With their first spacewalk behind them, the residents of the international space station pressed ahead this week to prepare for several upcoming milestones.
Expedition 12 Commander Bill McArthur and Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev will get a special musical wakeup call this weekend as Paul McCartney connects with them live from a concert in Anaheim, Calif. The call will take place at 11:55 p.m. CST Saturday and will be broadcast live on NASA Television.
The McCartney wakeup music for McArthur and Tokarev is a follow-up to a tribute he paid to the crew of Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-114 mission in August, when the Beatles' classic "Good Day Sunshine" was played as a wakeup call for Discovery's crew on the day weather conditions became favorable for landing.
McArthur and Tokarev spent the week servicing the spacesuits they wore Monday for a 5 hour, 22 minute excursion outside the station. During the spacewalk, they installed a television camera, jettisoned an inactive science experiment and removed and replaced other equipment on the truss system of the complex.
The crew's second spacewalk is planned for Dec. 7. McArthur and Tokarev will don Russian Orlan spacesuits and exit the Pirs Docking Compartment airlock for that excursion. During the spacewalk, they will move a cargo crane adapter, collect science experiments from the hull of the Zvezda Service Module and manually launch an expired Russian spacesuit equipped with amateur radio equipment. Called SuitSat, the experiment is designed to see if ham radio contacts can be made with a free-flying transmitter.
To prepare for that spacewalk, McArthur and Tokarev will relocate their Soyuz spacecraft from the Pirs docking port to the nadir docking port of the Zarya module on Nov. 18, briefly leaving the station unoccupied.
Earlier today, four thruster engines on the ISS Progress 19 resupply craft were fired for more than 33 minutes in two separate reboost maneuvers to raise the altitude of the outpost. The station is now in a near circular orbit of 219 statute miles to accommodate the launch and docking of the next Progress cargo ship in December. The reboost was the longest ever completed using Progress engines.
On Wednesday, Tokarev replaced a control panel for the station's toilet in Zvezda that had malfunctioned earlier in the week. The temporary loss of the use of the device's liquid disposal component had no impact on station operations. Following the troubleshooting, the toilet is now operating normally.
For information on the crew's activities aboard the station, future launch dates, and station sighting opportunities from anywhere on the Earth, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/station
The next ISS status report will be issued Thursday, Nov. 17, or earlier if events warrant.
