Yesterday was quite an epic day on ISS, thanks to Butch and Terry: one day earlier than originally planned, they successfully completed a multi-day, extremely complex maintenance task on one of our two CDRAs – the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly.
With plenty of support from the ground specialists and great concentration and attention to detail from their side, they got our Node 3 CDRA back in shape so that we’re back to full redundancy.
CDRA is a vital component for our survival on ISS: on spaceship Earth plants take care of “scrubbing” the CO2 we exhale from our atmosphere – on spaceship ISS we need the CDRA.
From my side, I got to do the first run of the ESA experiment Skin-B: with three different instruments, I took a series of measurement on a specific location on my forearm (the same we used for pre-flight data collection).
First I used an instrument call Tewameter, which measures the evaporation of water from the skin surface: this is an indicator of water loss across the skin, which in turn indicates how good the barrier function of the skin is.
A second instrument, called corneometer, measures the moisture level. And finally, by using a small handheld UV camera I could take a very detailed picture of the surface of my skin.
While science is the purpose of use being up here, we need of course to take care of our ship and make sure we can live up there as human beings. As you can imagine, a well functioning toilet is certainly part of that. Yesterday for the first time I got to access the bowels of our beloved space toilet for a relatively simple routine operation: refilling the flush water tank.
Of course, we don’t really have a toilet bowl to flush, but at the beginning of every use, when we turn on the fan to create the necessary suction, a certain quantity of a pre-treat chemical, diluted with some water from the flush water tank, goes through the piping – it takes a few seconds, a light goes out and the toilet is ready for “Number 1”.
Once in a while, that flush water needs refilling. Normally, we only need to reconfigure the valves to let water flow into the tanks, but this has been shown to cause some overpressure which has triggered fault lights in the past. Therefore we now have a temporary setup to provide pressure relief during refill, as you can see in the picture.
Something people often wonder about is: how it smells on the Space Station. I was actually very curious myself, because I had heard conflicting reports. To be honest, I can’t recognize any particular odor – it seems pretty neutral to me, the filters do a great job. Only our Soyuz has a distinct smell, not sure of what, but it’s very dear to me: whenever I float in there, it brings me instantly back to launch day!
Now, if you’re working close to a solid waste container, like I was yesterday for the toilet work, you’ll smell something. Similarly, you’ll smell something wherever we accumulate trash, be it in PMM for temporary stowage or ATV in preparation of destructive reentry. But in general, no unpleasant smell onboard! Or maybe I just got used to it already?
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
* #SamLogbook * * #Futura42 *
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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
06/12/2014