Written by L.A. Chung
Did you know you can see the International Space Station from time to time above our heads? Friday night it will be overhead for a whole two minutes!
Look for it at 10:10 p.m., about 68 degrees, starting West-Northwest and disappearing in the Southern sky.
Regular readers of Patch know that Patch frequently run alerts of when it will pass overhead. As the third-brightest object in the sky, it should be easy to spot with the naked eye.
NASA has a Spot-the-Station sign-up site so you, too, can get 12-hour advance notice, like this:
Time: Fri Jun 21/10:21 PM, Visible: 2 min, Max Height: 68 degrees, Appears: WNW, Disappears: S
Los Altos Patch already introduced you to the crew of Expedition 36 in our last space station missive — a Russian commander, two American engineers, one European flight engineer and two Russian engineers.
They are: Commander Pavel Vinogradov, flight engineer Alexander Misurkin, flight engineer Chris Cassidy, flight engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin, flight engineer Karen Nyberg and Italian Luca Parmitano.
What are they doing up there? Here's what the crew did today, in an edited version of the report appears on the NASA International Space Station page:
"The Expedition 36 crew ended the week Friday with medical experiments and a suited “dry run” that sets the stage for a six-hour spacewalk slated for Monday.
Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin climbed into their Russian Orlan spacesuits and tested the comfort levels inside the spacesuits and their mobility inside the Pirs docking compartment airlock.
On Monday's spacewalk the two cosmonauts will replace a fluid flow control valve panel on the Zarya module, test Kurs automated docking cables for the arrival of a new Russian laboratory module later this year and install clamps to later hold cables bringing power from the U.S. segment of the station to that new Russian module. The two spacewalkers are also slated to install handholds for future spacewalk activities and retrieve experiments from the hull of the Zvezda service module.
Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency drew blood samples for the Human Research Facility to track their adaptation to the weightless environment of the station. Parmitano processed the blood samples and stored them in the Minus Eighty-degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS, or MELFI, to preserve them for later analysis on Earth."
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