I’d say today is a day devoted to overall well-being on ISS.
Both Terry and I are being trained as Crew Medical Officers (CMO). We’ve both already taken a number of classes covering basic medical procedures. For example, the retinal imaging class I had yesterday! You can see me in the picture getting a feel for the fundoscope that is used to take images of the retina. As you might have heard, many long duration crew-members have experienced eyesight degradation during their mission and the reasons are not fully understood yet. That’s why we’re now monitoring the eyes so closely throughout the spaceflight.
As CMOs, today Terry and I we’ll have a brief on the main psychological disorders that might occur in long duration spaceflight: how to recognize them, what to do about them. If you ask me, good food is one of the main means of psychological well-being. How fitting that today we’ll also have our ESA food tasting! ESA does not provide food for the standard ISS menu, but we do provide a number of dishes that crew-members can choose for their bonus food containers.
Another aspect of well-being is overall fitness. Today I will also have a training session on the ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device). The ARED is the weight-lifting machine onboard ISS, except that it doesn’t have weights, but rather big vacuum cylinders that provide resistance as we do squats, chest presses, bicep curls and much more.
I’ve also attached a picture from the Quick Disconnects class I talked about yesterday, in case you’re curious to know how QDs look like. We got to practice on pressurized QDs on a special pressure trainer. Having to deal with the pressure in the lines gave me a whole new respect for this task!
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- Imaging the retina with the fundoscope.
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- Working on a 1.5 inch Quick Disconnect on the pressure trainer.
30/07/2013