In the last logbook I’ve told you about last week Soyuz final exam. The following day, on Wednesday, we swapped placed with the prime crew: they flew the Soyuz and we spent 8 hours working in the mockups of the Russian segment.
Let’s face it, this exam is especially important for Anton: all the complex tasks were assigned to him because, as a cosmonaut, on orbit he will mostly work on the Russian segment, while Terry and myself will mostly operate in the US/European/Japanese modules. But we tried to make our instructors proud by performing our relatively simple tasks flawlessly. Also, Wednesday was the “Day of the radio” in Russia, a day to recognize and celebrate all specialists working in the field of radio communication. On such a day, no mistakes were allowed in the use of the com system! And to be honest, the com system on the Russian segment can be somewhat confusing.
Just like on the Soyuz exam, at the beginning of the day we reported to the commission to pick our envelope with the failures we would be confronted with during the day. Again, as a specialist for the Russian segment Anton had to deal with all the malfunction, except the big emergency scenario that concludes the exam.
In our case, we got a depressurization scenario: at some point we got a call from a simulated Houston CapCom telling us that they were seeing a drop in pressure. We checked our portable pressure gauges, confirmed the drop, pressed the depress emergency button to iniated the vehicle’s autoresponse, reconfigured the com system to have Houston and Moscow on all channels and off we were to our Soyuz, to make sure that our ride home itself wasn’t the source of the leak.
Retreating to the Soyuz for a few minutes also gives the air flow sensors a chance to work. They are placed at the hatches between modules and, in case of a rapid pressure drop, they should be able to determine the module that is leaking. Sure enough, we had picked a relatively simple exam scenario: when we came back to check the Russian command laptops in the Service Module, they did show a positive resolution of the air flow sensors. Our leaking module was found! A series of isolation procedures later, we were officially done with the last of our exams.
After our debrief, it was time to celebrate! Together with the community of instructors and people who support us in the most diverse capacities, we joined the prime crew for many hours of partying at the rhythm of traditional Russian toasts!
(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/
11/05/2014