Expedition 73 Astronauts Conduct Physics Experiments, Health Research, and Tech Tests on ISS

Aboard the International Space Station, the Expedition 73 Crew commenced the week with the Science hardware in focus. The crew then configured foam and material physics research gear. Significantly, they further installed a space technology demonstration to obtain the broader aspects. Also, the blood circulation studies became a part of the agenda, wherein the crew analyzed the perspectives. Lastly, they summed up the day by exploring the technicalities of the cargo operations. The crew began the week with some major configurations.

Exploring the Modules and Understanding Configurations

According to NASA, Mike Fincke and Jonny Kim, the Flight Engineers, gathered the essential hardware, swapped the power cables, and installed the foam Corsening shapes within the Fluid Science Laboratory. This investigation will explore the changes in foam over microgravity and how it will impact the food industries, both on Earth and in space.

Tranquility Module

Commenced by Mike Fincke, he then installed the Voyager Flytrap tech demo within the NanoRacks Bishop airlock to test an inflatable capture bag that could potentially be deployed in Moon and Mars missions, to capture orbital debris, collect samples, and promote space mining techniques on small asteroids. Soon after Fincke, Kim underwent NanoRacks airlock operations to configure Bishop for the Flytrap experiment.

Kibo Laboratory Module

Kimiya Yui, Flight Engineer, YAXA, then commenced his configuration in the Kibo Laboratory Module, wherein he worked on the Electrostatic Levitation Furnace by swapping hardware and configuring cables. Post that, he underwent the Harmony Module, where he installed a power supply to examine the techniques for the removal of humidity from the spacecraft.

Lastly, Station Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Flight Engineer Alexey Zubritsky experimented with wearing cuffs that measure the blood circulation of the astronauts through arms, wrists, and fingers for the Roscosmos circulatory system investigation. Further, other modules like Poisk, Zvezda service, and Nauka science were inspected.

Comments

Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

Search This Blog