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Welcome to Space to Ground, I'm Kathryn Clayton. A few crew members said goodbye

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preparations for serious spacewalk and
plenty of science make for another busy

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week on the International Space Station.

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Three station crew members closed the

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hatch on their Soyuz spacecraft, undock
from station and made the trip back to Earth.

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NASA astronaut Nick Hague, Expedition
60 and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin,

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and the United Arab Emirates
astronaut Hazzaa Ali Almansoori ended

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their time on station Thursday. Hague and Ovchinin completed a 203 day mission that

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spanned three thousand, two hundred and
forty eight orbits of Earth or eighty

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point eight million miles.
This was Hague second spaceflight and

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the third for Ovchinin. Almansoori
wrapped up an eight day stay on the station.

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Their undocking marked the
beginning of Expedition 61. European

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Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano
will command the Expedition 61 crew

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comprised of NASA astronauts Christina
Koch,

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Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan, and
Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Skripochka.

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And things kick into
high gear for the crew this Sunday with

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the first of five complex spacewalk
scheduled in October.

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The spacewalkers will continue the ongoing work to
upgrade the large external batteries on

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the station, swapping older nickel
hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion

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batteries recently delivered on the
Japanese HTV-8. The upcoming battery

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swaps will be unique from previous
spacewalks which use extensive robotics to do

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the heavy lifting. The batteries set to
be replaced starting on Sunday are

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located on the far end of the station's
backbone, also called the truss, and are

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out of range for the Canadarm2. This
means the astronauts will have to carry

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the four hundred plus pound battery packs
back and forth by hand.

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Sunday's spacewalk is expected to last
over six hours with coverage on NASA TV

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starting at 6:30 a.m. Eastern.

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Amidst the departures in the spacewalk preparations,

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astronaut Christina Koch still had time
for science.

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She kept the Biomolecule Extraction and
Sequencing Technology or BEST

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investigation on task with sample
transfers and Culture Media exchanges.

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DNA sequencing allows researchers to
explore the molecular world. The best

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investigation seeks to advance
sequencing in space in three ways:

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Identifying microbes that cannot be
detected using traditional methods;

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assessing microbial mutations in the
genome because a spaceflight; and

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performing direct RNA sequencing.
Sequencing in space allows for real-time

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snapshot of gene expression, which will
help protect humans during future space

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exploration missions and help monitor
the presence of microbes in remote

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locations on Earth.

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Keep sending in your
questions using the hashtag AskNASA and