L+130: New arrivals | Outpost 42

Hey, I’m sure you’ve heard: we have two new crewmembers here on ISS who will remain onboard for, no kidding, an entire year!

Might be the first of several extended expeditions and the main driver of course is the observation of human physiology and health during a longer period of the time than the standard 6-month missions, so it’s not surprising that Scott and Misha are already being put “under the microscope” more extensively than, say, Terry or I.

There’ s a wide range of investigations that will target numerous aspects of their adaptation process and all of those experiments need start-of-mission data.

Today was a big day of ocular health research!
In fact, my working day ended with back-to-back sessions in which I supported Scott and Misha in taking funduscope images of their eyes, but even before our morning Daily Planning Conference I was already tasked with the setup of our Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) machine for their eye scans.

Gennady assisted Misha, before it was my turn to assist Scott. I must confess that I dread these events a little bit: getting good scans is not always easy and it’s not uncommon to have to repeat them multiple times to get a satisfactory result. It can be somewhat frustrating for the operator and tiring for the subject, who has to keep his/her eyes open and still for a long time.

We have awesome remote guiders who run the show from the ground, but they get the image streamed from our laptop with an ever so slight delay that sometimes makes it difficult to give real-time guidance when the image changes fast. All that said, I really had nothing to worry about today. Scott is a natural at this! He is just the perfect subject (at least certainly much better than me): his gaze was so steady that only minimal adjustments of the lens position were needed during the scans to keep the proper eye layers in view, making my job so easy. Thanks, Scott!

Between eye research sessions and a few other small tasks (like troubleshooting one of our Merlin fridge), today I also had three videoconferences with people on the ground – a bit unusual, typically they are spread out in the week. Besides the weekly videoconference with my flight surgeon Brigitte, I got to talk to ESA folks at COL-CC and ESTEC: the mission director and lead flight director, as well as the Eurocom on duty and the mission science officer. Similarly, in the evening Scott, Terry and I had our weekly conference with Houston and Huntsville for the NASA perspective and update on current operations from the lead flight director and the rest of the Expedition 43 team.

If you are someone who follows the live-feed from the Space Station, including the space-to-ground communications, you might have noticed that you don’t hear such conferences: that’s because mission controls puts restrictions in place, so that nobody beyond the parties involved listens to the conversation. As you can imagine that’s particularly important for the periodic medical and psychological conferences, but also for the weekly family conferences, as well as remote guidance for exams on human subjects, like an ultrasound or today’s OCT scans.

I also got to work a little on water balance today. As I’m sure we know, we recycle all the water onboard thanks to a facility called Water Processing Assembly (WPA). Well, WPA has been having some hiccups lately, so it’s not currently producing potable water. But… don’t panic! We have plenty of water in the lines and plenty of full water bags. However, while the specialists on the ground develop a forward plan to troubleshoot WPA, there’s a bit of work to be done to maintain proper water balance.

Check the picture captions for more info!

We keep water in these bags, called CWC-I. The letter “I” (and the color purple on the label) indicate that it contains iodinated water – iodine is added to our potable water for microbial control, but is eventually removed in the potable water dispenser before water is delivered to the end user (us).It’s important to have proper labels on the bags: brown labels, for example, indicate condensate (recuperated water before reprossessing).