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Image above: Flight Engineer Jeff Williams inserts a payload sample in the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI). Credit: NASA

Crew readies for next Shuttle arrival

The International Space Station's resident ham radio trio - Commander Pavel Vinogradov RV3BS, and Flight Engineers Jeff Williams KD5TVQ and Thomas Reiter DF4TR - continued preparations for the arrival of Space Shuttle Atlantis in late August, conducted station maintenance and worked with experiments aboard their orbital outpost.

On Monday, Williams activated the EarthKam hardware for a new session, which allows school students around the world to control a digital camera mounted in a window of the space station and download the images on the Internet.

Also on Monday, the crew practiced the procedures for photographing the space shuttle's arrival. The Expedition 13 crew will take numerous photographs of the shuttle as it approaches the station and performs a rendezvous pitch maneuver, or backflip, during flight day three of the upcoming STS-115 mission.

NASA astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin have been named as the 14th crew of the International Space Station. Expedition 14 is scheduled to begin this fall.