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2003
Report #24 
4 p.m. CDT, Friday, May 23, 2003 
Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas 
 
Four weeks into their mission, the two-man crew of the International
Space Station has moved beyond an orientation and familiarization
schedule and into an agenda of operations that reflects the range of
activities they’ll pursue on orbit during the remaining five months
of their flight. 

Each day this week Expedition 7 Commander Yuri Malenchenko and NASA
ISS Science Officer Ed Lu completed a variety of maintenance tasks to
keep their home on orbit in good shape, from monitoring the operation
of life support systems to testing the quality of air and water. 

In the coming week mission managers plan to have the crewmembers
replace a storage battery in the Zvezda Service Module. As training
for a contingency spacewalk, they also will have Malenchenko and Lu
get into, and then out of, the American spacesuits.  In their
pre-flight training Malenchenko and Lu always had help donning and
doffing the Extravehicular Mobility Unit. No spacewalks are planned
for this increment. 

The science mission of Expedition 7 picked up this week.  Malenchenko
took part in Russian biomedical experiments gauging the impact of the
microgravity environment on blood cell count and body mass, while Lu
began a new series of experiment runs with the InSPACE experiment in
the Microgravity Sciences Glovebox (MSG) this week.

The MSG is a sealed container in the Destiny laboratory housing
experiments involving materials that need to be isolated from the
station environment.  InSPACE, or Investigating the Structure of
Paramagnetic Aggregates from Colloidal Emulsions, which was started
during Expedition 6, studies how particles that are capable of being
magnetized respond when a magnetic field is pulsed on and off.

Scientists hope to develop better fluids for systems that are
routinely exposed to magnetic fields, such as automobile brake fluids
and vibration damping systems, and to develop new applications such
as vibration damping systems for buildings in earthquake-prone areas. 

Wednesday morning the Expedition 7 crewmembers discussed the progress
of their mission and its scientific research with the BBC Radio’s
World Service and WHEC-TV in Rochester, N.Y., near Lu’s hometown of
Webster, N.Y.  Thursday they took part in an educational event,
answering questions from students gathered at the Adler Planetarium
in Chicago. 

Information on the crew's activities aboard the space station, future
launch dates, as well as station sighting opportunities from anywhere
on the Earth, is available on the Internet at: 

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/

Details on station science operations can be found on an Internet
site administered by the Payload Operations Center at NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., at: 

http://scipoc.msfc.nasa.gov/

The next ISS status report will be issued on Friday, May 30, or
sooner if events warrant. 

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