Starting one more week of training here in Star City.
I won’t be in the Soyuz sim today, but I’ll have a two hour briefing with my Commander Anton and our instructor Dima. The actual sim will be tomorrow morning and will probably be a “suited” one, meaning that we’ll wear our Sokol pressure suits.
In the afternoon I’ll have a training session in manual re-entry. The Soyuz re-entry is normally controlled automatically by an onboard computer. However, there are some failure modes in which the computer won’t do it, either because it’s broken or because it doesn’t like the entry conditions into the atmosphere. In these special cases, before going for a ballistic re-entry, the crew can actually try and “save” the controlled re-entry mode by taking over manually.
At that point, separation has already occurred and only the descent module remains. If you take a look at the picture, that’s the bell-shaped central part. The spherical orbital module and the cylindrical service module burn up on their own during re-entry.
Controls are pretty easy – as they should be, since you’ll be under G and wearing the thick gloves of the pressure suit. However, ending up close to the nominal landing point while keeping the G loading within required limits… not easy at all. Well, that’s why we practice!
22/07/2013