A chilly day in Star City today. When I left this morning on my bike it was about -30°С. Luckily it’s nice and warm in the Soyuz simulator, where I got some more manual flying practice. In the picture you can see the dedicated simulator we use for this purpose. Inside it looks just like our regular descent module simulator, but it’s really specifically designed to present us with all kinds of manual approach and docking scenarios and to project accurate images on the periscope view as we fly. If you missed it, you can see our view and our controls here:
Please, don’t think that we can fire the big main engine of the Soyuz with those controllers though. We can only fire the small attitude thrusters: we have two sets of them and we nominally only use one at a time. If the main engine can give an acceleration of ca. 0.4 m/s2, one set of attitude thrusters only provides about one tenth of that acceleration. But that’s plenty, because by the time we are within 400 meters from Station we shouldn’t nominally have more than 2 m/s of closing velocity: to come to a full stop from that speed, if needed, we would only need to fire the small thrusters for 50 seconds.
We do practice scenarios in which the automatic control fails and we are way faster than we should be. If we recognize such a dangerous situation, we’re required to select both sets of thrusters simultaneously so that we can slow down twice as fast. At that point, it’s not about rendez-vous any more, but it’s about avoiding a possible collision with Station!
(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/
30/01/2014