Today Terry and I spent the day at the facilities of Soyuz manufacturer Energia in the town of Korolev in the Moscow metropolitan area. The name Korolev sounds familiar?
We had a number of different classes with high-fidelity hardware, including one on the docking system in which we could see the mechanism actually work, from the first capture of the probe head all the way to full probe retraction and closing of the hooks.
Unfortunately taking pictures is not allowed at Energia, but I have found this photo of the docking interface of an actual Soyuz or Progress.
In the green circle you can see the docking probe, which is fully retracted here. There are four petals on the probe: when any of these petals is pressed against the receiving cone of the Station during docking we get the “Contact” signal, the very beginning of the docking sequence.
Some time and several sensor signals later, the docking interfaces have made full contact and the hooks can be closed: you can see them in the picture, I have highlighted one pair in the yellow circle. In each pair, one hook is fixed and one is movable. The corresponding hooks on the Station sides are reversed, to that the movable hook of the Soyuz will grab the fixed hook of the Station and viceversa. We don’t always close hooks on both sides.
I have also highlighted in red one of the two spring pushers. During the docking sequence they are compressed as the interfaces are joined, thereby storing energy in the springs. At undocking, as soon as we open the hooks that energy is released and the Soyuz is literally pushed away. A simple, clever system!
(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
16/12/2013