an experiment today while he was exercising on the treadmill.
It's the Biomechanical Analysis Of Treadmill Exercise onboard the International
Space Station.
This experiment called Treadmill Kinematics for short is the first rigorous investigation
to quantify the biomechanics of the treadmill exercise conditions during
long-duration spaceflight.
Exercise prescriptions are developed under the assumption that walking and running
in microgravity have the same training affects as during normal gravity.
However if locomotion kinematics and kinetics differ between microgravity normal gravity,
understanding these mechanisms allows the development of better
or appropriate exercise prescriptions to increase the exercise benefits
to the crew members and their health and well-being while living on board the station.
And with the three crew members leaving the station on Friday there's a Change
Of Command ceremony this afternoon where station Commander Dan Burbank will handover command
to cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko to oversee Expedition 31, which officially begins
when the Soyuz undocks from the station Friday.