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Last manual docking training sessions these days before the upcoming exam. With my instructor, Sasha, we’ve been focusing on the most tricky scenarios to make sure I’m ready. So, what makes a scenario more difficult than others? The type of failure, for example: a “simple”  Kurs malfuction, meaning that the Soyuz can’t orient itself to Station any more, or rather a full computer failure? With a functioning computer we can turn on a function that compensates for the rotation of the ISS. When the Station is in its standard attitude with the stack of pressurized modules oriented along the velocity vector, it rotates about 4 degrees per minute as it tracks along the orbit. With the compensation function turned on, the computer automatically fires the thrusters to match that rotation, so that to us the ISS looks as though it was inertially stabilized. If the computer fails, however, we need to constantly correct to keep the target aligned as we approach. The Service Module and MRM1 docking ports are especially tricky, because the targets are oriented in such a way that rotation occurs in two channels. Night approaches are also a little bit more difficult. If we’re about to enter eclipse, we station-keep at a distance of about 70 meters and turn on the Soyuz light. At that point we also have to remove a screen we have on our periscope view during illumination, that protects us from being blinded by excessive light. Once that screen is removed, more light comes through and we’re able to see ISS with the rather faint illumination from our Soyuz light, but it’s a bit more uncomfortable to fly the approach. For one thing, without the extra screen you need to have your eyes perfectly aligned at the right distance to see the image: if you move your head a bit, you immediately loose it. Also, as you come in closer for final approach and docking, the light does become somewhat dazing again. So these are the scenarios Sasha and I have been focusing on. You can see us in the picture together before the sim today. Sasha wants to become a cosmonaut (she’d be a second generation). If you ask me, I’d bet my money that she will make it. If you celebrate Easter this weekend, happy Easter! #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Anton and I both passed our manual reentry exam in the centrifuge today and are now officially qualified to fly the Soyuz reentry manually as backup crew of Expedition 40, launching in May. In fact, this is the first of a series of qualification exams we’ll have to pass between now and early May. So, first one done! I did get one profile with a pretty high overshoot, in which I had to “fly the centrifuge” up to 5Gs. I had flown an 8G-run before, but it is indeed a bit different when you’re trying to fly your trajectory and do your reporting to the ground. Was fun! I’ll do it again in a few months as prime crew. #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di  +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par  +Anne Cpamoa  ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Today I took a ride on the impressive 18-meter-arm Star City centrifuge. As a preparation for the upcoming manual reentry exam, I had a dry-run today in which we went through a typical exam session: three reentry scenarios with the running centrifuge with two static scenarios to rest in between. I’ve talked a little bit here about how manual reentry works. The goal is to land within 10 km from the nominal touchdown point – the one that the computer-controlled reentry would fly us to, if it worked. But it’s also important to keep the Gs under control. Especially if we’re trying to compensate an overshoot in the time we made contact with the atmosphere (i.e. we made contact later than planned), the temptation is to give inputs that will lead to huge G-loads in an attempt to correct back. In an exam setting that will affect the score, but in real life, as well as in the centrifuge, it also affects one’s level of discomfort and pain. Let’s say it’s a self-punishing mistake! Under heavy G-loads it is quite difficult to move at all. Luckily, to fly the reentry we only need to press two buttons, the ones under my thumbs in the picture. Those inputs change the roll angle of the descent module in discrete increments of 15°, roll being the rotation around the axis of symmetry. It’s not very intuitive, but the roll affects the lift, so that we can control how steep or shallow we want to fly. (For those we want to try to figure it out, here’s a hint: the center of mass of the vehicle is displaced with respect to the axis of symmetry). If you want to know more about riding the centrifuge, here’s an older blog post about it: https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2013/07/22/a-ride-in-the-worlds-biggest-centrifuge/ #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di  +AstronautiNEWS  qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par  +Anne Cpamoa  ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

When you prepare for a flight on the Soyuz, you first learn about all the on-board systems one by one: you spend a lot of time in the classroom learning the theory and occasionally you get some time in the simulator, specifically dedicated to the one system you’re studying. Once you’ve passed the exams on all the systems, you graduate to the complex simulator sessions that I’ve written about multiple times and in which you integrate all your knowledge of the separate systems into the actual flight operations. Today Anton and I exceptionally reverted back to a single-topic practical training session, learning about new procedures to be applied in case of a computer failure just after undocking. See, our Soyuz will be docked to the MRM-1 module, just like one you see in this beautiful image by the Expedition 38 crew. Like the photo shows, in the standard ISS attitude the MRM-1 points nadir, towards Earth. Typically, when a vehicle undocks the Station it rotated 90° so that the docking port faces aft – that makes if easier from an orbital mechanics point of view, because the simple impulse given by the spring-loaded pushers in the aft direction is enough to guarantee that there will be no collision, even if the Soyuz was unable to perform the separation burns. However, it would be really nice to be able to leave the Station in its nominal attitude: it takes fuel to rotate it and the mechanical loads can cause fatigue on the structure, which affects the Station’s lifetime. If the docking port is nadir, though, proper separation burns must be performed to ensure safety. That’s why we now have new procedures in development that allow the crew to give the burns manually, should the computer fail before completing them. Was fun to try something new! Photo: ISS Expedition 38 #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

First of all, happy Cosmonautics Day! I can’t imagine a more suitable place to be in today than here in Star City, where it all started. Well, I guess next year will be even better, as I will be on ISS! But there’s still a lot of training to be completed before that and the coming weeks promise to be an exciting time. This is for me the “back-up trip” to Russia: Reid, Alex and Maksim will launch on May 28th and Terry, Anton and I will be their shadows until then. Just like them we’ll take the qualification exams, we’ll participate in all the pre-launch ceremonies and traditions and we’ll fly to Baikonour for a two-week quarantine time. And then we’ll watch them blast off to space! So this past week I’ve resumed my Soyuz “routine”. I had several manual flying sims (rendez-vous & docking as well as descent), while yesterday Anton and I were back together in the Soyuz simulator. First we practiced the transition from the nominal quick profile (launch-to-docking in six hours) to the two-day profile. If you have followed the last Soyuz launch, you know that this is a very real possibility: Soyuz 38S had a minor issue with one of the burns and they had to interrupt the nominal profile to eventually dock two days later. In our sim, however, after the transition we also got a leak in the pressurization lines of the propellant tanks: basically we were loosing pressure in the helium tanks that pressurize our fuel and our oxidizer, so that they flow to the combustion chamber when the appropriate valves are opened. No pressure, no engine firing! So we had to immediately initiate an emergency descent, before the pressure became too low. A nice refresher sim, as we wait for Terry to join us next time. I attach a picture of Anton and myself that Terry took a while back… with some artistic liberty. #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

A case of low pressure today! I went to the facilities of the company Svesda (Звезда), which manufactures our Sokol pressure suits and our seat liners.  As you might remember, my personal custom-made Sokol suit, sequential number 422, has been ready for a while. Last February I wore it for two hours with a 0,4 atm of overpressure to make sure it fit properly in an inflated state. If you missed it, that story is in Logbook L-280. Today I tested the nominal functions of my Sokol in the vacuum chamber, where I spent a couple of hours lying in a Soyuz-type seat and in my custom-fit seat liner. First we leak-checked the suit, just like we’ll do on the launch pad before the start: I manually closed the blue regulator valve and verified that the nominal overpressure was reached within a specified time limit. Then I reopened the regulator and put it back to the nominal setting of 0,4: should the pressure around me drops below 0,4 atm (and obviously that’s the plan of the day), the regulator maintains the internal pressure constant at that value. After a successful leak check, the chamber door was closed and we started the exercise. First the pressure was lowered to 5 km. It might be confusing to use km as a unit when we’re actually talking about pressure, but it’s pretty typical in a hypobaric chamber. The pressure is referred to the standard Earth atmosphere: when we say that we are 5 km, we mean that the pressure in the chamber is equivalent to what you would have on Earth at 5 km altitude (which is about half of the pressure at sea level). At 5 km we stopped momentarily, the ventilation was interrupted and the supply of pure oxygen was turned on instead. That’s a much smaller flow – just like it would be in the Soyuz – and from this point on it started to get a bit warmer inside the suit, as we resumed our “climb” to higher altitudes and lower pressures. At 7km I felt the suit starting to inflate and the needle of the gauge showing the suit’s overpressure starting to move from the zero position: the regulator had kicked in, preventing the internal pressure from dropping below 0,4 atm. Eventually we arrived at 30 km, where the pressure is about 1/100 of the sea level value – for all practical purposes today: vacuum. At that point the suit, still at constant internal pressure, was quite inflated and very rigid. Would be quite a challenge to operate in this state, but hey… I’m certainly not complaining. On a really bad day, it might save my life – just like it protected me from vacuum today! Photo: Yuri P. Kargapolov #SamLogbook   #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:

Yesterday I took a very early flight from Cologne to Munich for a one-day visit at the Columbus Control Centre, short: COL-CC. COL-CC is responsible for planning and real-time ground control of all operations in the European laboratory Columbus on the International Space Station, both concerning the systems and the science (payloads). I had a short brief by the increment leads of all the teams, who introduced their teams and provided an overview of the major activities foreseen during my time onboard, as well as any issues they are currently tracking. Of course, the picture is still a bit blurred and subject to change: we’re still 7 months from Increment 42 and some activities depend on the not-yet-finalized launch manifest of the cargo vehicles, bringing for example the equipment for new science experiments. Whatever the details will turn out to be, it’s clear that there’s a challenging year ahead for Columbus, with a lot of new, complex experiment hardware to be launched, assembled and commissioned by my fellow Shenanigan Alex, first, and then by myself. But the COL-CC team is committed to make it all happen and I certainly will do my best to do my part right! One of the key figures behind a mission to ISS is the Mission Director, the person who knows everything and coordinates the efforts of all the teams to make sure that things go smoothly and on schedule. It’s really a small world: my Mission Director Alex is an aerospace engineering graduate of the Technical University of Munich. Just like me, just one year apart! Another key figure is the Increment Operations Lead, who is the lead flight director (COL-Flight) for the increment. In the picture you can see me with Simon (right) and Cesare in the Control Room. Simon will be responsible for the first part of my mision, Inc 42, and Cesare will take over for Inc 43. There was also some time for little traditions, like putting a mission sticker at the entrance of the control room and signing it. By the way, COL-CC also has a blog: especially exciting with the upcoming mission of my fellow shenanigan Alex! https://www.dlr.de/blogs/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-9260/ #SamLogbook   #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Another science-intense day here at the European Astronaut Centre! First a baseline data collection for the Skin-B experiments, that I wrote about yesterday: not only the relatively quick measurements I will do on orbit, but also some additional ground-only ones, including a layer-by-layer imaging of the skin in intervals of 5 microns. Then I had a lesson on the ESA experiment Circadian Rythms – actually something that I was already familiar with from a previous baseline data collection. If you’ve been following this logbook for a while, you might remember it too. Then a fitcheck for the very special shirt I will be wearing on ISS during several nights for the ASI experiment Wearable Monitoring. Via sensors embedded in the shirt, an electronic box will record the electrocardiogram and the cardiac mechanics of the heart, like the opening and closing of the different cardiac valves. The aim is to gain insight into the quality of sleep in microgravity, which for most astronauts is not as good as on the ground. And, as you can imagine, acquire knowledge that will help people with sleep disturbances on Earth. Finally, an familiarization briefing with the Vessel ID System, which tracks from ISS the ships equipped with AIS (Automated Identification System).   Vessel US is a technology demonstrator to assess the feasibility of a space-based tracking system for global maritime traffic. You can learn more about it here: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Columbus/Vessel-ID Picture: spacewalking astronaut next to the AIS antenna on Columbus. #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

After flying a “slow orbit” around the world for the last couple of months, I’m now back at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne for some training on experiments and some medical exams. Today I had an introduction to the portable Pulmonary Function System (PFS), an interesting piece of equipment that allows the analysis of gas exhaled by a subject. In some configurations the subjects breaths cabin air, in others he/she breaths a known gas mixture that includes a metabolically inert tracking gas. PFS is required for the new ESA experiment “Airway Monitoring”, which should start during my increment on ISS. The protocol uses Nitric Oxide (exhaled or diffused into the blood) as a biomarker for inflammation of the airways and aims at observing the effect produced by microgravity and partial pressure: for the latter, in particular, two subjects will be isolated in the airlock and the pressure will be reduced to about 10 PSI. It’s a very new field of study and one that promises great insight into the gas exchange processes in the lung and the effects of the space environment on the respiratory system. I also had a lesson on the experiment Skin-B, which is focused instead on the aging process of the skin. Generally speaking the Space Station is a great place to learn about aging, because unfortunately many body systems, including the skin, undergo an accelerated aging in space. Skin-B will observe that with a quick protocol involving pictures and measurements of hydration level and water diffusion from inside the skin (which points to a deterioration of the skin’s barrier function). Tomorrow the principal investigators will be here for a baseline data collection session: I guess I will learn the actual “age” of my skin – at least the portion on my forearm. Picture: Skin-B training with Laura (Credit: ESA/Grotheus) #SamLogbook  #Futura (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ (Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/