This last week I spent quite a bit of time at the Neutral Buoyancy Facility. The picture I’m sharing is from last week’s suited run with crew-mate Scott Kelly.
As you can see in the photo, as soon as we are lowered into the water at the beginning of a training day, the safety divers take charge of us. Before we start our six hours of hard work, it’s time for their show!
First they give a shake to the suit to get rid of the air bubbles that might be trapped in the folds of the external garment. After that, any remaining stream of air bubbles would indicate a leak of the suit, so this is a good time for a final check. After a go from the suit engineer who’s watching from the pool deck, the divers take us to the bottom of the pool to do our initial weigh-out.
The purpose of the weigh-out is to make sure we’re neutrally buoyant in the water. In the first place, of course, that we don’t have a tendency to rise or fall. And then there is rotation. While we run our communication checks and we listen to the safety briefs, the divers spin us around in all directions to detect any tendencies of the suit to rotate along its axis. To neutralize those tendencies, they can insert small blocs of weights or foam of different densities into dedicated pouches located around the legs, on the backpack and on the chest area.
It’s an art, rather than a science. And adjustments are needed throughout the run to compensate for changes in configuration, water depth at in which we are working and the tendency of the suit to expand after several hours in the water.
Credit: NASA/Stafford
(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
02/11/2013