Another week has gone by on ISS, one of my last on board. Time sure flies when you’re having fun!
Well, the biggest news of this past week, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is that the Russian resupply vehicle Progress 59P didn’t make it to ISS.
On Tuesday morning we received a call from Houston saying that Mission Control – Moscow had downmoded the mission profile to a two-day rendezvous, as opposed to the standard 6-hour profile that would have had Progress dock to ISS by early afternoon.
Of course, there’s a lot of minor issues that can force a transition to a 2-day profile, so at that point we still expected to see Progress pull up in its parking spot by Thursday. We know now that 59P will never make it to ISS. Mission controllers in Moscow have valiantly tried all they could with the available telemetry and commanding capability, but unfortunately all efforts to recover the resupply mission have been unsuccessful.
The focus of the community has now shifted from the recovery attempts to analyzing the mishap and finding the cause. We’ll know more once our Russian colleagues will have concluded the investigation which, inevitably, will take a while.
In the meantime, teams are assessing the impacts to the ISS program: what is the consumable situation? How about trash removal capability that has been lost? What are the implications for the next Soyuz launch and, consequently, the impacts on ISS activities?
As you can imagine, it’s a complicated problem and, as is often the case, I’m happy that I’m just an astronaut and I’m only responsible for carrying out my tasks up here. People on the ground have a much tougher job, especially these days!
The good news is that we’re not going to run out of food, water, oxygen or any other vital consumables any time soon – we have plenty on margin. On humanity’s outpost in space no astronaut is going to bed hungry!
And we’re busy as usual keeping the Space Station in shape, transferring cargo and, of course, doing science. On Tuesday, in particular, as the Progress story unfolded, I spent most of the day working on the final session of the Italian Space Agency experiment Drain Brain: ultrasound session in the morning, plus breathing sessions with the pletismographs morning and afternoon. If this doesn’t ring a bell, you might have missed my L+57, L+58 Logbook, where I talked about Drain Brain!
Congratulations to the team on the completion of the experiment!
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) Tradducción en español por
+Carlos Lallana Borobio
https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
(Trad Russo)+Dmitry Meshkov https://samlogbook-ru.livejournal.com
03/05/2015