Happy 24th of December! It’s Christmas Eve, of course – a very special time for many people on Earth and for us on the Space Station. Much more humbly, it’s also the 1-month mark for Terry, Anton and me: on the 24th of November we arrived to our new home in space. Time flies, doesn’t it?
One of the peculiar things about living up here on ISS is that you have no commute at all. I’m fortunate that I never had significant commutes to school or to work in my life, but this beats them all: you wake up in the morning and you are already at work. If you’re one of those people who enjoys the commute as a buffer time, you’d be in trouble!
The first thing I do in the morning before even fully getting out of my sleeping bag is to open the lid of my laptop in my crew quarter and check the day’s plan on the electronic agenda, called OSTPV (On-Board Short Term Plan Viewer, or something similar).
We typically get the plan the night before, but changes could have been uploaded during the night. Moreover, during our post-sleep period in the morning there could be very short activities that are actually reminders: for example, no caffeine today for 2 hours before a certain experiment; remember that you’re closing up a urine collection this morning; no exercise this morning before 5 and 7 (not that I would be a candidate for that, but some crewmembers are early risers and enjoy working out in the morning).
This morning my day started again with a meeting with… Terry the Vampire! Just kidding, of course: Terry is a great Crew Medical Officer and always does an awesome job with my blood draws. As usual, after taking the blood samples and waiting the 30-minute coagulation time, I put the tubes in our centrifuge for another 30 minutes, before storing them in one of our MELFI freezers, where they will await an opportunity for return to Earth.
A lot of human physiology experiments have a “Flight Day 30” requirement for data so, besides the blood draw, I have been doing another 24-hour urine collection and I have been wearing again the temperature sensors on my forehead and sternum for the ESA experiment Circadian Rhythms. In addition I ran another series of measurements on my skin for the experiment, Skin-B, which I talked about in the L+11 Logbook.
I also got to dive a little bit in the belly of Columbus for a water sampling activity. Water runs in the internal cooling lines of all the non-Russian modules and periodically we need to access the lines via dedicated sampling ports and get some water out. I took two samples yesterday: one will be returned to the ground for analysis; the second one was for immediate testing with an ammonia test strip. Presence of ammonia in the water would indicate some leakage at the interface between the internal cooling lines (water) and the external cooling lines (ammonia): since ammonia is very toxic, that would be a very unfortunate finding. But luckily the test strip didn’t show any ammonia in the Columbus water!
Merry Christmas from us all up here on the Space Station!
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(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
24/12/2014