ISS - Expedition 64 Mission patch.
March 16, 2021
In between ongoing investigations to further our understanding of how spaceflight impacts the human body, the Expedition 64 crew devoted time to brushing up on procedures to relocate the Soyuz MS-17 to another port on the International Space Station — a reconfiguration maneuver that hasn’t been done since August 2019.
Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, both of Roscosmos, as well as NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, reviewed the timeline and operations plan to accomplish the port relocation, which will free up the Rassvet port for the docking of Soyuz MS-18. That vehicle will carry three Expedition 65 crew members to the orbiting laboratory after launch April 9 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan: NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos’ Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov. Live coverage of the Soyuz flight around the space station may be seen beginning at 12:15 p.m. EDT Friday, March 19, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.
Image above: The Soyuz MS-17 crew ship that carried the Expedition 64 crew to the International Space Station on Oct. 14, 2020, is pictured Oct. 18, 2020, docked to the Rassvet module. Image Credit: NASA.
Later, Rubins joined fellow NASA astronaut Victor Glover in the Kibo laboratory module to field questions from students during a Senate Youth Forum event involving multiple members of Congress, allowing participants a glimpse of some of the cutting-edge research being performed around the clock in space.
Glover also teamed up with crewmates Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker to work with Myotones, a study that observes how long-term exposure to a spaceflight environment influences the biochemical properties of muscles — qualities like muscle tone, stiffness, and elasticity.
HTV-9 external pallet released from the International Space Station
Soichi Noguchi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), meanwhile, worked to unfreeze samples as part of the Ribosome Profiling investigation. This experiment uses a state-of-the-art technique to decode gravity’s role in gene expression, and will one day help scientists understand how space impacts age-related changes in astronauts.
Related links:
Expedition 64: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition64/index.html
NASA Television: https://www.nasa.gov/live
Kibo laboratory module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/japan-kibo-laboratory
Myotones: https://iss-science.jsc.nasa.gov/details/7573
Ribosome Profiling investigation: https://iss-science.jsc.nasa.gov/details/7985
Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Image (mentioned), Video, Text, Credits: NASA/Catherine Williams/NASA TV/SciNews.
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