The three newest International Space Station crew members are getting used to life in space after a near three-and-a-half hour ride to the orbital lab late last week. There will be 10 people in space until Friday night when another three-person crew returns to Earth.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov have completed their first weekend orbiting Earth on the space station. The trio is getting up to speed with station systems following its arrival on Friday at 7:05 a.m. EDT. The new Expedition 65 crew launched earlier that day from Kazakhstan at 3:42 a.m. aboard the Soyuz MS-18 crew ship.
Meanwhile, another crew onboard the space station since October 14 is now focusing on its departure this Friday at 9:34 p.m. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins will parachute to Earth inside the Soyuz MS-17 crew ship alongside Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. They will land in Kazakhstan at 12:56 a.m. Saturday, completing a 185-day space research mission.
The other four station astronauts, representing the crew of SpaceX Crew-1, joined their six crewmates during Monday afternoon and reviewed emergency roles and responsibilities. Astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi joined the rest of the Expedition 64 crew and practiced safety procedures, communication protocols, and evacuation drills.
Some of the busy station residents did have time for science during all the crew swap and safety training activities taking place today. Glover attached sensors to his leg, collecting data for the Vascular Echo study that observes how the cardiovascular system changes in space. Noguchi reconfigured components inside the Cell Biology Experiment Facility, an artificial gravity-generating incubator, that supports cell and plant biology studies.