Image above: Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus stops to wave at the camera as she installs the port crew quarters in the International Space Station’s Harmony node. Credit: NASA TV

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ISS crew prepare for spacewalk

Nearly two weeks
of spacewalk preparations culminated Friday in a 'dry run' checkout of Russian Orlan spacesuits in the International Space Station’s Pirs docking compartment.

Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke, KE5AIT, and Flight Engineer Yury Lonchakov, RA3DT, donned the suits to practice their movements and test their mobility.

Fincke and Lonchakov are scheduled to exit the Pirs airlock Monday around 7:15 p.m. EST for the six-hour excursion to install and retrieve science experiments from the station’s exterior. They also will install a probe to measure electromagnetic potential around the Russian segment of the station that is suspected by Russian specialists to have contributed to the failure of Soyuz module separation bolts. Improper firing of these bolts resulted in steeper than expected re-entries for the Soyuz spacecrafts carrying the Expedition 15 and 16 crews back to Earth.

Lead spacewalker Lonchakov will wear the spacesuit with the blue stripes on the legs, while Fincke will wear the suit with the red stripes. NASA TV coverage of the spacewalk begins Monday at 6:30 p.m.

Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus, KE5FYE spent time Friday working on the installation of two new crew quarters in the station’s Harmony node. The new quarters were delivered, along with Magnus, by space shuttle Endeavour during the STS-126 mission.

The refurbished starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ) was placed in autotrack mode for four orbits Thursday, then returned to the directed position. The SARJ performed flawlessly. Engineers reported normal electrical currents and significantly reduced vibrations in the wake of the cleaning and lubrication performed on the joint during the STS-126 spacewalks.