. Dragon’s hatch was opened less than two hours later following the completion of standard air and pressure leaks. Soon after, Flight Engineers Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen, and Woody Hoburg, all from NASA, and Sultan Alneyadi from UAE entered Dragon and began offloading some of the more than 7,000 pounds of science experiments, station hardware, and crew supplies packed inside.
Controllers on the ground will also command the Canadarm2 robotic arm to extract a pair of roll-out solar arrays stowed inside Dragon’s unpressurized trunk. The remotely-controlled Canadarm2 will gently maneuver the solar arrays and temporarily stow them on a pallet attached to the station’s starboard-side truss structure.
Bowen and Hoburg will be the two spacewalkers installing the station’s fifth set of roll-out solar arrays on Friday. The two astronauts began Wednesday morning by organizing tools and reviewing the procedures they will use during the seven-hour spacewalk. Rubio and Alneyadi, who will assist the spacewalkers from inside the station, also participated in the tool work and procedure reviews.
In the midst of Wednesday’s spacewalk preparations, the four astronauts fit in other duties including running science experiments and maintaining lab operations. Bowen set up standard optometry gear found in a doctor’s office on Earth and imaged Hoburg’s eyes for a human research study. Rubio continued unpacking Dragon while Alneyadi conducted test runs of anThe station’s three cosmonauts had their day full of research, electronics maintenance, and cargo duties in thesegment of the orbiting lab.