NASA Space Station Status Report Friday, Oct. 31, 2003
International Space Station Expedition 8, Commander and NASA ISS Science Officer Michael Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri wound up their first full workweek in space Friday. Science activities, Station maintenance, exercise and more familiarization with their new home were their focus.
Kaleri spent much of the day setting up, working with and then stowing the Russian PILOT experiment, which looks at psychological and physiological changes in crew performance during long-duration spaceflight. The subject uses two hand controllers to make inputs for the experiment. Foale did inspections of the emergency lighting power supply in the U.S. laboratory Destiny and the Unity Node modules of the station.
The crew’s workweek began with the Monday departure of their Expedition 7 predecessors, Commander Yuri Malenchenko and NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu, along with European Space Agency astronaut Pedro Duque in their ISS Soyuz 6 spacecraft. Duque had come to the Station with the Expedition 8 crew Oct. 18. He flew under a European Space Agency contract with the Russian Aviation and Space Administration. After about eight days of intensive and very successful science activity, he landed with the Expedition 7 crew in Kazakhstan at 8:41 p.m. CST Monday.
That crew is resting and debriefing at the Gagarian Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City near Moscow. Malenchenko and Lu are expected to return to Johnson Space Center in mid-November.
Tuesday was a quiet day for Foale and Kaleri aboard the ISS, with a chance to rest a little after intensive handover activities and moving in with equipment and supplies. They got another half-day off on Wednesday, followed by a training drill on emergencies. Both crewmembers performed maintenance and Station configuration activities.
Thursday was a full day for the crew, including exercise and maintenance and inspection of exercise devices and work with medical experiments. Both crewmembers had an hour of station familiarization, as they do each day early in their increment.
Information on the crew’s activities aboard the Space Station, and instructions on how to view the Space Station from anywhere on Earth, is available at:
Details on Space Station science operations can be found on an Internet site administered by the Payload Operations Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., at
The next International Space Station status report will be issued Friday, Nov. 7, or sooner if events warrant.
