Crew on Track With Treadmill Maintenance

The three Expedition 25 crew members living and working aboard the orbiting International Space Station spent much of Tuesday conducting maintenance on the treadmill and the potable water system.

Commander Doug Wheelock and Flight Engineer Shannon Walker began their workday removing the privacy enclosure of the Waste Hygiene Compartment as part of an effort to install a T-hose on the Water Processing Apparatus (WPA) of the station’s Water Recovery System (WRS) in the Tranquility node.

Since the treadmill, also known as T2, needed to be removed to access the back of the WRS rack, the crew used this opportunity to perform some maintenance on the treadmill. With assistance from Walker, Wheelock removed the treadmill’s vibration isolation system, rotated the rack and stowed the apparatus in the Harmony module. Afterward, Walker replaced the treadmill’s power avionics unit.

The T2 is one of several exercise devices available to the crew as part of a daily exercise regimen to reduce the loss of bone density and muscle mass that typically occurs during long-duration spaceflight.

With the treadmill safely out of the way, Wheelock initiated a transfer of condensate water to a WPA storage tank. Later, Walker began the installation of the T-hose.

Working in the Russian segment of the station Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin set up ham radio equipment to test the feasibility of sending photographs back to Earth through slow scan television video.

Wheelock, Walker and Yurchikhin have been the sole residents of the orbiting complex since the departure of Expedition 24 Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineers Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Mikhail Kornienko aboard the Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft Friday. Their Soyuz landed early Saturday near Arkalyk, Kazakhstan.

At the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, three additional Expedition 25 flight engineers, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka, reviewed rendezvous simulation programs as they await their launch to the station aboard the new Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft Oct. 7 (Oct. 8, local time).