The weekend is almost over here in Star City and it’s time to get ready for another training week.
Looking back at last week, we wrapped up the training on Friday with a long simulation session in the Russian segment mockup reviewing crew response in case of a depressurization. This review will come in handy next week, when we’ll do this training in the vacuum chamber, with actual “leaks” and real pressure drops across closed hatches. I’m very much looking forward to experiencing this!
Last week I also had an interesting session on the tilt table with the purpose of conducting a fit check for the Braslet (Браслет). This item was first introduced to me last summer, together with a number of Russian clothing and personal hygiene products. It was then that my thigh measurements were taken in order to produce my personal Braslet, that will fly with me on the Soyuz.
The idea is pretty simple: you have an anatomically shaped strap that you can tighten around your upper thigh to restrict venous blood flow from the legs to the upper body. This is used in the first days of spaceflight to help in the adaptation to weightlessness conditions, in which there is an uncomfortable fluid shift towards the head.
The big numbers you can see in the picture are a scale that allows you to tighten the Braslet to a specified value, which is determined pre-flight. That’s when the tilt table comes in: by tilting a person head down you can simulate the weightlessness-induced effect of blood rushing to the head.
To have an objective measurements of the effect of the tilting on my circulatory system, sensors were applied around my head. First I was tilted a few times between 50° head-up and 50° head-down. Then, once the specialists were satisfied with the baseline data, they helped me put on the Braslet. We went through a couple of iteration steps to find out how much I should tighten it to have the expected effect. And the effect was quite significant. I realized it when the Braslet was removed: I was still tilted back 50° and, as soon as the strap was released, I could immediately feel the blood rushing to the head.
The tilt bed is also used in Baikonour for pre-launch conditioning, as you can see in this picture with ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/5238287463/
(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/
09/02/2014