NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Station Crew Prepares for Arrivals

Image above: Astronaut Sandra Magnus, Expedition 18 flight engineer, poses for a photo with food which she prepared at the galley in the Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Science experiments and preparations for new arrivals occupied the crew’s time Tuesday aboard the International Space Station.

Commander Mike Fincke spent much of the early part of his day working with the Shear History Extensional Rheology Experiment, investigating the effect of rotation on complex fluids stretched in microgravity. Understanding this effect is important for the development of containerless processing, which is an important operation for the fabrication of parts during long-duration space missions.

Flight Engineer Yury Lonchakov focused on a new Russian educational payload that demonstrates physics in microgravity. Lonchakov photographed several sessions with the student-designed experiment.

In the U.S. Destiny laboratory of the station, Flight Engineer Sandy Magnus set up the General Laboratory Active Cryogenic ISS Experiment Refrigerator, or GLACIER, a water cooled cryogenic freezer that can store scientific samples between 4 and minus 185 C (39 and minus 301 F).

Magnus and Fincke talked with flight about pre-packing of items for return to Earth on space shuttle Discovery on the STS-119 mission next month.

To prepare for the arrival of Discovery as well as the ISS Progress 32 cargo craft in February, flight controllers are planning a reboost of the station Wednesday. At 1:06 p.m. EST, the Zvezda service module engines will be fired for 2 minutes, 22 seconds to place the complex at the ideal altitude for docking.

Meanwhile, European Space Agency flight controllers in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, have begun troubleshooting a balky data management system in the Columbus module. The problem has prevented commanding to Columbus systems and experiments.

› Read more about Expedition 18
› View crew timelines

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2009 International Space Station Calendar

As part of NASA's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the International Space Station, the agency is offering a special 2009 calendar to teachers, as well as the general public.

The calendar contains photographs taken from the space station and highlights historic NASA milestones and fun facts about the international construction project of unprecedented complexity that began in 1998.

› Download calendar (5.3 Mb PDF)