(AGENPARL) – ven 15 settembre 2023 September 15, 2023 
RELEASE 23-104
*NASA Astronaut Tracy C. Dyson Receives Second Space Station Assignment*
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NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is assigned to a mission to the International
Space Station as a flight engineer and member of the Expedition 70/71 crew.
Dyson will launch on the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft.
*/Credits: NASA/Andrey Shelepin/*
NASA has assigned astronaut Tracy C. Dyson [1] to her second long-duration
mission to the International Space Station as a flight engineer and member of
the Expedition 70/71 crew.
Dyson will launch on the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft in March 2024 and
spend approximately six months aboard the International Space Station. She
will travel to the station with Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and
spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus, both of whom will
spend approximately 12 days aboard the orbital complex.
During her expedition, Dyson will conduct scientific investigations and
technology demonstrations that help prepare humans for future space missions
and benefit people on Earth. Among some of the hundreds of experiments
ongoing during her mission, Dyson will continue to study how fire spreads and
behaves in space with the Combustion Integrated Rack [2], as well as
contribute to the long-running Crew Earth Observations [3] study by
photographing Earth to better understand how our planet is changing over
time.
After completing her expedition, Dyson will return to Earth in fall 2024 with
Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on the Soyuz MS-25
spacecraft. Kononenko and Chub are slated to launch Friday, Sept. 15, with
NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft. Kononenko and
Chub will remain aboard the orbital laboratory for about one year. O’Hara,
who will spend six months aboard the space station, will return with
Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft.
NASA selected Dyson as an astronaut in June 1998, and during her previous two
flights, logged more than 188 days in space. Dyson first launched aboard the
space shuttle Endeavor on STS-118 in 2007, serving as a mission specialist.
During the mission, the crew successfully added the starboard-5 truss segment
to the station’s “backbone” and a new gyroscope. In 2010, she served as
flight engineer for Expedition 23/24 and performed three successful
contingency spacewalks, logging 22 hours and 49 minutes outside the station
as she helped remove and replace a failed pump module for one of two external
ammonia circulation loops that keep internal and external equipment cool.
Dyson has worked inside the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space
Center in Houston as spacecraft communicator, known as capcom, for both space
shuttle and space station operations. She also served as the lead capcom for
various space station missions, as well as the development of the capcom
cadre for Boeing’s Starliner Mission Operations Team. Other technical
assignments included leading the development of the spacewalk qualification
training flow, which she helped to complete for the 2017 class of NASA
astronauts.
Born in Arcadia, California, Dyson received a Bachelor of Science degree in
chemistry from California State University, Fullerton, in 1993, and a
doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Davis, in 1997.
For more than 22 years [4], humans have continuously lived and worked aboard
the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and
demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on
Earth. As a global endeavor, 244 people from 19 countries have visited the
unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 3,000 research and
educational investigations from researchers in 108 countries and areas.
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