Good day and welcome to Mission Control Houston where a team of flight controllers is watching
over the activities of the Expedition 29 crew aboard the International Space Station.
Commander Mike Fossum and Flight Engineer Satoshi Furukawa of Japan and Sergei Volkov
of Russia are continuing their activities of the day which focus
on research aboard the International Space Station.
Today's team here at mission control is being led by Flight Director Derek Hassmann
with Ricky Arnold, the astronaut in charge of communicating by voice
with the crew on board the space station.
In addition to what working with various pieces of experiment work today,
the crew is also working on some general house cleaning activities,
gathering trash to be stowed into the 42 progress vehicle that's going to be undocking
from the International Space Station coming up later in October and in anticipation
of the arrival of the next progress spacecraft that is scheduled launch on the 30th of October.
That undocking of Progress 42 is scheduled for Saturday, October the 29th
and will clear the Pirs docking compartment of the arrival
of the next Progress resupply vehicle.
In addition today, the crew worked with mission control to do some preparations for a bit
of a combination reboost and debris avoidance maneuver.
There's a small about four inch or ten centimeter piece of Russian rocket body
that was launched in 1991 that is coming a little bit too close
to the International Space Station for comfort.
There was a reboost activity planned for next week to prepare
for the arrival of the Progress 45 spacecraft.
Another such maneuver is planned for the 19th or 20th of October.
But because of the proximity of the debris and the upcoming reboost maneuver the team here
in mission control Houston coordinated with the team in the Moscow control center to conduct
that reboost maneuver a little early to take care of two birds with one stone,
reboosting the space station partially to get ready for that upcoming progress arrival
and also getting it out of the way of this piece of debris that's being tracked.
The Zvezda service module engines will be fired for about two minutes and 49 seconds today
at 11:45 CT, and that'll a reboost the space station by 4.7 kilometers or about 2.9 miles,
putting it to an increased altitude and getting ready
for that upcoming arrival of the Progress 45 spacecraft.
Again this is a part of a small piece of an old Russian rocket body that was launched
in December of 1991 and the team here on the ground in Houston and in Moscow worked together
to come together with this plan as the tracking is showing that it might come
within a close proximity of the space station.
As mentioned, they'll research this and of course some
of the preparations the crew is making on that are to close the shutters
on the exterior windows for the space station and the folks
in mission control are feathering the solar arrays to make sure they're
in the proper position for the firing of the Zvezda service module thrusters.
Among the different research facilities being worked
on today were the Combustion Integrated Rack and the Fluids Integrated Rack
and the Commercial Bioprocessing System.
Those various experiments continuing the almost 40 hours a week of research is going
on every week aboard the International Space Station as the assembly sequence is completed
and the full utilization of the space station is underway.
We do have a video clip of that Mike Fossum sent down early this morning of his work
with the Fluids Integrated Rack which looks at the how fluids behave in micro-gravity.
We will take a quick look at that clip now.
I wanted to make sure you guys have video.
Yes we do Mike, we're on downlink one.
Outstanding.
Well I wanted to welcome everybody aboard the International Space Station today.
I have the Fluids Integrated Rack open right behind me.
I'm going to dig in here and do a little bit of work this morning.
First is changing out a camera to give us or giving us a better view and then I'm going
to be changing out some samples so we can get this rack up and running in the next few days.
So welcome aboard, glad to have you watching over my shoulder.
And so the Fluids Integrated Rack is one of the two powered racks that compose Fluids
and Combustion Facility on the International Space Station.
The other the rack is called the Combustion Integrated Rack.
This combined set of experiment platforms provides the opportunity to look
at unique challenges of working with both fluids, flame or combustion in microgravity.
The Fluids Integrated Rack which we're looking
at here features a large user configurable volume for experiments and it kind
of resembles a laboratory optics bench.
The experiment can be built on the bench from different components
and the data acquisition and control sensor interfaces.
There is also a laser and white light sources and advanced imaging capabilities, power cooling
and other resources needed for a variety of different experiments.
It's built to accommodate a wide range of experiments and it focuses
on the complex fluids, interfacial phenomena, dynamics in instabilities of fluids,
multi-phase flows and changes in phase of fluids.
The investigations in the system range from fundamental research to technology development
and support of exploration missions for NASA.