ISS Update - Jan. 17, 2013

Good morning and welcome
to today's International Space Station update,
Joining us here us here in mission control Houston
at the Johnson space Center in Houston, Texas right now looking
down as the orbit two team is manning all these various
consoles monitoring systems onboard the orbiting laboratory.
Today's team being led today
by flight director Matt Abbott just walking back into the room
as the station's currently out of voice communication,
as we wait for the satalites to handover.
Yo can see Matt taken a seat there, right next to him
at the capcom position serving as the communication link
between all of these flight controllers on our astronauts
in space is NASA astronaut Clay Anderson.
This will be Clay's last shift as Capcom here
in mission control, as he is preparing to retire
from a very successful career
as a NASA astronaut here in Houston.
So all with this last capcom, we wish him all the best.
Meanwhile up and in space, we have our crew of Expedition 34,
a six man rotation currently led
by NASA astronaut Kevin Ford there in the front row
on the left, and joining him are three Russian cosmonauts,
starting across the top row we have Oleg Novitskiy,
Evgeny Tarelkin and Roman Romanenko.
All the way on the right there you see another NASA astronaut
Tom Marshburn.
Our sixth crew member, there on the front row as well,
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
Busy day for astronauts on board the station today, starting off
with Commander Kevin Ford, who spent a couple hours
as morning setting
up the station's robotic crew member, Robonaut2.
Robonaut, the first ever humanoid robot to travel
into space and right now has been going through a series
of checkouts over the past year or so, to stay prepared
to assign more and more tasks to Robonaut as a kind
of human assistant, Robonaut up there in space.
Here you can see a little earlier today,
Commander Ford unpacking Robonaut
from his resting area inside
of the Destiny laboratory before he was moved
through a couple tasks by controllers in Huntsville.
Aside from all of this Robonaut activity
which we will have more video of a little later,
Commander Ford was working on the
on the integrated cardiovascular experiment setting
up a monitoring system on his own person as they continue
to track any changes in the heart muscle
of these astronauts during long-duration exposure
to microgravity.
Also doing a little bit
of maintenance activities today cleaning out the bacteria filter
and replacing it inside the destiny laboratory.
Moving on, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy was inside
of the service module continuing some work that was going
on since the last week, doing some minor repairs to some
of the interior panels inside that module.
Aside from that, he was transferring some
of the urine waste from the station's tanks
over to what is known
as the rodnick tank inside the 48 progress vehicle.
It is one of the unmanned cargo craft, currently two
of those docked right now to the station.
Onr of his other major activities
for the day was the Russian bar experiment,
which looks to study various means
for detecting any depressurization inside
of the station structure.
He was assisted in that today by Evgeny Tarelkin another
of our Russian cosmonauts currently onboard.
Tarelkin started his day off
with the Russian sprut experiment,
which is an ongoing investigation
of various fluid distribution inside
of these astronauts bodies,
again due to that microgravity environment.
Aside from that, he will be taking some microbial air
samples throughout the Russian segment.
Our third Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko was busy,
transitioning out the station computer network inside the
Russian service module for backup configuration
and performing the seiner ocean observations.
Those are an ongoing search for bioproductive water areas
that are then used by researchers down here
on the ground for scientific searches also
fishing operations.
He was also inside one of the progress vehicles, over in 49P,
filling up that rodnick tank.
Meanwhile Canadian Chris Hadfield was gathering up a lot
of tools and items he will be needing for an upcoming water
on off valve installation inside of the European Columbus module,
he is also working on the potable water dispenser
in the U.S. segment, cleaning that out
and then just a little earlier this morning, he got a chance
to speak some students the school named after him,
in his hometown of Ontario, Canada.
Our sixth crew member Tom Marshburn started
of his day doing a vision test as part
of the health maintenance system.
Also inside of the regenerative environmental control
and life support system with the close system onboard the station
today, transitioning over some of the software over that helps
to control the urine processor assembly.
He will also be cleaning out some of the fans
in the Destiny laboratory's inter module ventilation.
Aside from all these crew activities today,
last night a reboost the station was conducted.
That happening at about 8:15 p.m. central time,
it was a three and three-quarter minute firing of the thrusters
on the Progress 49, which you could see their
at the very aft end of the station, attached to Zvezda.
This was done in order to raise the station's lower orbit
by about one statute mile in preparation
for the upcoming single day launch and docking
of the next Progress resupply ship, Progress 50.
And then the final activity
of mention today will be the resumption
of robotics refueling mission work with the Dextere,
special purpose dexterous manipulator
that will resume later this morning
after a one-day hiatus following a few hiccups
in system yesterday.