Terry, Anton and myself put a couple more exams behind us in the last couple of days.
On Tuesday we passed our theory exams on the flight program – both Soyuz and Russian segment. Especially the Soyuz one was very interesting, because these are alway occasions to learn some little details from the people who control the flight from Mission Control Moscow.
Yesterday we had our exam on manual rendezvous – that’s where Anton needs to show his skills in flying a manual approach from about 2-3 km away from ISS to a station-keeping position at 50-100 meters from the docking port, while I go into the orbital module and use a laser range finder through a forward facing window to give him distance and velocity measurements.
This situation is contemplated in our two-day launch-to-docking profile, not in the currently nominal 6-hour profile. That’s because in the shorter profile there is no time before the start of the rendezvous burns to set up the laser range finder in the orbital module. If a failure were to occur when we’re still a few km away from Station, we would interrupt the approach and figure out the problem with the ground.
In the two-day profile, however, after the first two orbit-rising maneuvers we get a break, transfer to the orbital module and have time to set up the laser range finder, so that it is ready two days later when we actually fly our approach to ISS.
Today is a big holiday here in Russia, like in many places in the world. If you celebrate it, Happy 1st of May to you.
Here in Star City we are off until Monday, but with the big full-day Soyuz exam coming up next Tuesday, there will certainly be a lot of studying going on!
(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/
01/05/2014