It’s a beautiful summer week here in Star City and Terry, Anton and I are keeping up our proficiency in all thing Soyuz. I’ve had training sessions in manual approach, manual docking and manual descent and today we were all three back together in the Soyuz simulator.
We flew a rendezvous and docking profile, the first time as part of a nominal flight, which takes 6 hours (4 orbits) from launch to docking. The second time we simulated having transitioned to the old two-day flight profile because of some malfunction.
If you’re wondering what we would be doing for two days, waiting to rendezvous with Station… well, I’m not sure how we would decide to kill the time, but one thing is certain: most of the time we would be spinning! In fact, when there are no dynamic operations (i.e.: there’s no need to fire the thrusters or the main engine), the Soyuz is put in gyroscopic stabilization with the solar panels pointed at the Sun to maximize power generation. It’s actually not the greatest thing for the crew: any space sickness you’re experiencing, the spinning is guaranteed to make it worse (or to give you symptoms, if you didn’t have any). But unless you actively stabilize the attitude with thrusters, the only way to keep a stable orientation is to rotate on an axis.
Btw, I’ve explained this a little bit more in this post from – wow! – almost three years ago (I have been studying the Soyuz for a while, haven’t I?)
In the picture you can see the periscope view in the simulator as we were approaching the ISS. Looks like we were at a distance of about 200-250 meters: at that point we would be doing the fly-around to align ourselves with the docking port. The computer is still flying the approach, but the hand controllers are in the working positions (they’re pulled out before approach start), so that Anton can reach them if it’s necessary to transition to manual control.
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
(Trad ES – Currently not updated) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
13/08/2014