14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, a variety of scientific experiments resumed on the International Space Station, as the Expedition 24 crew regained the investigation time lost because of the ammonia pump module failure.
As things get back to normal, Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker started to collect samples for the station’s Human Research Facility and placed them in the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer (MELFI).
MELFI is designed for preserving biological samples that are collected aboard the orbital station, until later return and analysis on Earth, and it supports a wide range of life science experiments.
Doug Wheelock also replaced a hard drive in the Fluid Science Laboratory of the European Columbus laboratory module, according to NASA.
Flight Engineer Tracy Caldwell Dyson worked within the Fluids and Combustion Facility, as she installed software for the Preliminary Advanced Colloids Experiments (PACE).
PACE are a series of observations, that study the behavior of particles suspended in fluid in the space environment.
Flight Engineer Mikhail Kornienko worked with the Matryoshka-R experiment, a Russian payload made for sophisticated radiation studies, called this way after the traditional Russian set of nested dolls.
As the ISS Progress 38 cargo craft will undock on August 31, Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin gathered and stowed unneeded equipment and trash inside it.
Several days later, on September 8, the ISS Progress 39 will be launched to the station.
The failure of the ammonia pump module in the complex’s Thermal Control System, gave big headaches to Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson as they had to perform three spacewalks to replace it.
The problem was a circuit breaker that tripped and caused a failure of the Pump Module for ammonia providing loop A, which maintains the cooling of the systems and avionics on the ISS.
The crew tried to close the circuit breaker and restart the pump module without any success, so the station operated with only three out of four Control Moment Gyroscopes.