→ Logbook

A trip to the vacuum chamber today! A big vacuum chamber that contains a replica of a few Russian segment modules, including the Service Module and the Soyuz. As we were inside these module, pressure was dropped in the chamber around us: the chamber technicians had then the possibility of opening one of several valves connected the atmosphere of our module to the rest of the chamber, thus creating “leak” conditions in various modules. All the hatches are just like the ones in space and the idea is to practice response procedures for the case of a leak, a so called rapid depressurization scenario. We have practiced those procedures many times both in Houston and in Russia, so we know very well how to react if the pressure starts dropping inside the Station, which we could notice because the alarm goes off or simply because our ears start to pop, whichever comes first – unless of course you happened to be staring at a pressure gauge, in which case you would see the needle moving. The main point of the response procedure is to determine which module is leaking, which involves closing hatches in a specified order. Once you close a hatch you check your pressure gauge: if the needle stops moving, the leak is on the other side and viceversa. And you keep on going until you’ve found the culprit, which then you have to isolate. Today we practiced again this kind of work, with the difference that we actually had a pressure differential building across the hatches when we had them closed. It was very interesting to see that effect and to realize how hard it can become to open a hatch that, say, swings open towards you, when there is a leak on the other side and you have to pull against a pressure differential. To avoid problems reopening a hatch, we are instructed to leave a hatch closed at most for half the time it takes for the pressure to drop 1 mm. Unfortunately I was not allowed to take pictures in this facility. I have attached a picture of the regular Russian segment mockup we practice in Star City. Progress, Service Module, FGB, DC1 are all in place. The MRM1 and MRM2 are off to the right and to the left you can see the future modules MLM and UM. Here you can navigate the panorama if you like: https://www.dermandar.com/p/eaDoMs/iss-mockup-in-star-city #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 have spent the morning in the Orlan airlock ops simulator in Star City with fellow Shenanigan Alex, putting into practice what we learned last week about supporting a Russian EVA in the role of third operator. If you missed it, you can read a bit about that on this logbook. Our Soyuz commanders, Anton and Maksim, were in the Orlan. The airlock ops simulator is one big room, it doesn’t have separate sections to reproduce the different modules of the Station. But it does have regular hatches, valves and pressure indicators, which is what we would work with during pre- and post-EVA operations. There is of course no change in pressure in the room, but all pressure gauges react according to our manipulation of the valves. Here you can see a panorama of the simulator room: https://www.dermandar.com/p/cawTmn/airlock-operations-simulator-in-star-ciy And here’s Anton closing the hatch “to space”, the beginning of our repressurization and post-EVA procedures. vine.co/v/MWXaZXBHgiJ Also, here you can see pictures from some time ago when Alex and I went through the airlock training in the Orlan. https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157631685452043/ #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/

The weekend is almost over here in Star City and it’s time to get ready for another training week. Looking back at last week, we wrapped up the training on Friday with a long simulation session in the Russian segment mockup reviewing crew response in case of a depressurization. This review will come in handy next week, when we’ll do this training in the vacuum chamber, with actual “leaks” and real pressure drops across closed hatches. I’m very much looking forward to experiencing this! Last week I also had an interesting session on the tilt table with the purpose of conducting a fit check for the Braslet (Браслет). This item was first introduced to me last summer, together with a number of Russian clothing and personal hygiene products. It was then that my thigh measurements were taken in order to produce my personal Braslet, that will fly with me on the Soyuz. The idea is pretty simple: you have an anatomically shaped strap that you can tighten around your upper thigh to restrict venous blood flow from the legs to the upper body. This is used in the first days of spaceflight to help in the adaptation to weightlessness conditions, in which there is an uncomfortable fluid shift towards the head. The big numbers you can see in the picture are a scale that allows you to tighten the Braslet to a specified value, which is determined pre-flight. That’s when the tilt table comes in: by tilting a person head down you can simulate the weightlessness-induced effect of blood rushing to the head. To have an objective measurements of the effect of the tilting on my circulatory system, sensors were applied around my head. First I was tilted a few times between 50° head-up and 50° head-down. Then, once the specialists were satisfied with the baseline data, they helped me put on the Braslet. We went through a couple of iteration steps to find out how much I should tighten it to have the expected effect. And the effect was quite significant. I realized it when the Braslet was removed: I was still tilted back 50° and, as soon as the strap was released, I could immediately feel the blood rushing to the head. The tilt bed is also used in Baikonour for pre-launch conditioning, as you can see in this picture with ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli: https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/5238287463/ #Futura #SamLogbook (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 Sasha and I passed our ATV rendezvous exam and were officially certified to perform the monitoring of the ATV docking. As you probably know, the Automated Transfer Vehicle is totally autonomous in its approach and docking to the International Space Station. In fact, there is no way to take manual control of ATV and bring it in for docking, as our Russian crewmates can do with the Progress cargo ship. But we do have humans in the loop: with the help of the camera and a number of visual cues and overlays, plus extensive telemetry information from the vehicle, the crew can monitor the approach and make sure that ATV remains within the nominal approach parameters in terms of speed, corridor, orientation. We are expected to recognize and react within a few seconds to a number of possible deviations that can require us to command the ATV to retreat, escape or abort. A retreat is a less severe intervention that just sends ATV back to the previous hold point. An escape and an abort are instead serious disengage maneuvers that bring ATV to a safe distance and position with respect to Station for troubleshooting and a possible reattempt in the next days. In the picture you can see ESA astronaut André Kuipers in front of the ATV control panel – yes, the big red button sends the abort command. Here you can see a few pictures from today’s exam: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157640578415314/ The prime crew, including my fellow Shenanigan Alex, also passed their exam today! #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 we had long sim with Terry and Anton practicing all operations from the moment we take our seats on the launch pad to docking… well, actually we didn’t quite make it to docking, we ran out of time a few km from Station. But it was anyway an intense training day with lots of learning points! This is, by the way, how our first exam day will look in a couple of months, when we will be do our official qualification sims as the backup crew of the Exp40 folks. On this type of sims, since the exam does foresee that we get to ISS somehow, we would never get catastrophic malfunctions like a fire, a depressurization or a leak in the propellant lines: those scenarios would force us to an immediate emergency reentry. Instead we will get a number of smaller malfunctions, which today included for example a lack of ventilation in Terry’s suit, a leak in one of the oxygen lines, a failure of the main radio receiver, a broken gas analyzer forcing us to manually keep internal pressure within acceptable limits by opening and closing the oxygen supply valve, a series of Kurs failures of both the prime and the backup unit, which would have eventually forced us to a manual rendezvous and docking, if we had gotten that far. We don’t always wear our Sokol during Soyuz training, but these so called “suited” sims are very useful to get us used to properly strapping in and organizing our actions. As you might have noticed, we don’t exactly have a lot of space to move around in the descent module, so it’s a really good thing to practice dealing with the suit in the cramped space. I’ve attached a couple of pictures in which you can see knee straps. Because at reentry the impact with the ground is pretty violent, it’s important that legs are tied down to the seat: if they were free to move, legs might violently impact the control panel just above and cause pretty serious harm. Not having leg straps properly in place has been a serious debrief item in one of our previous sims, so now we are in the habit of checking each other carefully. #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/

Terry is back in Star City and will join Anton and me for a long Soyuz sim in the Sokol suit tomorrow. In the picture, you can see Terry and myself before a similar sim last December. We had our two-hour brief today with our instructor Dima. The plan for tomorrow is to have a longer-than-usual sim (five hours instead of four) and go through the full sequence of events from the moment we enter the descent module on the launch pad to docking at the International Space Station. Sure, in real life it would still take a little bit longer, but in the simulator we can cut away the time in which not much would be happening, since waiting doesn’t have a lot of training value. After ascent and separation from the rocket, things go pretty fast with the new six-hour rendezvous profile. While I conduct the leak checks and verify that all systems are nominal (in the sim they never are!) Anton goes straight into monitoring of the dynamic mode: in fact, the automatic cycle starts a couple of minutes after injection into orbit, no time to waste. If all goes well, the onboard computer builds its basic LVLH orientation (belly to the Earth and “nose” in the direction of flight), tests the Kurs system and gives two initial burns that raise and correct the orbit. Then there is some time for us to test the manual controls, before we move on to the second sequence of two orbital correction burns. Then we transition immediately to the rendezvous mode and on we go all the way to docking. This morning Anton and I already had  similar four-hour sim, except that we had an engine failure during the second burn. If that happens, the automatic cycle stops and the quick 6-hours-launch-to-docking profile is not possible any more. Time to take it easy and get ready to spend two days in the little Soyuz, like in the old times! Photo credit: GCTC #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/

I was invited to lunch today! Between morning and afternoon classes Anton and I had had a food tasting session of Russian space food here in Star City. We were joined by our backup crew: Oleg, Kimya and Kjell. Only our crewmate Terry was missing! This is the first of eight “space lunches” in which we’ll be invited  to try and evaluate the Russian menu. As a European astronaut I will eat primarily the NASA menu and the ESA bonus food onboard, but it’s good to know what the Russian colleagues have to offer. I’m sure there’s a lot of food trading going on onboard! Some of the food rations will be dehydraded, others will be thermostabilized and only need to be heated. Unlike NASA and ESA thermostabilized items, which come in pouches, Russian ones typically come in cans not dissimilar from your typical tuna can from the supermarket. #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/

Happy Sunday everyone! Here in Star City these past few weeks several crews have done their winter survival training. Some have faced temperatures as low as 30°C as they spent two nights outdoors in the woods! This has brought back memories of my own winter survival training two years ago. At that time I wasn’t assigned to an ISS expedition yet, but I was undergoing training as the ESA reserve astronaut. My “crew” included my fellow Shenanigan +Thomas Pesquet and one of the 2009 cosmonaut candidates – now a fully qualified cosmonaut – Sergey, the latter serving as our Commander for the three days we spent outdoors. We had a great time together and we were very lucky with the weather: there wasn’t too much snow on the ground and temperatures only dropped to -15°C in the nights! I have taken some time today to select and upload some pictures, that you can find here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157630256920188/ And if you want to know more about how we spent those two days, here’s my assccount from two years ago: https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2012/01/30/surviving-the-russian-winter/ (Italian translation by @disinformatico here: https://attivissimo.blogspot.ru/2012/07/samantha-cristoforetti-prima-astronauta.html?m=1) #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 spent the afternoon in the Soyuz simulator today, warming up as we wait for our third crewmember Terry to join us in the sim next week. First we practiced the nominal undocking sequence and a nominal reentry burn, of course with a number of malfunctions. Then we moved on to practicing a ballistic reentry. I have explained in this earlier logbook that it’s not a very comfortable way of returning to the planet. To add a little bit of detail, let’s take a look at today’s second scenario: we had just left ISS and discovered that we were loosing our atmosphere into space. Pressure in our descent module was decreasing with a rate of 1 mm Hg every 10 seconds. (Yes, the Russian space community loves mm of mercury!) Our computer was programmed with all the data for a comfortable nominal reentry, but that would have meant turning on the engine to give the braking impulse and reenter the atmosphere only about two hours later! Not a good idea in our scenario to wait that long. That’s where the so-called Program 5 comes in: a predetermined sequence of commands stored in the computer with very generic parameters for the reentry burn. Certainly not enough for a controlled reentry, but enough for a ballistic ride through the atmosphere. The key of course is to start Program 5 at the right time. We have a printed table called Form 23-14 which contains the “magic time” for each and every orbit: Russian cosmonauts print it out every single day on Station and make sure a copy is in every Soyuz, to be prepared in the case of an emergency evacuation! Of course, in our case things were not so easy. We got a computer failure before the engine burn and we ended up having to do everything manually. But even in that case, Form 23-14 is your best friend: it tells you at what time you need to press the button and manually turn on the engine. Why is that so important? Well, it’s you only guarantee that you will land in a relatively safe area, rather than, for example, in the middle of the ocean or on a Himalayan mountain peak! #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 chilly day in Star City today. When I left this morning on my bike it was about -30°С. Luckily it’s nice and warm in the Soyuz simulator, where I got some more manual flying practice. In the picture you can see the dedicated simulator we use for this purpose. Inside it looks just like our regular descent module simulator, but it’s really specifically designed to present us with all kinds of manual approach and docking scenarios and to project accurate images on the periscope view as we fly. If you missed it, you can see our view and our controls here: Please, don’t think that we can fire the big main engine of the Soyuz with those controllers though. We can only fire the small attitude thrusters: we have two sets of them and we nominally only use one at a time. If the main engine can give an acceleration of ca. 0.4 m/s2, one set of attitude thrusters only provides about one tenth of that acceleration. But that’s plenty, because by the time we are within 400 meters from Station we shouldn’t nominally have more than 2 m/s of closing velocity: to come to a full stop from that speed, if needed, we would only need to fire the small thrusters for 50 seconds. We do practice scenarios in which the automatic control fails and we are way faster than we should be. If we recognize such a dangerous situation, we’re required to select both sets of thrusters simultaneously so that we can slow down twice as fast. At that point, it’s not about rendez-vous any more, but it’s about avoiding a possible collision with Station! #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/