Today Sasha and I passed our ATV rendezvous exam and were officially certified to perform the monitoring of the ATV docking.
As you probably know, the Automated Transfer Vehicle is totally autonomous in its approach and docking to the International Space Station. In fact, there is no way to take manual control of ATV and bring it in for docking, as our Russian crewmates can do with the Progress cargo ship.
But we do have humans in the loop: with the help of the camera and a number of visual cues and overlays, plus extensive telemetry information from the vehicle, the crew can monitor the approach and make sure that ATV remains within the nominal approach parameters in terms of speed, corridor, orientation.
We are expected to recognize and react within a few seconds to a number of possible deviations that can require us to command the ATV to retreat, escape or abort. A retreat is a less severe intervention that just sends ATV back to the previous hold point. An escape and an abort are instead serious disengage maneuvers that bring ATV to a safe distance and position with respect to Station for troubleshooting and a possible reattempt in the next days.
In the picture you can see ESA astronaut André Kuipers in front of the ATV control panel – yes, the big red button sends the abort command.
Here you can see a few pictures from today’s exam:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157640578415314/
The prime crew, including my fellow Shenanigan Alex, also passed their exam today!
(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://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
06/02/2014