One of the good things about being an astronaut is that you can lie down on your back all day and call it training. Today I spent eight hours lying down in a Soyuz seat: first for a four-hour sim, then for manual docking and finally for manual descent. This latter we usually train in a regular seat, but this week the control panel is installed in the centrifuge for the exams of the next departing crew, just like it happened back on L-423.
For our last simulator session on this training trip to Star City Anton, Terry and I flew a couple of times the rendezvous with ISS: one time based on the four-orbit quick rendezvous and one on the old two-day profile. The first crews that flew the new, fast scheme last year actually had to pass exams in both. Now the quick rendezvous has officially become the nominal mode, so we will have only one exam on ascent and rendezvous and we will play it just like on a real day: we will start out with the four-orbit profile and we’ll be ready to transition to the two-day backup plan if a malfunction forces us to do so. That could be an issue with the computer, with burns or with the determination of the state vector from the ground – or really any issue, big or small, that Moscow wants to have some time to work on before sending us on a trajectory towards Station.
So, that wraps up this trip to Star City. Incredibly enough, next time I’ll be in Russia it will be for some final training and then the certification exams as the backup of Maksim, Reid and Alex. And after that I’ll go to Kazakhstan to see those guys launch – and to be ready for the extremely unlikely event that we have to launch in their place. I can’t believe it’s coming so soon.
I’ll miss flying the Soyuz in the next six weeks, but I’ll have other interesting training keeping me busy in Tsukuba, Houston and Cologne. Next logbook from Japan on Monday!
Photo credit: GCTC (Manual docking)
(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/
19/02/2014