We have sent Dragon back home yesterday! I’ll tell you more about this in the coming days, but for now, I’ll just say this: looking back at the past weeks since Dragon arrival, it’s very gratifying to think of all the work we’ve done, from the experiments to the loading and unloading operations, up to the last-minute transfer of cold samples from the coolers and freezers to cold bags for return. It’s also nice to catch our breath today, though: since we had to work hard all weekend, we’re getting this Wednesday off. A nice and welcome surprise!
But now let’s go back to last week once more to catch up with the release of something a lot smaller from a somewhat smaller robotic arm: a tiny Cubesat, with the dimensions 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, was deployed by the Japanese arm on Friday. Pretty cool to see!
There were a lot of preparation activities the days before the release, in close cooperation with the JEM Control Center in Tsukuba, Japan. As you might remember if you’ve been reading this logbook, the JEM module has its own small airlock: we can open the door to the inside and slide a table into the cabin. The week prior to the release Butch had installed on this table the satellite deployment system with the Cubesat inside. On Thursday last week I got to depressurize the airlock. By the way, just like the big airlock for spacewalks, the Japanese airlock has provisions to recover most of the air into the Space Station volume: just the last bit of air, when the residual pressure in the airlock becomes too small (around 2 PSI), must necessarily be vented into space. Once the airlock was at vacuum, I opened the outer hatch into space and slid out the table with the satellite and deployment system. At that point, robotic controllers from Tsukuba grabbed the deployment system with the Japanese robotic arm and, once they had a firm grip, I got a GO to release it from the slide table, so that the arm could get full control of it and move it to the deployment position. My next task was to take pictures of the deployment and I have to say that this one made me a bit nervous: you only get one chance to get it right and that satellite goes away fast once it’s released! Really didn’t want to mess this up, can only imagine what a disappointment it would be for the students who developed the Cubesat not to have pictures.
Talking about students, on Wednesday I also got a chance to talk on the HAM radio to a group of school pupils from the schools “Locatelli-Oriani” and “Bachelet” in the Milan area: thanks for your great questions and you hard work preparing for this!
On Friday I got to spend quite a lot of time in our big airlock working on the EMU suits (the suits for spacewalks). In particular, I worked on the cooling water loops of both suits that will be used in the upcoming planned EVAs by Terry and Butch, “scrubbing” the water with different kinds of filters and adding iodine for microbial control. After that I took water samples that were returned on Dragon for analysis on the ground. The loop scrub can also be used as an opportunity to do some checks on the suits and get telemetry on the ground, so both suits were connected to a laptop on which we ran a data gathering application.
Hey, on Friday I also got to talk to Mission Control Moscow, which doesn’t happen very often to us non-Russian crewmembers. As we get ready for ATV undocking this Saturday, I ran with Moscow a checkout procedure for the ATV remote control panel that we will have deployed in the Russian Service Module when ATV departs. We’ll only need to send commands to ATV in case of an off-nominal situation, so I’m confident that we will not really need the control panel, but we’ll be ready!
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
(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 aqui: https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook
(Trad DE) Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de
11/02/2015