Incredible week behind me!
Together with Anton and Terry I have passed my final qualification exams both in the Soyuz and the Russian segment of the International Space Station and yesterday I have been part of a series of traditional events that mark the road to the launchpad. It’s been an emotional roller coaster!
But let’s catch up one thing at a time.
On Tuesday the prime crew had their full day exam on the Russian segment and we, as the backup crew, faced our Soyuz exam. We showed up early to get into our Sokol suits and at 8:20 we stepped in front of the commission. After reporting that we were ready to take our exam, our Commander Anton picked one of five sealed envelopes containing a list of five failures that would be injected in our profile during the day. Of course, we were not shown the content of the envelope.
To be honest, in our usual training sessions we practice dealing with a lot more malfunctions than just five. But it’s also true that there’s a lot of mistakes that can be made even on a nominal profile and we had many eyes checking our every move!
In the morning we flew a profile from start to docking, which went pretty smooth until a double failure at 40 meters from the docking port forced us to inhibit the autoescape maneuver that the computer was about to initiate and to take over manually. Shortly thereafter we also had a failure of a docking sensor that led to onboard logic to initiate a retrograde burn: again, we had to override the automatic sequence and take over manually to complete the docking.
The biggest challenge, however, came in the afternoon. Turns out we picked the envelope with the most complex scenario: a fire just after undocking. Anton and I had to work parallel procedure for several critical minutes, with me dealing with the fire and him setting up the system for a braking burn for an emergency descent. After I “depressurized” the descent module to put out the fire, we rejoined on the same procedure to get ready for the burn and… the main computer failed, forcing us to quickly set up for a manual activation of the engine in what we call the analogue loop.
After a successful burn, separation, atmospheric reentry and parachute deployment, the exam was declared concluded. No significant mistakes were made and we ended the day with a perfect score! A great feeling, indeed, for all of us.
Picture: NASA
(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/
09/05/2014