Busy, busy, busy time here in Houston these weeks. It’s my last training trip at the Johnson Space Center – in fact, this is my very last week – and there is just so much to do!
Only part of it is properly training – one last emergency simulation here, one last robotics session there, one last day of underwater training for spacewalks in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory and one last session on the ground training model of the ARED, our workout machine for weightlessness. And so on.
Another big chunk of the time is spent on Baseline Data Collection (BDC). As I’m writing this, I’m lying on a bed waiting for an MRI scan for the ESA experiment “Cartilage”, that looks at the effect of long duration spaceflight on, yes, the cartilage. It’ important to let the knee rest before the scan, hence my little 30-min downtime right now that allows me to write this logbook! By the way, I’m also carrying around a cooler for a 48-hour urine collection and later today I will put on the sensors for the 36-hours core temperature monitoring for another ESA experiment, “Circadian Rhythms”. Yes, you remember that one, the bandana days…
Finally, there’s those events that really remind you that you’ll be flying to ISS very soon. Last week, for example, we had a handover class with Mike Hopking, from Expedition 37/38, who walked with us through the mockups of the Space Station pointing out all those little daily-life-in-space things that it’s hard to get from the instructors, just because they haven’t lived up there themselves. Where do you charge batteries? Where do you keep camera lenses and how do you manage cameras? Where is the “office space” setup and how is it organized? How about the hygiene corner? The best place to hang your workout clothes to dry?
And how about questions like: how are my clothes packed? On what vehicle are they flying up? How will I find them? All that and more is part of the Crew Provisioning briefing. That’s how I know that most of my clothes, hygiene and some items I could include myself have just arrived to ISS this morning SpX-4. Hurrà! Somewhat related to that was our briefing on consumables: how are different types of consumable items managed, how is their usage tracked? We got to meet the specialists who will take care of that during our increment. And on a similar topic: what is the stowage and inventory situation onboard? Might not seem very interesting to you, but believe me, it’s very interesting to us. Imagine you were to go and live in a house that is overfilled with stuff, that you need to carefully track: you’ll probably want to hear a word or two about the current status!
Oh, I’ll have to tell you a bit more about yesterday in the next days. I finally had my altitude run in the vacuum chamber. I talked about it here.
The picture is from last July: as you might remember, back then the altitude run had to be aborted at the beginning of pre-breath because of a technical issue. Yesterday we successfully completed the four-hour pre-breath and the vacuum event. I’ll tell you more when I’ll have the pictures to share! In the meantime, more pictures from last summer are here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157645822082702/
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
(Trad ES – Currently not updated) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
23/09/2014