Good to be back in Star City! It’s quite a bit cooler here than it was in Europe – and certainly in Houston – but it’s very pretty: the trees are showing off all the rich colors of the fall. It’s just lovely out here, tucked away from the frenzy of Moscow and its frenetic traffic. And I definitely love that the training facilities are just a few minutes away by bike from the Profilactorium, where we have our accommodations as ESA astronauts.
I’ve only had two training days, but I’ve already had a chance to refresh all the skills that I will be tested on in the coming weeks, as part of our final certification: manual rendez-vous, manual docking and manual descent. Anton and I also started training for our complex full-day Soyuz exam (Terry will join us in another week). As per tradition, the first sim is pre-launch operations (what we do on the launch pad before start), ascent, injection into orbit and then… well, that depends on the good heart of our instructor. In our case, we had a leak – we were losing atmosphere into space – and so we had to come back with an emergency descent. That would be a very short flight!
I do want to mention that between training in Houston and returning to Star City I had several days of training at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne. That includes a final refresher of the Columbus systems, but also some additional training in the replacement of a Water-On-Off-Valve. There’s 10 of them in the Columbus thermal control system and one has been acting up recently, so it’s quite likely that I will be tasked to replace it – a spare is on orbit already.
I’ve also had quite a bit of training on experiments, like the EML (= Electro-Magnetic Levitator. Cool name, ah?). It arrived to ISS last summer on ATV5 and Alex, who’s up there right now, has already started to install it, but it looks like he won’t have enough time to finish the job and I’ll take over.
Here’s some more info about the EML: https://www.gizmag.com/msl-eml-iss/31042/
And of course EAC is also where we do Baseline Data Collection (BDC) for a number of human physiology experiments for ESA and ASI (the Italian Space Agency). So for example this week I had to sleep for two nights wearing a special shirt with integrated sensors for the experiment Wearable Monitoring. I talked about here.
An ultrasound of the heart was also part of this BDC, but will not be performed on orbit. For some other experiments, however, we have to do an ultrasound in space as well. For this purpose, we always have an experienced ultrasound operator, who provides A remote guidance from the ground, and in training we practice together to make sure that we communicate efficiently. An example of a protocol requiring an ultrasound on orbit is the ASI experiment Drain Brain. In the picture you can see a training session at EAC last August – Manuela is the instructor for this experiment, the remove guider is actually in another room.
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/
11/10/2014