Many different things going on today for me at Johnson Space Center.
First thing in the morning a couple of hours of eye examinations: partly an annual requirement and partly related to the additional set of medical tests we have to undergo before a long-duration spaceflight. Not my favorite exam, because it requires inducing a dilation of the pupils with special eye drops. For a few hours afterwards the eyes are quite sensitive to light and it’s hard to read.
Fortunately my vision was almost back to normal by the time I had a phlebotomy practice class: thanks to my countryman Luca, who works here at JSC and volunteered to have me draw his blood twice today!
I had to use my eyes and move them very quickly between camera views also in my last class, a refresher in flying the arm in support of a spacewalk. We flew part of the procedure that Koichi used on ISS last December in support of the pump module replacement contingency EVAs. If you missed it, here you can read some words about robotic support for EVAs, in particular what we call GCA.
In between I also had a class on cold stowage operations. We have a lot of cold stowage needs on ISS, both for science as well as for medical exams, since we routinely take blood and urine samples that need to be conserved and then returned to Earth for analysis. In the picture you can see me practicing working with the Melfi – actually only one representative unit. The actual Melfi has several of those freezer units and we have three Melfi racks onboard. We use them to stow cold packs as well, which in turn we use when samples have to be returned to Earth to prevent breaking the cold chain.
(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/
10/03/2014