After a summer of rehab and debriefs (and yes, 2 weeks of vacation), time to wrap up the story of my mission to ISS. This is the first entry in a final series of logbooks looking back at departure, landing and re-adaptation!
11 June 2015
Looks like this time they mean it: after a delay of one month, this time they really want us to go home.
It was an early wake-up for our very last day on ISS: the morning Daily Planning Conference, our tagup with the control centers to start the day, was scheduled for 1 am! But we did go to sleep in the early afternoon yesterday, in fact we have been sleep shifting for a couple of days. Undocking is not until 10:18 am, but there’s a lot to do before we can send that command to open the hooks that keep our Soyuz attached to the Space Station. And if you’re imagining us taking our time to say our mental farewell, leisurely savoring our last few hours in space…well, of course you’re not, you know better than that!
In fact, the morning was busy as ever. Scott and I were in Columbus even before DPC, assisting each other with our blood draws. This was a so-called “ambient blood draw”, meaning that the tubes don’t go into the MELFI freezers, but return to Earth on the Soyuz instead. They will be retrieved from the descent modules right after we are extracted. The blood draw in itself was no different than any other we’ve done, but the packing instructions did look daunting, especially regarding some particular tubes that Scott uses for his Twin Study. I will be forever grateful to him for offering to taking care of all the packing on his own, so I could save some time for a final tour of the Space Station. Thanks Scott!
However, I did get my share of packing as well. Remember the Stem Cells Differentiation experiment from the L+141/144 Logbook?
Well, those samples need to go home today as well, so I got to retrieve them from MELFI and pack them in insulated pouches for return. There isn’t much space in the Soyuz descent module, as you can imagine, so we try to pack things as compact as possible. In case of early-retrieval items, we put the number of the package on a green label and we also take a picture, that will be made available to the retrieval team at the landing site, so they know exactly what to look for. Of course, Anton is loading the Soyuz exactly according to the cargo plan: having the center of mass in the right place is important in a space vehicle, especially if it’s your ride back to Earth!
By the way, it’s not only blood that I have been donating to science today. First thing after waking up for the last time in my floating sleeping bag, I took three different saliva samples – a 10-min routine that I have performed many times by now for the experiments Microbiome and Salivary markers. Oh, and don’t forget urine collection! I will be filling out urine tubes and putting them into the MELFI freezer at every void until hatch closure. The glamour of spaceflight…
Picture: retrieving the Stem Cell Differentiation samples from the MELFI freezer.
#SamLogbook #Futura42
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Publiée par Scientificast.it sur Mardi 1 septembre 2015
(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) Deutsche Übersetzung von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
(Trad RUS) Русский перевод +Dmitry Meshkov https://samlogbook-ru.livejournal.com
02/09/2015