After working on a tight schedule through the weekend to get Dragon ready for departure and then to release it on Tuesday, on Wednesday we were given a day off. Hurrah!
I’m a night owl, so I like to sleep in when I can. On Tuesday night, before going to bed, I took a last look at Wednesday’s schedule for a confirmation that there was no need to set my alarm. Confirmed! So on Wednesday morning I slid my arms out of my sleeping bag around 9:30 and, as usual, opened my laptop to check the schedule and the Daily Summary, a message from ground controllers containing information about the state of the Station and any questions/answers/messages for the crew. Imagine my surprise when I saw an activity on the schedule at 7:30 in the morning. How could I possibly have missed that the night before? And weren’t we supposed to have a day off? And how bad was it that I hadn’t done it yet? But our Commander Butch is always up at 5 in the morning, so he would have woken me up if needed, right? So, don’t panic, let’s see what this is about…
Now, take a look at the picture with a snapshot of that activity. I’ll let you be the judge: our ground teams have some sense of humor, don’t they? We did miss the reading session on that day, and I’m sorry to report that I did not find a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy in the indicated location, but we’ll make this happen somehow!
Thursday and Friday we were back to a normal work schedule. I got to be the operator for Butch on a number of eye exams, part of the Ocular Health research for which he is a subject: I supported his ultrasound, optical coherence tomography and fundoscope exams, taking images of his eyes in more ways than I would have ever imagined possible before ISS training. I’ll also do the same exams this coming week, but I do them less frequently than Butch and Terry, because mine are a purely medical requirement, while my crewmates also serve as subject of this research effort focused on ocular health.
Then we had to get ready for ATV undocking.
Sasha and I had an On-Board-Training session on Thursday in which we reviewed all the pre-departure procedures and our monitoring tasks. Then on Friday we closed the hatches on ATV and ISS side and… you guessed it, I’m sure you know how these things work by now… we did a leak check.
We depressurized the vestibule between the hatches and then we monitored the pressure change for 30 minutes: had the pressure increased, either the ATV hatch or the ISS hatch would have been leaking air into the vestibule. Actually, Mission Control Moscow took care of the depressurization: vestibules on the Russian sides have a valve that can be commanded from the ground to vent the air to space. And our hatches passed the leak check with flying colors: up to 1 mm Hg of pressure increase is allowed and we only had a change of 0,5 mmHg.
That was it, the very last ATV was ready for undocking the next day!
Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42
avamposto42.esa.int
#SamLogbook #Futura42 #SamLogbook #Futura42
(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
16/02/2015