April 16, 2004

Allard Beutel 
Headquarters, Washington
(Phone: 202/358-4769) 

RELEASE: SS04-05

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION STATUS REPORT: SS04-05

Work to prepare for the eighth International Space Station crew 
exchange continued on schedule on the Station and at the Baikonur 
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

Expedition 9 Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Mike Fincke, 
and European Space Agency astronaut André Kuipers of the Netherlands 
are at the launch site, ready to go. Their Soyuz spacecraft was mated 
with its rocket booster today, and it will be rolled out to the 
launch site tomorrow. Launch remains on schedule for 11:19 p.m. EDT 
April 18.

Expedition 8 Commander Mike Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri 
spent the week preparing the Station for their replacement crew's 
arrival, packing for the trip home after six months on orbit, and 
wrapping up work on several experiments.

Foale and Kaleri supported a test of their Soyuz return vehicle's 
maneuvering jets, which verified all thrusters are ready to support 
undocking, deorbit burn and re-entry. Russian flight controllers 
monitoring the test reported seeing evidence of the same helium leak 
initially seen in telemetry during the Expedition 8 crew's launch 
last October. Today, Russian controllers conducted an additional test 
of the helium system used to pressurize the Soyuz fuel tanks to 
gather additional data on the leak rate, which is believed to have 
increased some over previous observations. Russian flight controllers 
are continuing to evaluate data from the tests. However, no impact to 
the normal Soyuz descent and landing is anticipated.

Kaleri also spent several hours in the Soyuz descent module changing 
out a pair of ventilation and humidity removal fans. He replaced the 
fans with a spare stored in the Zarya control module and verified 
that they are working well. The old fan package, which has one 
working fan, will be retained on the Station as a spare.

Foale conducted a final session with the Hand Posture Analyzer 
experiment on Thursday, after wrapping up work with the Pore 
Formation of Materials Investigations (PFMI) and the Foot/Ground 
Reaction Forces during Space Flight (FOOT) experiments last week. The 
Hand Posture Analyzer is an Italian investigation looking at how 
humans use their arms, wrists and hands for reaching and grasping in 
microgravity. 

Final sessions with the RENAL kidney stone experiment were also 
conducted today.

Foale also spent several hours Wednesday setting up and activating 
ESA's HEAT experiment in the Microgravity Science Glovebox for his 
visiting colleague Kuipers. HEAT will evaluate whether a grooved heat 
pipe can be used effectively in the weightlessness of space to 
transfer heat from hot surfaces, such as electronic devices, to cold 
surfaces, such as radiator panels. 

Otherwise, the crew conducted a series of routine, periodic 
fitness-evaluation tests on themselves, and collected samples of a 
variety of environmental factors inside the Station for return to 
Earth and evaluation by scientists on the ground, when they return 
home.

The Expedition 9 crew is scheduled to rendezvous and dock with the 
Station at 1:04 a.m. EDT Wednesday. Hatches will open and the five 
spacefarers will greet each other at 2:25 a.m. that day, beginning 
more than a week of joint operations.

Information on the crew's activities aboard the Space Station and 
future launch dates, as well as Station sighting opportunities from 
anywhere on the Earth, is available on the Internet at:



http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/

NASA's payload operations team at the Marshall Space Flight Center, 
Ala., coordinates science activities on Space Station. Details on 
Station science operations can be found at:



http://scipoc.msfc.nasa.gov

	
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