ISS - Expedition 61 Mission patch / EVA - Extra Vehicular Activities patch.
October 21, 2019
The Expedition 61 crew is cleaning up today after the first all-woman spacewalk at the International Space Station. Eye checks and lab maintenance also kicked off the workweek as two cosmonauts took the day off.
NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir are stowing the tools they used on Friday during a seven-hour and 17-minute spacewalk. Koch is also packing a failed power controller for return to Earth after replacing it with spare unit during last week’s excursion. Meir recorded how she felt about the first spacewalk of her career for a 3-D virtual reality film.
Image above: Spacewalkers Christina Koch and Jessica Meir are pictured during the first all-woman spacewalk that lasted seven hours and 17 minutes. Image Credit: NASA.
During the afternoon, Meir joined Commander Luca Parmitano and fellow Flight Engineer Andrew Morgan for eye exams. The trio took turns peering into Optical Coherence Tomography hardware so ground doctors could check the astronauts’ retinas.
Morgan partnered with Koch in the morning transferring hardware from the Permanent Multipurpose Module to Japan’s HTV-8 resupply ship. The HTV-8 will complete its 34-day cargo mission at the station’s Harmony module on Nov. 1.
Image above: NASA astronaut Christina Koch conducts her fourth spacewalk at the International Space Station. She and fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir (out of frame) ventured into the vacuum of space for seven hours and 17 minutes on Oct. 18, 2019, to swap a failed battery charge-discharge unit (BCDU) with a spare during the first all-woman spacewalk. The BCDU regulates the charge to the batteries that collect and distribute solar power to the orbiting laboratory’s systems. Image Credit: NASA.
Cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Skripochka are relaxing today after a busy week of space research and maintenance over the station’s Russian segment. The veteran space duo are each on their third long-duration mission at the orbiting lab.
Related links:
Expedition 61: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition61/index.html
3-D virtual reality film: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7877
Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/permanent-multipurpose-module
HTV-8 resupply ship: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2019/09/28/u-s-astronauts-captured-japanese-cargo-spacecraft-at-712-a-m-edt/
Harmony module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/harmony
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/Yvette Smith.
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