HOUSTON, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The Expedition 15 crew aboard the International Space Station is preparing for several arrivals and departures that are scheduled for the coming weeks.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration controllers in Houston said the ISS crew Tuesday worked with Russian flight controllers to review procedures to be implemented Thursday during the relocation of the docked Soyuz TMA-10 spacecraft. The crew will move the Soyuz to the aft port of the Zvezda service module, thereby freeing the Zarya nadir, or Earth-facing, port for the Oct. 12 arrival of Expedition 16.
ISS Cmdr. Fyodor Yurchikhin and cosmonaut Oleg Kotov conducted a motion control system test on the Soyuz, while astronaut Clay Anderson checked the seals on the hatches of the U.S. segment of the station. Those hatches will be closed during Thursday's Soyuz move to protect against depressurization.
On Monday the Zvezda service module's engines were fired for about 2 minutes to raise the space station's altitude by an average of about 5.3 nautical miles, NASA said. That took the station into the correct position for the October Soyuz TMA-11 and Discovery dockings.
