Remember how I have told you on several occasions about emergency simulations, both here in Houston as well as in Russia?
See this logbook for example.
So far we had always only three-person emergency sims with Terry and Anton, my Soyuz crewmates. As you know, however, the Station crew is composed of six people. The crew of the Soyuz before us will be there when we arrive in November and will leave in March. At that point we will officially become Expedition 43. After a couple of weeks, we will be joined by a new Soyuz crew and we’ll be back to a six-person complement.
So, yesterday we had a chance to practice emergency response with our first crew of six, Expedition 42, joining Butch, Elena and Sasha.
What’s different with six people working the procedures? Well, in principle it is easier, because you have more crewmembers taking care of the different steps. But, as usual with teamwork, it’s essential to have good coordination and communication, otherwise you’ll end up making it worse by getting in each other way.
That’s why before the sim Expedition 42 Commander, Butch, took some time to make sure that we all understood what our roles would be during the different emergency responses. For example, in a fire scenario I was going to have the main responsibility for working at the computer to find suspected fire locations based on the telemetry signatures and to perform the power downs as required. During the depressurization response I was going to carry one of the portable pressure gauges: we monitor it after every hatch closure and, if the leak is on our side, we recalculate our new reserve time in the smaller remaining volume.
Of course, an emergency response is a dynamic situation. We had a good plan going in, but we also always adjusted it real-time as required. That’s perfectly fine, as long as there is a clear communication when you hand over responsibility of a task to somebody else.
I’m happy to say that our six-person team worked smoothly and efficiently together yesterday. A very good sign for our future time together on orbit!
Picture: ESA/Corvaja
On ammonia respirators after an ammonia leak.
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/
03/07/2014