Today Anton, Terry and I were back in the Soyuz simulator for a pretty dense training day.
We started out with the approach profile to ISS and lost the Kurs system – the antennas that orient us to Station – just before the last burn on the main engine. If that happens, the compuer will still give you that burn based on the last good state vector it had from the Kurs. Basically, since it knows the position and velocity at the moment of the Kurs failure, it can propagate the state vector to the future and still calculate the burn.
However, propagating the state vector without the possibility of correcting it with the antenna measurement leads to errors that accumulate as time passes. That’s why, after that final burn and within 3 km from ISS, the computer stops working the approach profile and we, as the crew, are on our own. No big deal, since we’re trained for manual approach and docking.
As Anton was bringing us in manually, just a few minutes from contact, the computer also failed completely. Not that it mattered much at that point, so close to arrival, except that…
just after docking we realized we had a leak in the Soyuz! we ended up rushing to undock again and then we had to organize an emergency descent fully manually: Program 5 dies with the computer! By the way, if you missed it, you can read about Program 5 in this previous logbook.
A training session never ends when we leave the sim, of course. After a quick break, it’s debrief time, as you can see in the picture. Together with our instructor Dima we go over the events, especially any mistakes or actions that could have been done better or differently, so that we can try to perform better next time!
(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/
12/02/2014