[radio chatter]
This is Mission Control, Houston.
Good morning to everyone and welcome
to the International Space Station flight control room here
at the Johnson Space Center.
This is today's ISS update.
It is Monday, June 11, 2012.
The crew on board the space station is busy working
on a series of experiments and routine maintenance work.
The team down here on Earth is being led today
by Flight Director Royce Renfrew.
He is standing up there.
He is joined by the Capcom today
which is veteran astronaut Sandy Magnus.
She herself lived on board the space station complex,
also flew the last space shuttle mission STS 135.
Today is her actual final day of training as a Capcom,
so we'll be seeing her face
and hearing her voice a bit more here inside mission control.
Today, the three Russian crew members including Oleg
Kononenko, Gennady Padalka
and Sergei Revin are spending some time observing Russia Day,
which is a holiday for our colleagues in Russia
that recognizes national pride and social
and economic achievements throughout history.
Of course, there are many from that nation,
the space program not the least
of which gets recognized on Russia Day.
Joe Acaba, one of the flight engineers on board,
is performing a quarterly inspection of one
of the onboard treadmills.
Those treadmills are an important piece of equipment
for the crew to use each and every day.
It requires some upkeep up there on board
so he is taking care of that today.
He is also doing some work
on what is called the Combustion Integrated Rack,
or the CIR. This rack, including its twin
which is the Fluid Integrated Rack, are large pieces
of experiment hardware on board the space station.
The Combustion Integrated Rack is used
to perform combustion experiments just
like its name sounds up in space.
It's fairly large.
It has a 100-liter combustion chamber,
which you see the majority of there,
and five different cameras that the crew
and also the ground teams can use
to see the different experiments that are inside.
The crew actually helps maintain the racks and the fuel bottles
which are mounted down below that provide the fuel
to burn inside the rack, but the actual experiments themselves
are run from the ground.
So they're remote controlled.
Acaba also spending some time moving cargo
out of the Automated Transfer Vehicle that is still docked
with the station back there on the Russian segment.
That ATV, which is called the "Amaldi," came up back in March
and docked with the International Space Station.
You see this very large spacecraft here
with its x-wing solar arrays
which set it apart from other vehicles.
It's going to spend the next several months attached
to the station.
It brought up more than seven tons of supplies for the crew,
so they've been spending the last several weeks
and couple months unloading it.
They will continue this throughout the summer,
and then pack it full of trash and other items
that they don't need anymore.
And ultimately, coming up in August, September or at the end
of the summer, that ATV will be undocked from the station
and sent into a destructive reentry
in the Earth's atmosphere.
This ATV is the third of the ATV's that have come
up to the station complex.
Andre Kuipers is working on some routine work inside Kibo
on the ventilation system.
This is some routine maintenance work that he and the rest
of the crew have
to do throughout the entire space station complex
on the different modules there.
He will take care of that and take some photos of his work
and send that down to the ground team so they can verify
that everything has been done according to plan.
He's also working on what's called the Integrated
Cardiovascular ambulatory monitoring experiment.
Obviously the human body is one of the main focuses
of station experiments to find out what happens to us as we're
up in space for extended periods of time.
These lessons learned from the space station will be important
as humans venture beyond low Earth orbit to destinations
such as an asteroid or back to the moon or the moons of Mars
or whatever it may be.
This particular experiment has the crew member wear a device
that monitors blood pressure for 24 hours.
After that takes place, then they basically do the same thing
with an EKG machine
which records electrocardiogram signals from heart.
All this is put together to find out exactly what happens to us
up there on board the space station.
And finally Don Pettit is working
on an experiment called BASS.
It stands for Burning And Suppression
of Solids up in space.
It's an interesting experiment,
sort of like the Combustion Integrated Rack.
It takes a look at how things burn in space.
Fire behaves extremely differently inside the
weightless environment of the International Space Station.
What BASS actually takes a look
at is how do you extinguish fires up in space
because the accepted theory is that here
on Earth the way a flame behaves,
that you aim the fire suppression or the extinguisher
down at the base of the flame which is
where the flame is basically created and also serves
as its stabilization point.
But that may be a bit different up in space,
so this BASS experiment takes a look at that,
how the fire behaves and how someone one would put
that out up there in space.