Four nights ago I watched my friends of Expedition 40/41 climb onto their rocket and, a few hours later, become an ever smaller light dot in the night sky of Baikonur. After following their successful docking to ISS, I’ve flown back to Moscow and then home to Europe. It’s been four days since I’ve left Kazakhstan, but the images have kept coming back, as though a part of me was still lingering there. Maybe because we’re now prime crew and that’s where our path will bring us again in six months time. Maybe because it’s like living a different life for two weeks and you don’t want to let it go. Maybe because coming back means facing the hard truth that we have six months of intense training ahead of us, before we can climb on that rocket ourselves.
Scheduling wisdom calls for two weeks of vacation after the backup flow and before jumping into prime flow, however scheduling constraints called for an exception in my case, so here I am at the European Astronaut Centre for a week of payload and ATV training.
Right in the morning I’ve been reunited with Sasha for some refresher training in ATV rendezvous and docking. After a short review of the possible malfunctions by our instructor Oleg, we tried our skills in the sim and quickly reestablished our good crew coordination. After all, it’s not been that long since our exam.
In the afternoon I got a class in the assembly of the Plasma Kristall 4 experiment, due to arrive on Station in the fall. PK-4, to be installed in Columbus, is a joint ESA/Russian experiment studying the properties of complex plasma in microgravity, with actual experiment runs will starting next year.
(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/
02/06/2014