Crew Wraps Up Treadmill Work, Prepares For EVA’s
Flight engineers Koichi Wakata and Michael Barratt worked to complete the maintenance of the station’s treadmill vibration isolation system Friday. The astronauts spent several days working on the exercise unit to improve its performance after years of on-orbit use.
A second treadmill will be delivered in the summer aboard space shuttle Discovery during the STS-128 mission. The new treadmill, named Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT, was named after comedian Stephen Colbert.
Commander Gennady Padalka and Barratt are checking the Russian Orlan spacesuits in advance of two spacewalks planned for June 5 and June 10. The spacewalkers will relocate docking hardware inside and outside the Pirs docking compartment. This sets the stage for the arrival in November of Russia’s new Mini-Research Module-2 (MRM-2). The MRM-2 will provide improved access to the Zvezda service module’s zenith docking port for Soyuz and Progress space vehicles.
The station crew members also spent some time Friday on a physics experiment dubbed FLYING SAUCER. They videotaped and described the behavior of a disk spinning and not spinning in various orientations in microgravity.
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Image Caption: Flight engineers Michael Barratt (left) and Koichi Wakata talk to Japanese students from inside the Kibo laboratory module. Credit: NASA TV
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