Good day and welcome.
This is the International Space Station flight control room at the Johnson Space Center
in Houston with the Expedition 29 update for Friday October 28.
Flight Director Jerry Jason is leading today's team of flight controllers and serving
as spacecraft communicator or Capcom is Kathy Bolt.
This week the Expedition 29 crew members, Commander Mike Fossum, Satoshi Furukawa
and Sergei Volkov, completed preparations for the departure
of the Progress 42 vehicle including the packing of the vehicle with trash,
testing the Russian segment's Kurs automated rendezvous system for the both the passive side
of the Zvezda service module and the active side of the Progress supply ship
and made preparations to close the hatch between the station and the vehicle.
Progress 42 is set to undock on Saturday at 4:04 a.m. Central time.
With an eye towards undocking and deorbit of Progress 42 the crew today closed the hatch
between the Pirs docking compartment and the vehicle.
That happened this morning at 9:25 a.m. Central time and then they began to conduct leak checks.
Departure of the Progress 42 sets the stage for the arrival of the Progress 45 vehicle,
a supply ship filled with 2.8 tons of food, fuel and supplies.
That supply ship will launch at 5:11 a.m. Sunday, 4:11 p.m. Baikonur time,
and dock to the station on Wednesday Nov.
2 at 6:40 a.m. Central time.
All this can be seen on NASA Television.
Progress 45 and its Soyuz booster rolled to the launch pad today
at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Progress 45 launch will be the first for this configuration of the Soyuz booster rocket
since the third stage engine failure in the flight of August 24.
That failure resulted in the loss of that Progress cargo craft, the station's Progress 44.
Earlier today, Volkov and Furukawa conducted a training session
with the telerobotically operated rendezvous system in the Zvezda service module.
That is the TORU and is the manual system that would be used next week in the unlikely event
that the new Progress 45 cargo craft encounters a problem
with its automated rendezvous system the Kurs for link
up to the Pirs docking compartment on Wednesday.
During the crew's daily earth observations, a time to capture video and photographs
for scientists studying Earth's changes, this week crew was able to videotape Hurricane Rina
as the hurricane swept over Southern Mexico.
At its peak on Wednesday, Rina was near a category three hurricane but weakened Thursday
as it closed in on Cancun and other resorts on Mexico's popular Carribean coast.
Rina is now a tropical depression.
Hurricane Rina also impacted NASA's fifteenth Extreme Environment Mission Operations,
or known as NEEMO.
The six aquanauts of NEEMO crew left the facility where they lived for five days
and returned to the surface of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
in Key Largo on Wednesday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA,
operates the Aquarius undersea laboratory and the agency determined that Rina posed a risk
to the safety of the mission taking place near Key Largo.
In other activities for the week, Fossum worked
on the Binary Colloidal Alloy Test, known as the BCAT experiment.
This experiment lays the foundation for nano-technology and nano-mechanical systems
in space and could apply to ceramics, composites and optical filters here on Earth.
Fossum also performed the Sprint experiment which evaluates the use of high intensity
and low volume exercise training to minimize the loss of muscle,
bone and cardiovascular function in station crew members.
This study will help a scientist plan longer missions
such as travel to an asteroid or to Mars.
Fossum also performed the final VO2Max experiments this week.
This study evaluates oxygen uptake by crew members and relates to the ability
of an astronaut to perform an egress task, the task required to abandon the station,
while wearing a launch and escape space suit.
Japanese space agancy astronaut Satoshi Furukawa completed work on the Gradient Heating Facility
in the Kibo module, closed out his nutrition assessment for the mission
and stored those samples in the station's Minus Eighty Degree Freezer, also known as the MELFI,
set up equipment for additional biorhythm experiments this week, did some maintenance work
on the water on and off valve and installed egress markers around the Columbus module hatch.
During the week crew was interviewed by CNN and MSNBC, talked with school children
at the nineteenth International Space Olympiad and with ZZ Top musician Dusty Hill
and his family and held several ham radio conferences with schools around the world.
Furukawa also responded to questions from students at the Saga Space and Science Museum
and at the Takayama Astronomical Observatory.
In other news this week the Expedition 29/30 crew, U.S. astronaut Dan Burbank
and Russian cosmonauts Anton Skhaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, conducted a news conference
at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, toured Red Square in Moscow
where they laid commemorative flowers at the Kremlin Wall and began preparations to fly
to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday to get ready for their launch
to the station on their Soyuz 28 at 10:14 p.m. on November 13.
For more information on the space station and Expedition 29/30 be sure to look
for the International Space Station home page on the web.
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This is Mission Control Houston.