This past Thursday Anton, Terry and I had a five-hour Routing Ops Sim in the ISS mockups (see Logbook L-403).
Anything that is not science and is not a contingency situation is a good candidate for these simulations, including of course maintenance activities. As you can imagine, the Station is a complex machine that requires some care. The ground keeps track of preventive maintenance requirements on every piece of equipment and schedules the necessary tasks when they’re are due. Of course, once in a while something does break and in that case a corrective maintenance activity will be scheduled.
To save crew time, the ground will try to take care as much as possible of all the steps that can be performed remotely. For example, the first steps of a procedures will often contain actions like opening an electric switch or commanding a valve in a particular position to put the equipment in a safe configuration for hands-on work. Since the specialists sitting on console at Mission Control can also send those commands, it’s not unusual for the crew to receive a call that they are “Go” to start with a later step in the procedure.
Of course, only the crew can put hands on the equipment. And for all those hands-on activities, as you can see in the picture, we have a tool-box that would make any DIY enthusiast envious!
You can see some more pictures of our May routine ops sim here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157633526267514/
Photo credit: NASA
(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
27/10/2013