Space
station commander Bill McArthur said Wednesday that he is looking forward to a
steaming cup of coffee on Earth now that he and four other astronauts have
passed the midpoint of a week-long orbital crew swap.
"The very
next thing I'd like to do is smell a cup of coffee," McArthur told the Associated
Press Wednesday during video link broadcast on NASA TV, adding that he
hopes to see his family first. "It's just an absolute thrill and joy to live
and work in space, but we miss the richness, the texture, the three-dimensional
nature of living on our home planet."
McArthur
has lived aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with Russian cosmonaut
Valery Tokarev for six months during their Expedition 12 mission.
The two astronauts will hand
control of the ISS over the Expedition
13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight engineer Jeffrey Williams - who arrived
early April 1 with Brazilian astronaut Marcos
Pontes - before returning to Earth with Pontes on April 8.
"It's a lot
like if you were to buy a new house and you're moving in...except in this case
the former owners are still there and they're still living in it, their closets
are all full and they're not going to clean it up," Williams told the Houston
Chronicle of the handover process Wednesday. "It never occurred to me how
difficult that would be to move in to somebody's house with all their stuff in
it and then pick up without a pause in the normal day-to-day operations."
Airlock
campout details
McArthur
and Williams, both NASA astronauts, spent a portion of Monday night sealed
inside the space station's U.S.-built Quest
airlock during a test of spacewalk preparation procedures to flush nitrogen
from the human body. The measure, in which astronauts sleep at a lower
atmospheric pressure than that inside the rest of the ISS, could shave up to
one hour off the typical time it takes astronauts to prepare for U.S.
spacewalks, but the Monday night test was cut short due to a pair of apparently
erroneous alarms, NASA said.
"We were
never in any danger," McArthur said of the airlock campout. "There was never
any problem with the [airlock's] atmosphere."
A software
glitch led to two inadvertent alarms, the second of which awoke the two NASA astronauts
and prompted NASA ISS flight controllers to call off the overnight airlock
test, NASA said.
"They were
worried about us getting a good night's sleep," McArthur said.
NASA
officials said Wednesday that the three primary goals of the airlock campout
were met, despite the abbreviated test. Those goals included checking the
performance of an atmosphere-watching device called a mass constituency
analyzer during a rapid sampling phase as the airlock depressurized, an
auto-sequence mode to check the environments of multiple ISS modules -
including the Quest airlock - and the collection of data on the actual campout
process itself.
Flight
controllers are now looking through that data to determine whether another
campout test will be required before the process is used in earnest during
NASA's upcoming STS-115 shuttle mission - slated to fly no earlier than late
August - to install new solar arrays outside the station, the space agency
said.
Robotic
arm training
The
Expedition 12 and Expedition 13 astronauts spent part of Wednesday training
with the space station's robotic arm, while Tokarev used the day to pack the
Soyuz TMA-7 spacecraft that will return him, McArthur and Pontes to Earth.
Earlier, McArthur
and Tokarev tested the satellite phone they will use after landing Saturday on
the steppes of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The two astronauts are also
familiarizing their Expedition 13 counterparts with the location of items in
the space station's numerous compartments.
"Jeff and
Pavel are definitely ready to take over," McArthur said of the Expedition 13
crew, which is beginning its own six-month mission.
As the
joint space station crews continue their handover activities, Pontes - Brazil's
first astronaut - is engaged in a full schedule of science experiments and
video conferences.
Pontes, who
carried Brazil's
national flag, stamps,
coins and other objects from his native country into orbit, is expected to
speak with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva today via a
space-to-ground video link, according to the Brazilian Space Agency (Agência
Espacial Brasileira, or AEB). He is also expected to speak to a group of 250
children and Brazilian journalists during a pair of planned video conferences
later this week, AEB officials said.
Pontes is
spending 10 days in space - eight of them aboard the ISS - and will return to
Earth with the Expedition 12 crew at 7:46 p.m. EST (2346 GMT) on April 8.
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