ISS - Expedition 56 Mission patch.
August 29, 2018
International Space Station (ISS). Image Credit: NASA
The six residents aboard the International Space Station today continued exploring how living in space impacts their bodies. The Expedition 56 crew also worked on science hardware and life support gear to ensure the orbital complex is in tip-top shape.
Three astronauts helped doctors understand what is happening to their eyes in the weightless environment of microgravity. One crew member has also worked all week on a pair of European experiments researching what happens during exercise and cognition on long-term missions in space.
Image above: Expedition 56/57 crew members (clockwise from top) Alexander Gerst, Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Sergey Prokopyev pose for a portrait inside the Bigelow Expandable Aerospace Module (BEAM). Image Credit: NASA.
NASA astronauts Ricky Arnold and Serena Auñón-Chancellor joined ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst for more regularly scheduled eye checks today. Arnold led the morning’s retina scans using optical coherence tomography on the other two crewmates. Later in the afternoon, Auñón-Chancellor and Gerst swapped medical roles and peered into each other’s eyes looking out the optic disc and macula with a fundoscope.
Gerst continued working out today in a custom t-shirt in a specialized fabric testing its comfort and thermal relief for the SpaceTex-2 study. He then moved on to the GRIP study exploring how microgravity impacts an astronaut’s cognition when working with tools and interfaces aboard spacecraft.
Image above: Flying over South Africa, seen by EarthCam on ISS, speed: 27'585 Km/h, altitude: 412,99 Km, image captured by Roland Berga (on Earth in Switzerland) from International Space Station (ISS) using ISS-HD Live application with EarthCam's from ISS on August 29, 2018 at 14:45 UTC. Image Credits: Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
Commander Drew Feustel worked on the Materials Science Research Rack today replacing gear inside the refrigerator-sized device that can heat research samples to a temperature of 2500° F. Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Prokopyev spent the afternoon checking the Vozdukh carbon dioxide removal device for leaks in the Russian segment of the station.
Related links:
Expedition 56: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition56/index.html
SpaceTex-2: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7571
GRIP: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=1188
Materials Science Research Rack: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/380893main_MSRR_factsheet.pdf
Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
Best regards, Orbiter.ch
