It’s vacation time! I’m enjoying some pleasant summer days in my home country, Italy, recharging the batteries before the final stretch of training.
Last training day before vacation was Thursday last week. I couldn’t write a logbook, though, because there was a lot going on after training that day. For one thing, at the European Astronaut Centre we hosted the first in-flight-call with my fellow Shenanigan +Alexander Gerst: lots of TV crews and media folks came to ask him questions for about 20 minutes. Alex looked great and already very at ease with weightlessness.
Afterwards I had a pleasant interview with my friends of Astronauticast – the very same gang of knowledgeable space enthusiasts who translate my logbook in Italian. If you understand Italian, here is the interview (right at the beginning of the podcast):
https://www.astronauticast.com/archives/2521
But I did have some training as well. For example I had a briefing on the Kubik, a stand-alone unite of the European Space Agency, that provides a controlled temperature between 6°C and 38°C for living samples, like cell cultures. Thanks to a centrifuge insert, that you can see in the picture, samples can be exposed to variable accelerations, that can be set between 0,2G and 2G in steps of 0,1G. If samples just need to be exposed to a weightless environment, the centrifuge can be replaced with a passive insert.
The Kubik is a simple and cheap way of performing life science experiments on the Space Station.
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
09/06/2014