Another busy day feeling like a scientist yesterday, training for several life science experiments, including one in which we’ll work with small plants.
One last class late afternoon was dedicated to the preparation of my vacuum chamber run next week, working with a Class 1 EVA suit and gloves. Class 1 is the designation of hardware that is meant for use in space (as opposed to training). The gloves, in particular, will be my custom-made prime and backup gloves: if we find no issues with them in the chamber, they will be packed and sent to Russia to fly with me on the Soyuz.
On Monday I will have a dry-run: we will go through all the pre-EVA airlock procedures, but the depressurization will be simulated. As in prep-and-post classes in the past, we will instead pressurize the suit to the 4.3 PSI over ambient. Here’s the story of a prep-and-post class.
On Tuesday we’ll have the so-called altitude run, in which we’ll actually depressurize the chamber to almost vacuum. For this, we need to go through pre-breath procedures, purging nitrogen from the body to prevent decompression sickness as the pressure is lowered. The protocol used in the chamber is the 4-hour in-suit protocol, which is exactly what it sounds: breathing pure oxygen in the suit for 4 hours.The suggestion here is to bring one or two movies to watch through a small window in the chamber door!
By the way, this will be my first time in the vacuum chamber in the NASA EMU suit, but I had the chance a while back to do a chamber run in the Russian Orlan suit. Here is that story, if you missed it!
https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2012/11/05/a-trip-into-vacuum/
Picture: Terry’s chamber run a couple of weeks ago. I helped suiting him up. (Credit: NASA)
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 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/
09/07/2014