Good morning and welcome to today's International Space Station update.
The crew awoke today at about midnight, central time, and started off the day
with some morning prep work and then a daily planning conference
where they discussed the day's activities with ground controllers all across the globe.
Commander Dan Burbank, his major activity for the day is updating the CUCU, which is C U C U,
which stands for the COTS UHF Communications Unit,
COTS being the Commercial Orbital Transport Services.
And then the updates he's doing are in anticipation
of the launch of the SpaceX Dragon capsule.
This update will allow that comm unit to provide station to Dragon communications
for any commands and telemetry reading.
Those plan to take up about four hours of his day
and also included a checkout of the COTS command panel.
Other work that he's doing today included the Integrated Cardiovascular ambulatory monitoring
setup, which he did some of that yesterday.
And that experiment determines just how much cardiac atrophy occurs during a spaceflight
and how fast it develops.
And then this is due to the micro-gravity environment
that the astronauts are subject to during their expeditions.
And that will study whether this atrophy causes any problems with the heart's pumping
or its electrical function, and how both the atrophy in any associated changes develop.
And for that today's he's changing out the data recording card and a battery
to continue another twenty four hour reporting period.
Later in the day he got some exercise in the CEVIS and the ARED devices,
the CEVIS being a stationary cycle and the ARED being more of a standard muscle workout system
that the astronauts can do things like squats and arm workouts to help fight
that bone density loss and muscle atrophy as they float around in micro-gravity environment
of the International Space Station.
Getting a look now here at the ARED device,
again that stands for the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device
and that helps the astronauts again keep those muscles and bones strong while they're
on board station for extended periods of time.
Later on in the day Commander Burbank will do some more work
with the Combustion Integrated Rack alignment guides.
Combustion Integrated Rack is an experiment that provides an optics bench
and a combustion chamber and a number of cameras and oxidizer controls,
and it's used to perform combustion experiments
in the unique micro-gravity environment onboard the station.
Later in the day he was scheduled to do some journals entry which is an ongoing experiment
that studies any isolation or confinement stressors of space flight
that can affect crew health and morale, but due to some delays this morning
with the CUCU update, he may not be able to get to that in time.
His last scheduled activity for the day will be to close some shutters on the windows
of the US segment in preparation for a planned reboost.
Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov started his day with some work on the MOLNIYA experiment,
transferring some data and tagging up with ground specialists.
This is an investigation of any optical emissions in the Earth's atmosphere
and ionosphere associated with any thunderstorm or seismic activity.
There you can see Anton Shkaplerov the Russian cosmonaut and flight engineer of Expedition 30.
Later he spent a few hours doing some more cargo transfer from the 45 Progress vehicle
which docked back on November 2, and in conjunction with that doing some updates
to the station's inventory management system making sure everything is in place.
Later he did some, got a work out in on the TEVIS, which is one of you treadmills
on board the station before returning to that MOLNIYA experiment to perform setup work
and downlink work to renew data collection.
The last experiment he's scheduled to interact with is the Interactions experiment
which is a setup of weekly questionnaires that are used to identify any interpersonal factors
that may impact the performance of the crew
and their ground support personnel during their expeditions.
Rounding out the crew of Expedition 30 is Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin
who earlier this morning ended a twenty four-hour electrocardiogram experiment
that he began yesterday and that was studying his heart functions over a day's time.
That experiment part of the PNEUMOCARD collection of experiments
which is a Russian investigation that helps understand any of the mechanisms
of adapting the cardio respiratory system to the micro-gravity space flight conditions.
Studying the synchronization of heart activity and breathing factors as well
as the cardio respiratory system's control processes.
He got some exercise time in on the ARED and TEVIS devices, the TEVIS being one
of the treadmills on board the station,
before doing some routine replacement work on the Russian toilet system.
He'll then take a few hours to continue transferring items
from the crew's Soyuz vehicle the TMA-22, and then checking out everything
in the station's inventory management system.
Crew will then have a second daily planning conference at the end of the day before moving
into their pre-sleep period where they perform any wrap up work or get-ahead work
for the day's activities tomorrow before moving
into their sleep period at 3:30 p.m. central time.
After the crew goes to sleep a reboost is currently scheduled
to take place at 5:11 p m central time.
And this will be in order to position the station in its proper attitude for the launch
and docking of the Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft planned to launch on December 21
which will carry the remainder of the Expedition 30 crew, rounding out that Expedition
and bringing the station back up to a six-person rotation.