As the U.S. continues to aid Ukraine and Russia refuses to end an invasion of the sovereign country, astronauts from the U.S. and the Russian Federation continue to work together on the International Space Station (ISS).
In fact, U.S. astronauts were filmed preparing the station orbiting Earth for upgrades this week and a new group of Russian astronauts arrived, wearing the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Plans for the ISS began in the 1980s and its first crew, made up of astronauts from the U.S. and Russia, began residing on the station in 1998. There have been more than two decades of continuous human presence on the space laboratory, which is a collaboration among five space agencies (Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan) representing 15 countries.
“The space station is approximately the size of a football field: a 460-ton, permanently crewed platform orbiting 250 miles above Earth,” according to the ISS website. “It is about four times as large as the Russian space station Mir and five times as large as the U.S. Skylab.”
According to NASA, “the space station’s laboratories allow crew members to do research that could not be done anywhere else,” due to the conditions in space. “This scientific research benefits people on Earth. Space research is even used in everyday life.”
A “spacewalk” to perform the station upgrades was conducted Tuesday and another is planned next week. Any time an astronaut gets out of a vehicle in space, it is referred to as a spacewalk. Russian astronaut Alexei Leonov was the first person to spacewalk on March 18, 1965.
NASA Flight Engineers Kayla Barron and Raja Chari conducted the Tuesday spacewalk at ISS. Barron wore a suit with red stripes and Chari wore a suit with no stripes. It was the second spacewalk of Barron’s career and Chari’s first.
They assembled and installed modification kits required for upcoming solar array upgrades, including brackets and struts to support the future installation of an ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA), solar panels that help power the station.
When a total of six new IROSA arrays are installed, the stations total power will increase from 160 kilowatts to up to 215 kilowatts.
During the spacewalk planned for next Wednesday, two astronauts are expected “to install hoses on a Radiator Beam Valve Module that routes ammonia through the station’s heat-rejecting radiators to keep systems at the proper temperature,” as well as a power and data cable and to replace an external camera on the station’s truss among other upgrades.
Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov, cosmonauts from the Russian space program Roscosmos, also arrived at the ISS Friday, according to NASA. Space.com reported that the cosmonauts’ entrance was surprising because they “were wearing bright yellow flight suits with blue highlights — the colors of Ukraine.”
The Russian Federation began an invasion of Ukraine last month and in the past weeks both military and civilian lives have been lost as the conflict continues. While the U.S. has not sent troops directly to Ukraine, it has provided $1 billion in military aid in the course of a week.
When asked about the suits during a Russian TV broadcast, Artemyev said there was a surplus of yellow fabric in the warehouse. Some people think it was a show of support for Ukraine.
At the end of the month, the Soyuz spacecraft that brought the cosmonauts to the station is expected to bring Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos back to Earth, along with NASA’s Mark Vande Hei, who will set the record for longest human spaceflight mission at 355 days.
NASA astronauts Barron, Chari and Tom Marshburn will remain at the station with European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer and the new group of cosmonauts.
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