Back at the Soyuz controls today to fly some manual docking. Always a great way to end a training day!
As you probably know, the Soyuz docks to the Space Station automatically if everything is nominal. Our manual docking training covers for two types of contingency: a failure of the on-board computer and a failure of the Kurs, which is the systems of antennas (both on the Soyuz and on Station) that gives the computer the necessary information about the relative position and speed with respect to ISS.
A failure of the Kurs is a slightly lighter scenario, because a functioning computer can anyway make life easier in some ways. For example, when we make a correction of the orientation, the attitude thrusters inevitably give the Soyuz also a forward impulse: the computer automatically compensates for this with a burn in the aft direction, so that we don’t get forward speed that we never intended to acquire. If the computer fails, we have to do those compensations manually.
We also have different scenarios in terms of illumination (day or night), attitude mode of the Station (inertially stabilized or rotating with the local vertical as it moves around the Earth) and initial conditions (how far from Station? with a safe speed or with excessive speed that requires immediate actions to avoid collision with Station? already in front of the docking port or not?)
Also, different docking ports have slightly different challenges, mainly because of the different target alignment. In the pictures I have shown the four docking ports that a Soyuz can fly to: the Service Modules aft (yellow, an ATV is docked in the picture); Docking Compartment 1 and MRM2 (green, Soyuz or Progress docked in the picture); and MRM1 (red, port is free in the picture).
We also practice relocating the Soyuz from one docking port to another. That’s by the way not a contingency mode: relocations can only be flown manually.
(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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha
03/12/2013