By NASA October 8, 2022
The four crew members of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission join the Expedition 68 crew during welcome remarks inside the space station’s Harmony Module. Credit: NASA TV
On Friday, the 11 crew members now living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) had a short day after Thursday’s arrival of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. The eight astronauts and three cosmonauts spent a long night after docking with the SpaceX Dragon Endurance crew ship.
Now the four members of Crew-5 are officially Flight Engineers for Expedition 68 and will spend the next few days getting used to life in orbit while spending time familiarizing themselves with the space station’s systems. NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, have a long list of space experiments to perform during his stay in the orbital laboratory. Among many other types of research, the commercial crew quartet will study the effects of microgravity on the cardiorespiratory system, 3D bioprinting of human organs and tissues for implantation, and modeling of heart tissue to improve therapies for health problems caused by space flights.
As the new crew members adjusted to their new home in space, the other seven ISS crewmates continued their normal science and laboratory maintenance activities for half a day Friday.
NASA flight engineers Jessica Watkins and Frank Rubio worked on a couple of different studies during the afternoon to explore how to grow crops and manufacture products in space. Watkins checked out growing vegetables for the XROOTS space agriculture study that uses hydroponic and aeroponic feeding techniques. Rubio investigated harnessing weightlessness to improve the production and quality of fiber optic cables.
ESA (European Space Agency) Commander Samantha Cristoforetti joined NASA Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren to collect and process their blood samples. Lindgren then teamed up with Mann and transferred the emergency hardware from the station to the newly arrived crew ship Endurance.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin spent the afternoon in their space research and life support maintenance contingent on the Russian segment of the space station.