Suggested Searches

International Space Station

Categories

Expedition 74 Relaxes on Monday Following Busy Weekend

The city lights of Türkiye sparkle 261 miles below the International Space Station in this photograph from a window aboard a SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft taken at approximately 9:24 p.m. local time. In the foreground, is a set of the orbital outpost's main solar arrays (left) and another SpaceX Dragon spacecraft (lower right).
iss074e0225549 (Jan. 6, 2026) — The city lights of Türkiye sparkle 261 miles below the International Space Station in this photograph from a window aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft taken at approximately 9:24 p.m. local time. In the foreground, is a set of the orbital outpost’s main solar arrays (left) and another SpaceX Dragon spacecraft (lower right).
JAXA/Kimiya Yui

Expedition 74 was off duty on Monday following a weekend of crew handover activities, cargo packing, and microbiology research. A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will also depart the International Space Station for return to Earth later this week.

The orbital outpost’s newest residents spent Saturday and Sunday familiarizing themselves with space station systems and procedures following a busy first week of scientific operations. Standard housekeeping duties such as trash collecting, vacuuming modules and vents for dust, and wiping down surfaces with a disinfectant rounded out the weekend activities.

NASA Flight Engineer Chris Williams, who has been orbiting Earth since November, assisted the station’s newest crewmates Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, both from NASA, and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) helping them get up to speed with living and working in weightlessness. Williams showed the trio the location of food, drinks, and emergency gear, demonstrated the operation of medical equipment, communications gear, and computer networking hardware, and gave a tour of the modules while describing the operations and systems that take place in each. Williams also joined Meir and Adenot on Saturday and explored using ultraviolet light as a method to disinfect spacecraft inhibiting microbial growth to protect crew health and space equipment.

The quartet will also step up the pace of cargo transfers inside the Dragon cargo spacecraft as it nears its departure later this week. Dragon will return to Earth loaded with completed science experiments and station hardware for analysis. The astronauts also continued unloading crew supplies from the Dragon crew spacecraft delivered on Feb. 14.

Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev, who is beginning his second spaceflight, joined his cosmonaut crewmates over the weekend, Commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, cleaning ventilation systems and inspecting laptop computers and power supply systems. Fedyaev also continued his respiratory research on Saturday attaching an acoustic sensor to his neck that recorded his rapid exhalation to understand how microgravity affects his breathing.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

Get the latest from NASA delivered every week. Subscribe here.