Today it’s Christmas again! That’s right: Russia, a predominantly Orthodox country, celebrates Christmas on January 7th, so last night we had a Christmas Eve get together with our Russian crewmates.
On the Space Station this is typically a day off in the Russian segment only, but today Terry, Butch and I also got a free day, because we expect to work on the weekend following the arrival of Dragon. We were therefore free to join Sasha, Elena and Anton on their videocon with their families, who had gathered in Mission Control Moscow.
Father Ioav, the very kind Star City priest, even brought in a small choir to sing Christmas songs to us, including the Italian favorite “Tu scendi dalle stelle” beautifully performed with impeccable pronunciation!
Looking back at yesterday, I performed a third run of the ESA experiment Skin-B, studying the effects of space environment on the skin: if you missed it, I talked about it in greater detail in the L+11 Logbook.
I also got to dive into the bowels of our space toilet again: in that same L+11 Logbook I mentioned refilling the flush water tank, this time I changed the pre-treat tank. Pre-treat is a fluid that is added in small quantity to flush water and provides some chemical treatment of the urine. There is a component, called dose pump, that provides the necessary pre-treat quantity at the beginning of every use. In fact, every time we turn on the toilet (which means turning on the fan that provides suction) we need to check for the dose-pump light to come on for a few seconds and then go out. If it doesn’t, there is a problem. This happened to me just this past Sunday, actually: the dose pump light did not go out and a red fault light came on instead. After some troubleshooting lead by specialists on the ground, the conclusion was made that the dose-pump had failed and Terry had the replacement on his schedule for Monday.
Before this could be successfully completely, the Node 3 toilet was out of service. Luckily we do have redundancy onboard: the Russian service module has another toilet – in fact that was the original toilet of the space station and the toilet in Node 3 is exactly the same design with some modifications to account for urine transfer directly to the Urine Processing Assembly.
Of course, it’s really preferable for us to use the Node 3 toilet: not only it’s a lot closer, but we avoid disturbing Anton and Elena, who sleep not very far from the Russian toilet.
As you know, we’re also ready to receive the Dragon cargo ship here soon. In preparation for berthing, I got to do something which did feel somewhat disturbing for a moment: I unlatched the Node 2 hatch, which is where Dragon will be berthed. Right now, of course, it leads to vacuum. We do that to avoid any issues with the latch-unlatch mechanism on ingress day: several science payloads on Dragon are time-critical and a delay in hatch opening and transfer could cause a loss of science. Of course, the hatch opens to the inside, so even if the mechanism is unlatched, there is no way it can open against the internal pressure of the Space Station. But I guess I’m not the first one to feel strange about unlatching it: the include a reminder that there is a force of about 39,000 lbf keeping the hatch closed when the modules is pressurized. Btw, this also means that hatches opening to the outside would be a very bad idea (yes, I’m thinking of you, “Gravity”).
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
08/01/2015