Space to Ground: First Timers: 01/20/2023

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

What is said in the film

Welcome to space to ground, I’m sandra jones. This week two first timers suited up and took the walk of a lifetime for a spacewalk outside the international space station that is. Also, a first in the study of quantum gases in space, and a seat liner swap took place. On friday nasa astronaut nicole mann and japan aerospace exploration agency astronaut koichi wakata ventured outside of the space station’s quest airlock to conduct a spacewalk in anticipation of future solar array installation. The spacewalking duo worked to install mounting platforms as part of planned solar array augmentation on the starboard side of the international space station’s truss.

The installation is part of a series of spacewalks to augment the international space station’s power channels with new international space station roll-out solar arrays, or irosas. Four irosas have been installed so far, and two more will be mounted to the platforms installed during spacewalks in the future. The unique microgravity environment of space allows research to be done in a truly out of this world way aboard the international space station. One example of such a study includes the cold atom lab. Researchers with nasa’s cold atom lab have now simultaneously produced gases of two atomic species in a uniquely quantum, or wave-like, phase of matter called a bose-einstein condensate for the first time in space.

"really, very much the same kind of atom trap that we got on the ground. But the beauty is we got it up here and so we don't have to put any energy into holding these atoms, these really cold atoms in their location. And so that means we can get down to really, really cold temperatures and the dwell time of those atoms interacting is fairly significant like on order of 10 or 20 seconds. The cool thing for me is you know that, that's an experiment where you can see quantum mechanics happening on the macroscopic level. " ultracold atomic gases provide a unique tool for exploring the quantum nature of matter and for probing the foundations of modern physics.

Cold atom lab is now the first and only quantum gas experiment in space with multiple atomic species available for study. Also taking place this week was a seat liner move for nasa astronaut frank rubio. Nasa astronauts josh cassada and nicole mann, worked inside the spacex dragon endurance crew ship, moving rubio’s seat liner from the roscosmos soyuz ms-22 spacecraft to the crew dragon. The seat liner move is taking place following the external cooling loop leak on soyuz last month. This move ensures that rubio would be able to return to earth aboard crew dragon and reduces the heat load inside the ms-22 spacecraft for cosmonauts sergey prokopyev and dmitri petelin in the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation from the space station.

A replacement spacecraft, soyuz ms-23, will launch to the station next month. Once docked to station, prokopyev, petelin and rubio will return to earth on that soyuz later this year. And that’s space to ground for this week. Thanks for watching. You can get a daily on-orbit status report by visiting our space station blog at blogs.

nasa. gov. We’ll see you next week.

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