Another rainy and chilly weekend day in Star City. I guess I’ll work out in the gym again today, instead of running outside.
On the training side, I’ll review my notes from the class on the 4-orbit rendezvous profile. Believe it or not, I recently had to go back to classroom for a theory lesson!
As you might have heard, the trip to the ISS has become a lot shorter lately. Starting with the crew of Pavel Vinogradov this past spring, we’ve been experimenting with the “quick rendezvous” which brings the Soyuz to docking within about six hours (or four orbits) from launch.
It used to take two days to get to Station. After ascent and insertion into orbit, the ground personnel would track the Soyuz, measure its actual position and velocity and, based on that, calculate and upload to the onboard computer the data for the engine burns: when should the engine turn on? for how long? in what orientation should the capsule be? The goal of course is to get closer to the ISS and into a position from which the onboard computer can calculate the final rendezvous burns.
Now, it turns out that after hundreds of Soyuz and Progress launches Russian controllers have a lot of statistical data and can predict pretty well how the orbit will look like after launch. So we now insert the data for the first two burns when the rocket is still on the launchpad and get those first two burns done right away.
It means that after launch things will go pretty fast! As the board engineer, I will devote my attention mainly to the systems verification and to the leak checks, making sure we’re not losing air into free space. In the meantime Anton will monitor the beginning of the dynamic mode: in preparation of the engine burns, the Soyuz will orient itself along the local vertical (with the “belly” pointing to Earth) and he will be able to observe this procedure in his periscope view. Like in the picture, except that at this point Anton will see the Earth, not yet the Station.
Of course, as a good crew we’ll try to look each other over the shoulder as we work in parallel to make sure we don’t miss anything and we’re well on our way to humanity’s outpost in space!
#SamLogbook
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https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
21/07/2013