→ Logbook

My fellow Shenanigan Alex and I had the pleasure of meeting one of our Orlan instructors again. It’s incredible, but it’s been almost almost a year and a half since he taught us about the Russian spacewalks suit! This time it wasn’t about preparing us to do an Orlan spacewalk (EVA), but rather to teach us how to be the so-called “third operator”, the person assisting the spacewalking crewmembers with pre-EVA and post-EVA procedures. You may wonder why we would be fulfilling that role, since there is always a third Russian crewmember on-board and he/she is bound to have a lot more training in the Russian procedures. Well, the thing is that this person would most likely be isolated in his/her Soyuz. If you take a look at the picture I’ve attached, it will all make sense. In the yellow circle I’ve indicated the module which is used as airlock, meaning the module that is isolated from the rest of the Space Station and depressurized, before spacewalkers open the hatch and exit. When spacewalkers come back inside and close the hatch again, before connecting the airlock again to the rest of the Station we verify that there is no leak to the outside. Imagine, for example, that we damaged the hatch and could not close it properly any more: if we reconnected the airlock to the rest of the ISS, we would depressurize the entire Station! So, Russian EVA procedures foresee a solution for this contingency: the two spacewalkers would get into the small module that I have highlighted in red, called Transfer Section (переходный отсек) and basically use that as a contingency airlock. To protect for this possibility, all four hatches of the Transfer Section are closed and leak checks are performed before the EVA – one of the tasks of the third operator, by the way. Now, of the six ISS crewmembers, three have their Soyuz docked to MRM2 and three to MRM1 (this latter will likely be the case for Alex and myself). As you can easily see, the Soyuz that is docked to MRM2 remains isolated from the rest of Station. So, crewmemers of that Soyuz who are not outside doing the spacewalk need to wait in the MRM2/Soyuz volume, because they can not remain separated from their spaceship. And because of the way crews are composed and docking ports are utilized, most likely the third Russian crewmember would be one of those isolated in there. Hence the need to ask a non-Russian to serve as third operator. Alex and I are an obvious choice, since we’ve already been certified in performing Orlan spacewalks and we only needed a quick refresher. By the way, you can see some pictures of our Orlan training a while back here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157631685452043/

Sasha and I had a chance today to dive back into the ATV* world today. There’s a dedicated simulator here in Star City in which we can practice rendez-vous scenarios and keep up our proficiency, after the initial course we had at the European Astronaut Centre back in Cologne. As the backup crew assigned to the rendez-vous of ATV5 this coming summer, we need to be as good at it as the prime guys, the other two Sashas (one being my fellow shenanigan Alexander Gerst). I also had an overview class on the Penguin suit. Here’s a picture:

Russian Penguin suit. Applies tension to spine to help recompress it to normal length after months in weightlessness! pic.twitter.com/JrUieIL9Ub

— Samantha Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 28, 2014

Russian doctors recommend that we wear it for several hours a day during the last month on ISS. It has a number of chords that apply a compression load between shoulders and pelvis: the purpose is to re-compress the spine, after the long exposure to weighlessness has caused it to elongate. In addition, you can adjust the tensions on the different chords in such a way that, in order to maintain posture, you need to work “against the suit” and train those little stabilization muscles that we use unconsciously on Earth but get quickly deconditioned on orbit. Now time for some Soyuz manual docking practice! *If you’re not familiar with ATV at all, here are some general words from an older logbook: #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/

An easy first day here in Star City. Thanks to my scheduler for the start at 11:00, which gave me a chance to sleep in after the late night arrival from Europe and gradually adjust to the three-hour sleep shift. Three hours is not much, granted. But since I’m a good candidate for having the most rigid internal clock ever observed in a human, I’ll take any help I get. Fun day, also. Four hours at the controls of the Soyuz, first for some manual rendez-vous practice and then for some manual descent training. In the picture you can see where we practice manually flying the descent profile: the control panel and the bluish hand controller are just like the ones we have in the actual Soyuz. Dima is the super awesome instructor assigned to our crew.  He’s not only responsible for our manual reentry skills, but also for preparing us for the overall Soyuz qualification exams. He’s the one who comes up with the craziest failure scenarios to make us grow as a crew and make sure that we take good care of the Soyuz-TMA 15M later this year. About manual reentry: in case you missed it, this older logbook has some general words. But don’t hesitate to ask any questions! #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/

Early wakeup call this morning at 5am to drive to airport and catch my flight from Moscow to Frankfurt. Training is done and dusted for this year, I’ll resume on January 13th. Talking about wakeup calls: in exactly one month ESA colleagues will send a wakeup call hundreds of millions of km into deep space. Waking up from a three-year long nap will be Rosetta, the comet chasing probe. No kidding: Rosetta will catch up with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the Philae lander will hop on the comet. What a day it will be for our human quest for knowledge! It’s been an amazing space adventure so far: check out a fun recap of Rosetta’s journey up to now: Yesterday Terry, Anton and I had a manual docking sim together. Usually Anton and I practice that separately, so this was an occasion to see how we would approach this situation as a crew. But we also took some time for a shout-out to Rosetta – granted, my Vine skills need some honing, but it was in good spirit. I’m sure you can do better, though. Upload your #wakeuprosetta video here – it’s cool and it’s a chance to win some cool prizes! https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/The_competition_winners_who_helped_us_wake_up_Rosetta That’s all from this Logbook for this year. Catch up with you in 2014.. wait, did I say 2014? That’s the year I’m going to space! Thank you all for your interest and support so far. Merry Christmas! #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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha

One final Soyuz sim today with Terry and Anton before Terry and I leave Russia for the Christmas holidays. Our scenario started today just prior to undocking for reentry to Earth. Before we could open the hooks and release the Soyuz from Station, we had to perform a suit leak check, to make sure that our pressure suits would save our lives in case of depressurization. In the picture, just left of my left elbow, you can see our pneumatic connections to Station. The big line is ventilation, meaning that it’s just cabin air circulated in our suits. The smaller one is the supply of pure oxygen. For a leak check we close the blue regulator just below the helmet and start supplying oxygen into the suit by opening the valve next to the window. On the arm we have a pressure gauge: if the suit reaches 0.1 atm and then from there 0.35 atm of overpressure within 90 seconds, the leak check is passed! We reopen the regulator and relief the extra pressure into the cabin. The regulator then remains at the setting 0,4 atm throughout the flight. In a normal day, the suit is simply connected to the outside, but should the pressure in the cabin drop, the regulator will not allow the pressure in the suit to decrease below 0.4 atm. It’s not easy to work in the suit at that pressure: freedom of movement and dexterity are very limited. That’s why for a maximum of 5 min we are allowed to change the setting to 0,27 atm if there’s a need to work demanding procedures. This pressure makes the suit softer and less bulky, but it’s also unfortunately too low to ensure that we’ll have no issues with decompression sickness, hence the time limit. As always in spaceflight, and maybe in life in general, it’s a compromise! #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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha

I got an overview of Russian countermeasures today. In the ISS world, under the name ‘countermeasures’ we mean all that we do to minimize the debilitating effect of weightlessness on muscles, bones and the cardiovascular system. In the countermeasures family, the Chibis-M wins the trophy for the most bizarre piece of equipment I’ve seen so far! Here’s the problem it’s meant to counteract: in weightlessness body fluids, in particular blood, are not pulled towards the legs by gravity as they are on Earth. We call this phenomenon fluid shift and it’s the cause of the puffy face and the chicken legs that astronauts typically display when they are on orbit. When astronauts return to Earth, the effect of gravity can wreak havoc with their cardiovascular system. Here’s where Chibis-M comes in. Don it, make a tight seal around your waist and then reduce the pressure around your lower body, causing some reverse blood shift towards the legs. Do it repeatedly in the weeks before landing and, the thought goes, you’ll have trained your cardiovascular system to better withstand the return to the Earth, where things have a weight. And if it doesn’t work, nobody will be able to say that you didn’t give it your best try! #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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha

Today Terry and I spent the day at the facilities of Soyuz manufacturer Energia in the town of Korolev in the Moscow metropolitan area. The name Korolev sounds familiar? We had a number of different classes with high-fidelity hardware, including one on the docking system in which we could see the mechanism actually work, from the first capture of the probe head all the way to full probe retraction and closing of the hooks. Unfortunately taking pictures is not allowed at Energia, but I have found this photo of the docking interface of an actual Soyuz or Progress. In the green circle you can see the docking probe, which is fully retracted here. There are four petals on the probe: when any of these petals is pressed against the receiving cone of the Station during docking we get the “Contact” signal, the very beginning of the docking sequence. Some time and several sensor signals later, the docking interfaces have made full contact and the hooks can be closed: you can see them in the picture, I have highlighted one pair in the yellow circle. In each pair, one hook is fixed and one is movable. The corresponding hooks on the Station sides are reversed, to that the movable hook of the Soyuz will grab the fixed hook of the Station and viceversa. We don’t always close hooks on both sides. I have also highlighted in red one of the two spring pushers. During the docking sequence they are compressed as the interfaces are joined, thereby storing energy in the springs. At undocking, as soon as we open the hooks that energy is released and the Soyuz is literally pushed away. A simple, clever system! #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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha

This Sunday night I’m preparing for another trip to Energia, the Soyuz manufacturer: departure from Star City early tomorrow morning with Terry! In the meantime, picking up the logbook where I left off, I’d like to finish the story of our fire evacuation training last week. As you might remember, we practiced fire scenarios in the Russian segment of the Space Station and eventually we were confronted with a fire that, in our simulation, we could not put out. To make things worse, the fire affected the module to which our Soyuz was docked, leaving us with no choice but to leave the Station. Now, putting on the pressure suits Sokol while wearing the gas mask is a bit of a challenge. Initially you put on the Sokol like you normally would, up to the arms. The fun comes next: you take a deep breath, hold it, take off the mask, slide your head through the neck ring and put the mask back on, the idea here being that you need to avoid breaking your protection from smoke and toxic combustions products. For our simulation, we actually had to move from the building that houses the Station mockups to the one across the street with the Soyuz simulator. During the warm months crews actually walk across the street with the mask on, but with snow and ice on the ground it’s preferred that we take the mask off. So we got a non-functioning mask for the suiting up, making it a bit easier: in real life we would have to pay great attention at not collapsing the black soft bag – after an exhalation, that bag contains the supply of gas for the next breath! After suiting up, we took our seats in the descent module of the Soyuz simulator, which our instructors had already filled with pretty thick smoke. At times I could hardly see the control panel! After connecting our suits to the Soyuz oxygen supply, we took another deep breath, took the gas mask off and closed the helmet, isolating ourselves from the smoke. For the next couple of hours we then proceeded to perform an emergency undocking from Station as well as the fire-related actions. If you missed it, you can read about the latter in the L-350 Logbook! You can also find more pictures here!  (Photo credits: GCTC) https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157638604385363/ #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://anne.cpamoa.free.fr/blog/index.php/category/logbook-samantha