Terry is back in Star City and will join Anton and me for a long Soyuz sim in the Sokol suit tomorrow. In the picture, you can see Terry and myself before a similar sim last December.
We had our two-hour brief today with our instructor Dima. The plan for tomorrow is to have a longer-than-usual sim (five hours instead of four) and go through the full sequence of events from the moment we enter the descent module on the launch pad to docking at the International Space Station.
Sure, in real life it would still take a little bit longer, but in the simulator we can cut away the time in which not much would be happening, since waiting doesn’t have a lot of training value.
After ascent and separation from the rocket, things go pretty fast with the new six-hour rendezvous profile. While I conduct the leak checks and verify that all systems are nominal (in the sim they never are!) Anton goes straight into monitoring of the dynamic mode: in fact, the automatic cycle starts a couple of minutes after injection into orbit, no time to waste.
If all goes well, the onboard computer builds its basic LVLH orientation (belly to the Earth and “nose” in the direction of flight), tests the Kurs system and gives two initial burns that raise and correct the orbit. Then there is some time for us to test the manual controls, before we move on to the second sequence of two orbital correction burns.
Then we transition immediately to the rendezvous mode and on we go all the way to docking.
This morning Anton and I already had similar four-hour sim, except that we had an engine failure during the second burn. If that happens, the automatic cycle stops and the quick 6-hours-launch-to-docking profile is not possible any more. Time to take it easy and get ready to spend two days in the little Soyuz, like in the old times!
Photo credit: GCTC
(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/
04/02/2014