The International Space Station’s itinerary on Wednesday included everything from performing delicate medical operations in microgravity to preparing for them

The Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion’s itin­er­ary on Wednes­day includ­ed every­thing from con­duct­ing del­i­cate med­ical oper­a­tions in micro­grav­i­ty to prepar­ing to haul away garbage 260 miles above Earth. Expe­di­tion 67 crew mem­bers also con­tin­ued to study a vari­ety of space phe­nom­e­na to improve the lives of peo­ple on Earth and in space.

On their jour­ney beyond low Earth orbit to the Moon, Mars and beyond, future astro­nauts must act inde­pen­dent­ly of mis­sion con­trollers. As a result, NASA Flight Engi­neers Kjell Lind­gren and Bob Hines trained today to diag­nose and treat acute med­ical con­di­tions with­out ground sup­port. Hines prac­ticed ultra­sound scans on Lind­gren’s blad­der and kid­neys for the Autonomous Med­ical Offi­cer Sup­port Demon­stra­tion (AMOS). The study aims to help crews become more self-reliant and reduce mis­sion risks, as com­mu­ni­ca­tion delays increase the far­ther a space­craft trav­els from Earth.

The orbit­ing lab’s four astro­nauts are also prepar­ing to clean up the garbage this week­end, which will require pro­ce­dures more com­pli­cat­ed than bag­ging garbage on Earth. Astro­nauts Jes­si­ca Watkins of NASA and Saman­tha Cristo­fore­t­ti of ESA (Euro­pean Space Agency) today com­plet­ed the load­ing of dump­sters in the NanoRacks Bish­op air­lock. They were assist­ed by Lind­gren and Hines as they closed Bish­op’s hatch and depres­sur­ized the air­lock. The dump­ster will be eject­ed into Earth­’s atmos­phere on Sat­ur­day for a fiery but safe disposal.

Roscos­mos sta­tion com­man­der Oleg Arte­myev stud­ied how future crew mem­bers might pilot space­craft or pilot robots on plan­e­tary mis­sions for a long-run­ning Russ­ian probe. Flight engi­neer Denis Matveev con­tin­ued to con­fig­ure nanosatel­lites for future deploy­ment and worked in car­go oper­a­tions on the sup­ply ship ISS Progress 80. Cos­mo­naut Sergey Kor­sakov spent his day main­tain­ing elec­tron­ics and com­put­ers before study­ing inter­na­tion­al crew dynam­ics and col­lect­ing radi­a­tion readings.

Sum­ma­ry of the news:

• On Wednes­day, the crew will work on autonomous med­i­cine and garbage collection
• Check all the news and arti­cles from the lat­est space news updates.