This Sunday night I’m preparing for another trip to Energia, the Soyuz manufacturer: departure from Star City early tomorrow morning with Terry!
In the meantime, picking up the logbook where I left off, I’d like to finish the story of our fire evacuation training last week. As you might remember, we practiced fire scenarios in the Russian segment of the Space Station and eventually we were confronted with a fire that, in our simulation, we could not put out.
To make things worse, the fire affected the module to which our Soyuz was docked, leaving us with no choice but to leave the Station. Now, putting on the pressure suits Sokol while wearing the gas mask is a bit of a challenge. Initially you put on the Sokol like you normally would, up to the arms. The fun comes next: you take a deep breath, hold it, take off the mask, slide your head through the neck ring and put the mask back on, the idea here being that you need to avoid breaking your protection from smoke and toxic combustions products.
For our simulation, we actually had to move from the building that houses the Station mockups to the one across the street with the Soyuz simulator. During the warm months crews actually walk across the street with the mask on, but with snow and ice on the ground it’s preferred that we take the mask off. So we got a non-functioning mask for the suiting up, making it a bit easier: in real life we would have to pay great attention at not collapsing the black soft bag – after an exhalation, that bag contains the supply of gas for the next breath!
After suiting up, we took our seats in the descent module of the Soyuz simulator, which our instructors had already filled with pretty thick smoke. At times I could hardly see the control panel! After connecting our suits to the Soyuz oxygen supply, we took another deep breath, took the gas mask off and closed the helmet, isolating ourselves from the smoke.
For the next couple of hours we then proceeded to perform an emergency undocking from Station as well as the fire-related actions. If you missed it, you can read about the latter in the L-350 Logbook!
You can also find more pictures here! (Photo credits: GCTC)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157638604385363/
(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
15/12/2013