Station Crew Prepares for Automated Transfer Vehicle-3 Arrival

Aboard the orbiting International Space Station Monday, Expedition 30 Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers prepared the Permanent Multi-Purpose Module for the stowage of cargo that will be unloaded from the soon-to-arrive Automated Transfer Vehicle-3 (ATV-3).

Kuipers also joined Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko in brushing up on rendezvous and docking procedures for the European Space Agency resupply vehicle’s arrival Wednesday at 6:33 p.m. EDT.

The ATV-3, named “Edoardo Amaldi,” flies smoothly on toward its docking date with the aft port of the Zvezda service module. It launched atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Arianespace launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, at 12:34 a.m. Friday, beginning its six-day journey to the orbital complex.

Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineer Don Pettit worked with the Integrated Cardiovascular (ICV) experiment. ICV researches the extent of cardiac atrophy and seeks to identify its mechanisms.

In the U.S. Destiny laboratory, Pettit set up hardware for an experiment known as Burning and Suppression of Solids. Known as BASS, the experiment investigates the burning and extinction characteristics of a wide variety of fuel samples in microgravity.

Flight Engineers Anatoly Ivanishin and Anton Shkaplerov worked with the Bar experiment. The Russian investigation looks at methods and instruments for detecting the location of a loss of pressure aboard the station.

Oleg Kononenko, a flight engineer, took photographs of Earth as part of the Russian Uragan Earth-imaging program, which is named for the Russian word for hurricane. Uragan is a ground- and space-based system for predicting natural and manmade disasters.