That was the beginning of the day for myself and my crewmates Anton and Terry. As soon as the Service Module filled up with simulated smoke, we grabbed our gas masks. We took a deep breath, put them on and then exhaled into the chemical cartridge to start the reaction that would give us oxygen to breath for the next hour or so. It’s an isolated system: the reaction uses the CO2 and water vapor we exhale to generate oxygen. It’s also an exothermic reaction, meaning it generates heat: it takes a while to get used to breathing the warm, dry gas supply from the cartridge and we all had our share of coughing, but certainly better than being exposed to combustions smokes on a real day on orbit!
We did find and put out the fire in our first scenario and also went through the procedures to start the cleaning process of the atmosphere.
On our second scenario we simulated that we could not put out the fire. Since our Soyuz was docked to the “burning” module, we had to evacuate. The idea was for us to practice getting into our Sokol suits with our masks on and going through quick undocking procedures for an arbitrary orientation of the Station. A story for another day!
Photo credit: Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center
(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
12/12/2013