SUBMITTED BY ARTHUR N1ORC - AMSAT A/C #31468

*Expedition 14 Crew Preps for Progress 24*

Image above: Gibraltar Bay in the western Mediterranean Sea, as photographed by an Expedition 14 crew member. Image credit: NASA. TO VIEW PICTURE GO TO: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Suni Williams spent the past week preparing for the arrival of ISS Progress 24. The cargo craft will launch on Wednesday, Jan. 17, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly after 9:00 p.m. EST. The docking is planned for Friday, Jan. 19 at approximately 10:00 p.m. The new Russian cargo ship will bring about 2½ tons of food, fuel, oxygen and supplies to the complex, including clothing and spacewalk hardware for the next station crew that will arrive in April.

Packed with discarded items, Progress 22 will undock from the station’s Pirs Docking Compartment Tuesday, Jan. 16 around 6:30 p.m. and its engines will be fired three hours later to send it back into the atmosphere where it will burn up.

In other activities, the crew worked for several hours in the Zvezda Service Module on a major systems replacement task, trained on the Robotics Onboard Trainer and relocated it to a new rack in the Destiny lab. They also repaired and tested a Russian exercise machine.

+ Read more about Expedition 14 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition14/index.html + Read more about Expedition 15 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition15/index.html + View crew's daily timelines http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/timelines/index.html