Passed my manual docking exam today! Now I am officially qualified to dock the Soyuz to the Space Station. I doubt I will ever have to do that, because the Commander is prime for this task, while the flight engineer is a just-in-case backup. But it doesn’t matter: I’m one of those people who enjoys immensely simply getting to the point of mastering something!
First Anton and I took our regular places and Anton flew his exam profiles. Then we swapped places, I sat in the Commander seat with the hand controllers in front of me and flew my own four profiles.Each profile docks to a different docking port. You can check Logbook L-357 for an overview of the ports.
On the exam day, we always start with the simplest task, as a warm up: moving the Soyuz from one docking port to another. After the hooks open and the pushers give us a separation speed, we move out to a distance of 40-60m, fly around to the other port and dock again.
The next profiles are in random order.
In two of them we are around 300 m from ISS and we’re not aligned to the docking port. We fly in to a safe distance of about 200 meters, hold that distance and perform a fly-around to align ourselves with the docking port. Then we fly in to a a distance of 50-100 meters and hold position again: we roll if necessary to align the target in our view, we retract one antenna that, if extended, would impede docking, we make sure that the docking system is ready and then we receive permission from MCC-Moscow (or the instructor) to go for docking. Most people, including me, hold position again at around 2 meters to make sure that we have a perfect alignment and to be able to give a known impulse starting from zero velocity, so that we can dock within the allowed range of 6-15cm/sec.
(There was a more extensive discussion of the velocity issue here)
Finally, we get a scenario in which we are already aligned to the docking port. In this situation, the auto-escape is enabled on the vehicle: if the computer fails, there is no way to override it, so there will be an automatic braking burn on two sets of thrusters for 30 seconds. Once that’s complete, our job is to take over manually, stop the separation motion and move in again. Typically quite quickly, because this scenario has eclipse coming up within a few minutes and it’s hard to see the Station from far away at night, even with the light turned on.
That’s it flying the Soyuz manually until next summer. I’ll miss it!
(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/
28/04/2014