It’s weekend! Looking ahead to what’s coming up next week, one of the big events will be a Track & Capture class with Butch (crewmate Barry Wilmore).
Track & Capture training prepares crewmembers for the grappling of a visiting vehicle, specifically the ones that we call Free Flyers, because they can not dock autonomously to ISS. All those cargo resupply ships (HTV, Dragon, Cygnus) have a grapple pin that can be captured with the end effector of the robotic arm and, right next to it, a visual target for the astronaut to align the arm properly. The “Track” part of it consists in matching the residual translation and rotation rates of the vehicles with respect to Station while it’s in station keeping. Real vehicles have been pretty steady so far, but we see quite significant rates in training!
I’ve done a lot of solo Track & Capture training, meaning myself and the instructor. Next week’s class with Butch will be the first one in which we practice coordination and team work with actual crewmates. While one person is at the hand controllers concentrating on the target and performing the capture, the second person has the overall awareness and runs the checklists in case of an off-nominal situation.
Btw, yesterday on orbit Karen Nyberg captured HTV-4 with the assistance of Chris Cassidy. You can see them at their Cupola workstation in this picture shared by Luca Parmitano.
10/08/2013