Crew Training for Two New Cargo Missions Launching This Week

ISS - Expedition 61 Mission patch.

December 3, 2019

The Expedition 61 crew aboard the International Space Station is focusing on a pair of upcoming cargo deliveries after completing a spacewalk on Monday.

SpaceX will launch its 19th Dragon resupply ship aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday at 12:51 p.m. EST from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Dragon is delivering nearly three tons of cargo to the orbiting lab including new science hardware such as the Confined Combustion study, Japan’s Hyperspectral Imager Suite (HISUI) and the AzTechSat-1 cubesat developed by Mexican students.

Image above: Astronaut Luca Parmitano carries the new thermal pump system that was installed on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) during the third spacewalk to upgrade the AMS. Image Credit: NASA.

Commander Luca Parmitano and Flight Engineer Andrew Morgan are training to capture Dragon with the Canadarm2 robotic arm when it arrives Saturday at 5:58 a.m. Robotics controllers will take command of the Canadarm2 and then install Dragon to the Harmony module’s Earth-facing port.

Parmitano and Morgan wrapped up a spacewalk on Monday having replaced a thermal pump system on the station’s cosmic particle detector. They joined fellow astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch at the end of the day Tuesday with a call to Mission Control about their spacewalk experience.

Image above: The Russian Progress 72 cargo craft is pictured shortly before undocking from the Pirs docking compartment of the International Space Station on July 29, 2019. The Progress 74 spacecraft is scheduled to launch Dec. 6, 2019, and dock at the same compartment two days later. Image Credit: NASA.

The space station is also preparing for the arrival of Russia’s Progress 74 (74P) cargo craft set for launch on Friday at 4:34 a.m. The 74P will take a three-day trip to the station and dock Monday Dec. 9 at 5:38 a.m. Cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Skripochka checked out the tele-robotically operated rendezvous unit (TORU) today in the unlikely event they would need to remotely maneuver the 74P to a docking.

Related article:

NASA Television to Air Space Station Cargo Ship Launch, Docking
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-television-to-air-space-station-cargo-ship-launch-docking

Related links:

Expedition 61: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition61/index.html

Confined Combustion: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7886

Hyperspectral Imager Suite (HISUI): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7476

AzTechSat-1: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=8055

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.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

* This article was originally published here