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After working half a day, the 10 residents of the International Space Station went to bed early on Friday to get some rest before the departure of the three crew members. During the shortened day, the orbiting crew loaded cargo onto the departing Soyuz crew ship and continued its ongoing scientific mission.
NASA cosmonaut Loral O’Hara, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, and Belarusian spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya all go to bed just before their lunch break and enter a sleep period. The trio boarded the Soyuz MS-24 crew ship and are undergoing a sleep change before undocking from the Rasvet module tonight at 11:54 PM EDT. They will return to Earth aboard the Soyuz and land by parachute in Kazakhstan at 3:17 a.m. Saturday (12:17 p.m. Kazakh time). Live coverage of the mission will begin Friday at 8 p.m. on NASA+, NASA TV, the NASA app, YouTube and NASA’s website.
On Friday morning, O’Hara finished packing and completed his biomedical work documenting adaptation to microgravity. Nowitzki continued to transfer cargo aboard the Soyuz and performed final checks on the spacecraft’s systems. Vasilevskaya seemed relaxed during her shift. The trio will wake up a few hours before departure, complete their science assignments and complete loading onto the Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA flight engineers Matthew Dominique and Tracy C. Dyson teamed up for biological research inside the Destiny Laboratory module Friday morning. The pair cleaned habitat and fed mice under observation for a study testing gene therapy to improve eye health in space. NASA flight engineers Mike Barratt and Janet Epps gathered at the Kibo experiment module to remove external research hardware that had been placed in the outdoor space environment. This gear will hold samples exposed to cosmic radiation and extreme temperatures to inform the development of advanced materials and facilitate the commercial space industry.
Cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Alexander Grebenkin began their day by swabbing the station’s surfaces and collecting microbial samples for analysis. Kononenko also prepared salt tablets for the departing crew to ingest to help them adapt to Earth’s gravity. Roscosmos flight engineer Nikolai Chubb also assisted with microbial sampling and loaded protein crystal growth kits aboard the returning Soyuz crew.
For more information on station activities, follow the Space Station blog. @Space Station and @ISS_Research In addition to X, it is also available on the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
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