Thursday and Friday Terry, Anton and I had our very last training sessions in the Russian segment mockups and in the Soyuz simulator, respectively.
We’ll only go back in there once more next week for the final exams. Believe it or not, tomorrow we’ll start our last week of training.
The Russian segment exam will be first, on Thursday. I’ve talked about it here, when we took this exam as backup crew in May:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SamanthaCristoforetti/posts/EebhSgStjUa
What has changed since then is that Terry and I will report to the commission in the morning, pick the envelope with the scenarios and then… take a break. That’s right, we’ll only join Anton in the afternoon for 4 hours, instead of participating for the full 8 hours. That’s in recognition of the fact that, on Station, it’s really the cosmonauts who work in the Russian segments and non-Russians only perform very basic operations. Or, of course, emergency responses.
Basic operations include, for example using the com system, which is a bit more complicated in the Russian segment, because there’s more communication options and the crew actually does most of the reconfigurations. When the ISS passes over the Russian ground sites, we need to use the Russian segment VHF transmitters and receivers. Otherwise, we connect the Russian segment audio system to the USOS segment and use its Ku-Band or S-Band channels: voice is then transmitted to Mission Control Moscow via Houston (and viceversa). Since Russian VHF passes are few and not very long, we typically have one Space-To-Ground channel on S-Band dedicated to Russian communication. There’s three more channels that can be used for communication with Houston, Munich, Tsukuba and Huntsville. Sometimes one of those channels will be “privatized”, for example for our weekly medical conferences with our flight surgeon or for our weekly conferences with our family. “Privatized” really relates to the ground: anybody could potentially listen in on Station from another module. Except that this would be extremely bad space etiquette!
Other basic ops we need to be able to perform on the Russian segment are related to simply being a human: using the toilet, get water, prepare food. Most of the Russian rations are in cans, which only need to be heated. Juices, tea and coffee, as well as soups, are dehydrated instead, so we need to add water. What I’m holding in my hand in the picture is bread: it comes in little cubes that you can put in your mouth whole, so no crumbles! And there are little slots in the heater dedicated to those bread packages, so that you can heat them along with your food cans: certainly not your freshly baked bread from the bakery, but not bad for a space galley!
26/10/2014