Crew Packs Dragon for Departure This Week

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Don Pettit pose for a portrait in front of the Advanced Plant Habitat designed to support commercial and fundamental plant research in microgravity.

The Expedition 72 crew is packing a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft ahead of its departure later this week. The seven astronauts and cosmonauts also kept up a variety of space biology and lab maintenance tasks aboard the International Space Station on Monday.

Cargo packing is at the top of the schedule this week as the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft nears its undocking targeted for 11:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 5. NASA's live coverage of undocking and departure begins at 10:50 a.m. EST on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.

Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineer Don Pettit joined forces on Monday morning loading Dragon with return cargo as it prepares to depart the Harmony module's forward port after being docked for one month. Pettit then worked with Flight Engineer Nick Hague during the afternoon strapping down the hardware inside Dragon. The trio plus Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore will work during the week stowing critical research samples and finalized experiments inside the spacecraft for analysis in labs on Earth.

The four NASA astronauts also continued their regularly scheduled research objectives studying space biology and servicing a host of science equipment. Williams with assistance from Wilmore activated mixing tubes supporting student-designed experiments that observe how microgravity affects proteins and bacteria potentially benefitting human health on and off the Earth. Williams also processed bacteria and yeast samples for a biomanufacturing study possibly enabling the production of food and medicine in space. Pettit spun his blood sample in a centrifuge then stowed it in a science freezer for later analysis. Hague installed the Multi-Purpose Experiment Platform, a device that can deploy scientific payloads in the vacuum of space, into the Kibo laboratory module's airlock.

Working in the Roscosmos segment of the orbital outpost, cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov unloaded cargo from the Progress 90 resupply ship that docked to the Zvezda service module's rear port on Nov. 23. He also set up imaging hardware to view natural and human-caused conditions on Earth using different wavelengths. Flight Engineers Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner partnered together throughout Monday servicing communications, computer, and electronics hardware in Zvezda.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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