Sasha and I had a chance today to dive back into the ATV* world today.
There’s a dedicated simulator here in Star City in which we can practice rendez-vous scenarios and keep up our proficiency, after the initial course we had at the European Astronaut Centre back in Cologne. As the backup crew assigned to the rendez-vous of ATV5 this coming summer, we need to be as good at it as the prime guys, the other two Sashas (one being my fellow shenanigan Alexander Gerst).
I also had an overview class on the Penguin suit. Here’s a picture:
Russian Penguin suit. Applies tension to spine to help recompress it to normal length after months in weightlessness! pic.twitter.com/JrUieIL9Ub
— Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 28, 2014
Russian doctors recommend that we wear it for several hours a day during the last month on ISS. It has a number of chords that apply a compression load between shoulders and pelvis: the purpose is to re-compress the spine, after the long exposure to weighlessness has caused it to elongate. In addition, you can adjust the tensions on the different chords in such a way that, in order to maintain posture, you need to work “against the suit” and train those little stabilization muscles that we use unconsciously on Earth but get quickly deconditioned on orbit.
Now time for some Soyuz manual docking practice!
*If you’re not familiar with ATV at all, here are some general words from an older logbook:
(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/
28/01/2014