Sorry, sorry, sorry!
My apologies, I never meant for this logbook to take a break for the holidays, but this is exactly what ended up happening. It’s not been an especially busy time up here on ISS, but I did take some more time for personal matters, friends and family.
So, here we are, almost a week into 2015 already. By the way, as our Lead Flight Director Tomas pointed out (hallo Tomas!) for a full month the calendar date and the GMT date match, so I will actually know what day it is for a change.
Don’t know if I ever mentioned this explicitly, but the Station runs on GMT time, or more properly UTC, which corresponds to the Greenwich time zone. We also like to indicate what day it is by counting up from 1 to 365. In Station jargon, today is GMT 005. Might actually be that GMT is not a correct definition for this, but it’s the usage in the ISS world. It’s easy to see how by, say, GMT 072 you’ve lost track of what the real date is!
GMT 365, of course, was pretty easy to recognize as New Year’s Eve. We had a grand time celebrating multiple times down in the Russian Service module. We started with midnight Moscow-time, of course, and then on to midnight Central European time and finally our own midnight on Station. By the way, many have asked whether we could see any fireworks from space. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out very well: from a few days before New Year’s Eve and until today we didn’t have a proper, fully dark night on Station. It was what we call a high-Beta period, a time in which the relative positions of the Sun, the Earth and the Space Station are such that we are never completely without sunlight. In other words, for several days we were flying all the time very close to the terminator, the line between day and night on Earth. The Sun was either just above the horizon, creating very dramatic long shadows on the planet, or just below the horizon, with the twilight lasting until the next sunrise.
What I loved the most was the shades of intense blue and orange that appear on the Earth horizon just before or after sunrise: during high-Beta the time this colorful stripe is visible a lot longer, so you can really rest your gaze on it. But I did miss seeing the city lights and the stars in the darkness, so welcome back night. We missed you!
Hey, at New Year’s Eve we actually danced, you know? Not sure that it looked like dancing from the outside, but since nobody watched besides our close space family here, and we were very much convinced that we were dancing, we danced: it’s our story, and we’re sticking to it!
Sasha and Anton even played songs by Adriano Celentano, a very famous and not-so-young-anymore Italian singer. He is to this day incredibly popular in Russia and I have yet to meet a Russian who doesn’t know his most popular tunes.
Which brings me back to a story from our launch I’d like to share. As you might remember, Terry, Anton and I each picked a few songs that were played to us in the last 40 minutes before launch. Anton decided to include a few Celentano songs and selected one of his favorite tunes, without having any understanding whatsoever of the lyrics. So imagine my surprise when, sitting on top of a rocket with the hatch closed and the access towers retracted, I hear these words in my headphones: “E’ inutile suonare qui non aprira’ nessuno, il mondo l’abbiam chiuso fuori con il suo casino!” which translates as “No point in ringing the bell, nobody will open the door; we have left the world and its chaos outside”. Talk about picking the right soundtrack!
Not only we had locked the world outside (or the world had locked us inside), but we were space-bound! After a few hours we arrived to the Space Station – that was an early morning 42 days ago, by the way. A good occasion for a friendly reminder from your friendly Expedition 42: “42” is the answer, so don’t panic and always know where your towel is!
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
06/01/2015