Expedition 35 Starts a Busy First Week

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Expedition 35 Starts a Busy First Week

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Expedition 35 officially began when the Soyuz TMA-06M undocked Friday at 8:43 p.m. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is now station commander staying behind with Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko. They will be joined by a new trio of Expedition 35 crew mates when Flight Engineers Pavel Vinogradov, Chris Cassidy and Alexander Misurkin launch Thursday, March 28, and dock to the station about six hours later.

› Watch Expedition 35 trio departure preparations

The station residents are back to work this week on science and maintenance. They are working on ongoing experiments as well as new experiments brought up on the Dragon commercial spacecraft. The crew is also working to ensure the systems in the station’s U.S. and Russian segments are in a safe operating condition.

Hadfield worked throughout the day on materials science experiments and gear. He swapped out a laptop in the Materials Science and Research Rack, charged its battery and loaded new software. He transferred data and inserted a new sample processing unit for the Coarsening of Solids in Liquids Mixtures experiment. He also set up a camera to photograph crystal samples for the Binary Colloidal Alloy Test.

› Read more about the Materials Science and Research Rack

› Read more about Coarsening of Solids in Liquids Mixtures

› Read more about Binary Colloidal Alloy Test

Marshburn was in the Kibo laboratory module working on a couple of Japanese experiments throughout Monday. He conducted some preparatory work for the Marangoni Inside study which observes surface tension produced by temperature differences occurring at a liquid/gas interface. He removed a sample cartridge from the Hicari experiment that seeks to create high quality crystals to develop efficient solar cells and semiconductor electronics.

Read more about Marangoni: › Exp, › UVP

› Read more about Hicari

Romanenko started his day rebooting laptop computers in the Russian segment. He later removed an Automated Transfer Vehicle hardware panel inside the Zvezda service module. He then replaced filters and updated the station’s Inventory Management System. On Monday, March 25, the SpaceX-2 Dragon spacecraft loaded with returnable cargo will be released from the space station for a splashdown and recovery in the Pacific Ocean. The Canadarm2 will release the commercial cargo craft about 7:53 a.m. for an automated splashdown about 1:35 p.m.

Expedition 34 officially landed at 11:06 p.m. EDT Friday or 9:06 a.m. Kazakhstan time Saturday inside the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft. The trio of Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin landed in dismal weather conditions in the Kazakhs steppe. They were recovered by a reduced landing support team with most of the recovery helicopters grounded at their staging areas due to low visibility at the landing site.

› Watch the Expedition 34 landing and recovery

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