Quiet Easter Sunday here on ISS, no work at all on my schedule, although I did a little bit of work off the “task list”. Oh, I don’t think I ever told you about the task list, time to change that!
The task list is a pool of activities that have been prepared by the ground, but don’t have a high enough priority to be put on the regular schedule. If we want to do some work in our free time, or if time frees up because some activity could be completed quicker than expected, or because a planned activity was aborted, we can browse the task list and find useful things to do.
Some are bigger tasks of several hours, others are little housekeeping tasks, like replacing the batteries or the shell of a laptop, or reconfiguring stowage in preparation of an upcoming activity. Packing and unpacking a cargo vehicle is also often on the task list, in case we want to work ahead during our free time.
And since being late with packing is really not an option, we always get a head start: the stowage specialists on the ground send up pre-pack gather lists well before a vehicle actually shows up, so we can start getting return bags ready. In the picture you can see the Node 2 endcone with all the bags we already started to pack for Dragon. Compare it with the way it looks about a month ago for our Exp 42 crew picture!
Recording video messages or educational videos for outreach purposes is also typically on the task list, as well as a couple of procedures that are permanent entries: changing the solid waste container and the urine container in our space toilet. After the first couple of times, you don’t really need a procedure for that, but an activity also has a stowage note attached, which in this case tells you which new containers to get, where to find them and where to stow the removed ones.
As you know, every item is tracked on the Space Station: by part number, barcode , serial number.. or all three of them!
Things still get lost occasionally, unfortunately. We’re all humans and as such are prone to making mistakes: if something ends up in the wrong place (in the real world or in the inventory system), who knows when it’s going to be found! Also, things accumulate over time that should actually have been disposed of a long time ago. Not unlike most people’s homes, we can’t afford to accumulate things that are no longer necessary, because we need the space for new hardware to support the science program.
The European laboratory Columbus, after having been on orbit for about 7 years now, has seen a little bit of that. When I arrived back in November there were quite a few stowage bags on the rack fronts: so much science going on, so little space to stow the equipment! Luckily ATV5 and SpX-5 took away some bags that were no longer used and some optimization of the available volume in the endcone has cleaned up the cabin quite a bit.
In order to optimize more, on the weekends I have been doing photo-audits of our main stowage rack in Columbus, the Deck 4 rack. The stowage team at COL-CC, the COSMOs, want to have the full picture of what’s in those lockers, in order to devise a consolidation plan that will hopefully save some space! So I have been snapping away… patiently, locker by locker, bag by bag, item by item, nicely showing all the barcodes and serial numbers.
And you thought that being an astronaut was all glamour and adrenaline, didn’t you?
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) Tradducción en español por +Carlos Lallana Borobio
aqui: https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
08/04/2015