While August is traditionally a slow month for major news stories, the same cannot be said for the International Space Station with several comings and goings and even a spacewalk during the latter part of the month.
On 14 August, Cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko conducted an EVA at 1420 GMT exiting from the Pirs airlock of the station. Their main tasks on this EVA were the installing of soft handrails that connect solid handrails on the station to make it easier for the crew to transit around the exterior of the station. The team also installed a new antenna and fasteners on the antenna covers to prevent them accidentally become detached. The spacewalkers also took photographs of the Expose-R experiment mounted to the outside of the station and removed a sensor from the Obstanovka experiment which samples plasma waves near the station. The EVA ended after 5 hours and 31 minutes with both cosmonauts re-entering the Pirs airlock at 1951 GMT.
The Progress M-026M cargo undocked from ISS Poisk module at 1019GMT on 14 August 2015 taking with it all he astronauts trash for destruction. it was later re-entered at 1328 GMT on the same day with any surviving debris safely splashing into the Pacific around 1417 GMT.
The HTV-5 craft was captured by the ISS Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) robot arm at 1028 GMT on 24 August 2015 to be berthed later that day at 1402 GMT on the Harmony module’s nadir port.
There was another move on the ISS on 28 August 2015. This time it was a Soyuz move to make way for another docking.
International Space Station Expedition 44 Commander, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, along with fellow Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko and NASA astronaut Scott Kelly of NASA undocked their Soyuz TMA-016M spacecraft from the Poisk module at 0712 GMT and redocked their spacecraft at the Zvezda service module at 0730 GMT.
All these moves leave the Soyuz TMA-016M spacecraft is docked to the Zvezda service module. The ISS Progress 60 spacecraft is docked to the Pirs docking compartment. The Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft is docked to the Rassvet mini-research module. Japan’s “Kounotori” HTV-5 is berthed to the Harmony module.
The move of the Soyuz spacecraft clears the Poisk module for the arrival Soyuz TMA-018M carrying cosmonaut Sergei Volkov Andreas Mogensen of ESA and Aidyn Aimbetov of the Kazakh Space Agency. According to the plan, their flight launches towards the space station at 0437 GMT on 2 September 2015 ready for a docking on the same day. If successful, the flight will result in three Soyuz craft being docked along with a total ISS crew of nine until Morgensen, Aimbetov and Volkov return to Earth on 12 September using Soyuz TMA-016M.
In March 2016, the arriving Soyuz TMA-18M will return with Volkov, as well as crew members Kelly and Kornienko who will have spent one year on the station as part of a biomedical data test for long range human missions to Mars and the other planets.
