It’s been a week of many lasts. That’s the way it is when you are at L-70!
On Friday I had my last 1G bref in preparation of – you guess it – my last NBL run next week. And on Thursday I had my last SAFER class.
You can read some more about SAFER training here. But actually this last class was a bit different because we tried the virtual reality setup that we have on ISS, which is used to practice SAFER rescue scenarios, but also to review a timeline in 3D before performing it on a spacewalk. Here’s a picture of how it looks like! https://twitter.com/vr_doug/status/510099878135865344/photo/1
And on Wednesday Terry and I had our last full-day Prep & Post class, reviewing the airlock operations conducted before and after a spacewalk. Believe it or not, it’s been almost three years since my first Prep & Post class: I have pictures from that event dated October 2011. At that time I wasn’t assigned to an ISS expedition, but I was training as though I was, having been designated ESA’s reserve astronaut. Regan, our Exp 42 lead EVA systems instructor, actually taught me that class back in 2011: I can safely say he’s taught me all I know about the EMU suit and the airlock operations.
Normally in a Prep & Post class we would pressurize the suits and devote some serious training time to the pre-breath protocols. I have explained a bit about that in this previous logbooks: L-470: Before EVA, L-390: Rehearsing pre- and post-EVA
On this last class, however, we did not pressurize and we focused instead on a thorough review of all the procedures. But the main goal was to make the most of a few hours in which we had a special guests, our Soyuz commander Anton. In the past, when we had only three people on ISS, cosmonauts were fully trained on the EMU and non-Russians were fully trained on the Orlan. After we started having 6 crewmembers onboard – three Russians and three non-Russians – the ISS moved to separate operations, in order to optimize training time, so everybody gets training only in “their” suit and spacewalk procedures. As ESA astronauts we are a bit of an exception, in that most of us (including me) are qualified both on the EMU and on the Orlan.
As you probably know if you’ve been following this logbook, suiting somebody up in the EMU is not such an easy task and having two extra hands to help is definitely desirable. Having Anton get hands-on on the EMU last week, helping in the suit-up process, will definitely pay off if he needs to help us on orbit!
Our second special guest was NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, who gave us a lot of valuable tips based on her experience of actually running airlock operations on ISS just last year.
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
(Trad ES – Currently not updated) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
14/09/2014