Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Joshua Kutryk spent the week getting ready for his first spacewalk, filling spacesuit cooling garments with water and trying a suit on for fit, while NASA crewmates printed blood vessels and studied cancer cells in the space station’s labs.
The spacesuit prep builds toward two spacewalks, on Oct. 29 and Nov. 5, that will finish installing the station’s last pair of solar arrays and put a Canadian outside the station for the first time since 2019.
Canada’s week
Canada’s part in the two spacewalks goes well beyond lending the Canadarm2 robotic arm, the CSA said in an Oct. 20 update. The agency’s flight controllers and engineers helped plan the spacewalks and choreograph the arm’s moves, and its Robotics Mission Control Centre in Longueuil, Que., will track Canadarm2 in real time once Kutryk and NASA’s Anil Menon step outside.
CSA astronaut Jenni Gibbons will serve as CAPCOM, short for capsule communicator, relaying instructions between mission control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the crew. She did the same job for the 2021 spacewalks that installed the first of the new solar arrays, and was on console as CAPCOM during the Artemis II flight around the moon.
On Wednesday morning, Kutryk spoke from the station to Space Canada’s SpaceBound conference in Gatineau, Que., answering moderated questions from Brian Gallant, chief executive of Space Canada, during a 20-minute downlink.
Aboard the station, NASA’s Luke Delaney will command Canadarm2 during the spacewalks. He and NASA’s Jessica Watkins trained on the arm Friday and will help Kutryk and Menon in and out of their suits.
Kutryk, who arrived at the station Oct. 1 for a six-month stay, split the week between the suit and the science. He filled the tanks and cooling garments of two spacesuits with water, and had his form tracked by motion-capture sensors during a workout on the station’s resistance machine. On Wednesday he and Menon organized their tools, inspected tethers and cleaned the helmets they’ll wear outside, and on Thursday Kutryk tried a suit on for a fit check that allows for changes such as the spine stretching in weightlessness. On Friday he swapped samples in a research furnace that levitates materials with an electric field and heats them with lasers.
Science and technology experiments
In the BioFabrication Facility, a bioprinter in the station’s European lab, Delaney, Watkins and Menon took turns printing blood vessels, building tissue layer by layer from living cells. The cells come from patients with a rare genetic disorder that causes rapid aging, and NASA says studying them in weightlessness could point to new therapies. The crew thawed the cells, mixed them with a printing gel and printed them, then froze some samples and kept others growing.
Delaney also processed tumour samples in a glovebox in the station’s Japanese module, part of a study into how cancer cells grow and respond to treatment without gravity, and is working on an experiment that tests analyzing crew biological samples aboard the station instead of shipping them home. Menon handled algae and tobacco-cell samples for a study of how crops might one day grow on the moon or Mars.
In the station’s Russian segment, cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina wore acoustic sensors to track their breathing, and the three cosmonauts finished a study of plasma crystals and tried artificial-intelligence tools meant to transcribe crew reports. Sergey Teteryatnikov, the fourth member of Crew-13, also practised running the European robotic arm on Russia’s Nauka module.
Spacewalks 100 and 101
NASA will stream the first outing, U.S. spacewalk 100, on NASA+ starting at 6:30 a.m. EDT on Oct. 29, with Kutryk and Menon due to leave the Quest airlock at 8 a.m. Coverage of spacewalk 101 on Nov. 5 starts at 6:45 a.m. EST, for an 8:10 a.m. start.
On the first spacewalk, planned to last about six hours and 45 minutes, the pair will install a roll-out solar array on the port side of the station’s truss, its long main frame. It will be Menon’s fourth spacewalk. The second will add the eighth and final array on the starboard side, finishing an upgrade that will “increase our power generation capability up to 30 per cent,” Gaurang Patel, operations integration manager for NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said at the agency’s Oct. 20 briefing.
Looking ahead
The cargo Dragon that docked Oct. 15 is due to undock in mid-November, once the crew finishes unpacking it, last week’s update reported.