A good Tuesday morning from the International Space Station
Flight Control Room.
This is Mission Control Houston.
It's Tuesday, January 22, 2013.
The crew aboard the station, known as Expedition 34,
is comprised of six crew members.
Commander Kevin Ford you see in the seated position
on the left is serving
as the overall commander of Expedition 34.
On the left side of the view,
standing behind him are Oleg Novitskiy
and Evgeny Tarelkin, Russian cosmonauts.
They're on their first voyage into space,
Kevin Ford on his first long-duration stay in space.
He flew on a shuttle flight, a shorter duration mission
to the station on STS-128.
These three crew members have been onboard the station now
for 90 days.
They've been in space for 92 days arriving
at the complex back in late October aboard their Soyuz
TMA-06M spacecraft.
The newest three crew members,
pretty much no longer the newest, are comprised
of three flight engineers.
Standing in the back,
the tallest of the three Roman Romanenko,
the Russian cosmonaut, he served
on a long-duration expedition, Expedition 20 and 21.
And also joining him, next to him is Dr. Tom Marshburn.
He's on his first long-duration stay in space.
He flew a shuttle flight, STS-127,
a shorter flight to the station.
Also joining them is Canadian Space Agency astronaut,
the seated crew member there, Chris Hadfield.
He's on his, also first long-duration stay in space.
But he's flown two previous shuttle flights, one of those
to the International Space Station as well.
The crew members spent a fairly busy weekend.
They had a number of human research experiments
that they performed over the weekend.
They also had some off-duty time to talk
with their family members
through private family conferences from the station.
That's a routine for the crew members periodically to stay
in touch with their families here on the ground.
The crews also performed some routine housekeeping chores
as usual aboard the station to ensure
that all the systems are working properly.
They did some experiment checks as well to ensure that some
of the ongoing autonomous experiments are continuing
to perform as expected.
Today the crew members are focusing their attention
on the experiments once again.
The crew is focusing on an experiment
that basically checks the patient's eyesight.
It's called a panoptic experiment.
It's developed by Dr. Paul Filar who operates
out of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
He came up with a device to be able
to send images remotely over long distances.
This is essentially a way
that the crew will take some periodic,
essentially an on-orbit eye exam.
And that will be using those images and transmit those
to the ground to prove the concept
of if there is any eye problems that can be looked
at distance-wise
by an ophthalmologist here on the ground.
Also underway, the Capillary Flow experiment operations
by Kevin Ford.
It's a suite of fluid physics experiments
that investigates how fluids move up surfaces
in the microgravity environment of space as well.
In and around all of that, the crew again visited
with flight controllers on the ground as well to look
over their schedules and also look ahead to what's
in store for the next day.
They do that periodically.
They also perform exercise twice a day, budgeted for two hours
of exercise in the morning and evening
to maintain their cardiovascular
and musculoskeletal systems while living
in the microgravity environment of space.
So that's life aboard the International Space Station
over the weekend and today
for the Expedition 34 crew aboard the International
Space Station.
