First of all, as you can imagine, after several delays, we were very happy when we saw the successful liftoff yesterday. To be more specific, we watched a replay, we weren’t able to watch the launch live, although we were “tuned in” on NASA TV at that time.
Yes, you heard it right, we can watch TV up here… sort of. There is a videoconferencing system and on one of our laptops, located in Node 1 where we eat, Mission Control can stream a TV channel on our request. I’m not much into TV myself, so most of the time we watch ESPN, a US sports channel that Terry and Butch are very fond of. But for special events like the Dragon launch we request NASA TV.
Unfortunately this is not an interruption-free service, and I’m not talking about commercials. The videoconferencing system (like our email, internet access and two of our four Space-to-Ground channels) only work when our Ku-Band antennas have coverage. Interruptions are quite frequent and can range from a few minutes to even a full hour. The Dragon launch occurred during one of those gaps in coverage, which we call LOS (Loss-Of-Signal).
Anyway, back to our main topic, getting ready for Dragon arrival. Butch and I had a final training session today in which we practiced the capture. I have written about the capture choreography and our respective roles in Logbook L+19, in case you missed it.
Today I wrote a number on the cue card next to every malfunction and I asked our instructor on the ground to call out a number during the approach and capture, so I could practice mentally determining the appropriate response, without really interfering with Butch’s capture practice.
Since during one of the runs we were in Ku-LOS (see above) and had no com with our instructor, Butch started unexpectedly to randomly call out numbers while he was flying the arm. Great training! And by the way, although we train for the worse scenarios, we all count on Dragon and the arm working flawlessly tomorrow. And Terry will take some awesome pictures: he spent a lot of time today setting up cameras and knowing his skills, it will be good!
Hey, one little thing I would like to share from our past Christmas holidays, actually from Christmas day. Terry was so thoughtful to fly up for me a golden astronaut pin, which you get when you actually fly to space, and he gave it to me as a Christmas present. That was so nice and totally unexpected. And Butch gave me the Soyuz Mach-25 patch. Don’t I have wonderful crewmates?
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
12/01/2015