Another day of ATV training for Sasha and myself at the European Astronaut Centre.
In the morning we had more practice with rendez-vous and docking malfunction. In the afternoon we’ll have a long simulation of attached phase operations: that’s all that occurs when ATV is docked to the International Space Station.
ATV is a resupply ship and it can bring, among many other things, water (from Torino, Italy, by the way). All ATVs so far have brought “Russian” water, which is supplemented with silver ions to prevent microbial growth. “American” water uses iodine instead and the two should not be mixed.
“Russian” water can be transfered into the big tanks in the service module, or into portable water tanks, like the one you can see in the picture. One of these tanks is also always installed in the toilets to collect urine, although the US toilet is now nominally connected to the Urine Processing Assembly and the portable urine tank is a backup option.
Managing water and waste fluids on board is a complex tasks that is the responsibility of dedicated specialists on the ground. If it is decided that some urine must be disposed of as waste, we can transfer it into the ATV tanks once we have offloaded the fresh water to Station. The portable tanks have a soft bladder inside that actually contains the fluid: by applying pressure in the volume outside of the bladder, we can “squeeze” the fluid out and into the ATV tanks.
This is what the setup you see in the picture is for: once we have established the connection to the water control panel and opened the valves, we can transfer the water by pressurizing the bladder via a compressor or, as in the case of the picture, with a manual pump – in the unlikely event that all compressors onboard failed.
As you can imagine, once we have transferred some urine, we really don’t want any confusion about what kind of fluid is in the ATV tanks. Just to be sure, we swap the blue water label for the orange one you see in the picture!
(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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha
27/11/2013