The training day will start in a couple of hours with a short lesson on the still camera that is taken out on spacewalks and with which EVA crew-members have taken stunning photos outside Station.
Then I’ll move on to a two-hour refresher on Crew Medical Officer skills. These classes have pretty serious currency requirements, as you can imagine. On the plan, among other things, a review of catheterization procedures, just in case microgravity messes up with somebody’s bladder functions. I know, not a very glamorous part of spaceflight, but a situation we want to be ready for!
In the afternoon Terry and I will have a a three-hour free flier rendezvous class in the dome. Free fliers are visiting vehicles like HTV, Dragon or, in the near future, Cygnus, that don’t come all the way to docking, but rather hold position at 10 m from Station and are then grappled by the astronauts with the robotic arm and berthed to a free ISS port.
I’ve found a really cool picture of fellow Shenanigan Alex in the dome. It’s a pretty amazing facility in which we practice the rendezvous phase of vehicles from corridor monitoring during the approach phase all the way to grappling with the Canadarm2.
Final event for the day, a fit-check for my custom-made earplugs. Those are especially important for the periodic hearing assessment on ISS, in which we monitor the hearing function of astronauts throughout the mission. With all those pumps and fans running all the time, ISS is never very quiet!
31/07/2013