First of all, if you read yesterday’s logbook you’ll be happy to know that the Fan-Pump-Separator that Butch and I replaced in the past two days is working nominally: Butch ran the checkout procedure with great results! I was in the middle of my workout on CEVIS, our space bike, when he floated out of the airlock to announce the good news we had been hoping for: believe me, I didn’t mind a bit being interrupted!
Today we spent quite a bit of time preparing for the arrival of the cargo vehicle Dragon in a couple of weeks: we had time on our schedule to review some onboard training material about the approach and capture operations and we even had a video conference with the NASA team in Houston who will work Dragon, including the instructors responsible for our upcoming proficiency training, which is meant to make sure that we’ll be ready to welcome Dragon to ISS.
Other than that, I feel like I have a spent a lot of time around ARED today, our Advanced Resistive Exercise Device. It’s the extraordinary machine that allows us to perform the exercises that we do on the ground with weight… in weightlessness!
There are two main types of exercises you can do on ARED: using the big bar, which moves the main arm upper down (for example squats, deadlift, shoulder press..) or connecting a short bar to a cable (for example bent-over rows, bicep curls or even crunches). Today I got to dive in the belly of ARED and replace the ropes that transmit the load from the cable around a number of pulleys. After that I moved on to do my daily workout, except that this one was special: I had a privatized communication channel with Cologne, where my sports trainer, my physiotherapist and my flight surgeon were gathered to watch my exercise session on a private video downlink and to give pointers to perfect my form. Very important not to get hurt doing exercise up here!
Unfortunately, we also had a cable break on ARED today: well, it’s not like it snapped, but we noticed some fraying in the steel threads, which makes it unsafe to use and makes it impossible for now to perform upper stop exercises: that’s because this cable allows the main arm to rest on a higher stop, so you can for example do squats or heel raises – when you let go, the bar will remain high. Without this cable, there’s no way to prevent the bar from going all the way down to the platform, for example at the end of your squat set – so we are limited now to lower stop exercises like deadlift or shoulder press. We can still of course do all the cable exercises!
We worked until well past dinner time to replace the cable, but unfortunately there’s been a few hiccups and it’s not quite ready yet: hopefully soon!
Hey, you might notice in the picture that I am wearing a little something on my forehead: that’s for the ESA experiment Circadian Rhythms. For about 40 hours I have to wear that sensor on my forehead, as well as an identical one on my sternum and the unit that records the data. The sensors continually measure and record my body temperature, providing data that will help researchers understand circadian rhythms in space. It’s quite the fashion statement, but also a bit itchy now and then, so I’ll be happy to have completed my duty for science and remove the instruments tomorrow!
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
12/12/2014