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Hey, I didn’t forget that I promised to talk to you about the NATO experiment! On Wednesday I wrapped up NATO by removing the experiment containers from the Kubik incubator and putting them into the MELFI freezer, their biological state being frozen until researchers on the ground can get hold of them and do their post-flight analysis. The full name of the experiment is Nanoparticles and Osteoporosis and, like Osteo-4 from the last logbook, it studies the bone. But while Osteo-4 is interested in determining the mechanisms that make us loose bone mass in microgravity, NATO want to see what we can do about it and, in particular, if a particular type of nanoparticles could be effective in counteracting bone loss. See, it’s not very intuitive, but bone is a living tissue that is constantly destroyed and reformed. Cells called osteoclasts destroy bone, other cells called osteoblasts produce new bone. As long as destruction and production are in balance, everything is good, but in weightlessness this balance is disturbed and osteoclasts win. That’s also what happens when people suffer of osteoporosis, unfortunately a common problem! NATO observes in vitro the effects of adding to bone tissue  various doses of “strontium-containing-hydroxyapatite-nanoparticles”, or nHAP-Sr. Some ground studies have suggested that adding nHAP-Sr could be effective in impeding osteoclasts in their bone-destructing job, which would promote a more favorable balance in the bone destruction/production cycle. A promising research for us astronauts in space and for people on the ground suffering from bone loss! But it’s not science all the time up here of course. We do need to keep the Station up and running, which also means periodically changing the Recycle Tank in our Urine Processing Assembly, or UPA. You can see the UPA in the picture, it occupies the deck area beneath our space toilet. What’s left of our urine after being processed in UPA, a dense greenish and not-so-pleasant-smelly liquid called brine, is collected in the recycle tank, which of course needs to be swapped when full. But I did end the day with another cool new experiment called Nematode muscle. I’ll tell you all about it next time! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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 G  ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha (Trad ES) Tradducción en español por +Carlos Lallana Borobio https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook (Trad DE)  Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de

Another day of science yesterday here on humanity’s outpost in space! First, you’ll be happy to hear that the BRICs I talked to you about in the last logbook are happily chilling out at -98deg Celsius in one of our MELFI freezers: after I activated the experiment on Monday, the microbial cultures remained at ambient temperature for about 24 hours and then it was time to put them in cold stowage, where they’ll remain until they can be returned to Earth. Yesterday I also performed the third and last run of the Osteo-4 experiment, which came up on Dragon last week. It’s a set of three trays, each one hosting three bioreactors with a culture of mouse bone cells. The aim is to investigate the mechanism of mechano-transduction, which basically means that bones tissue “senses” mechanical forces and responds with a particular behavior. That’s probably why we lose mass in space: in weightlessness there isn’t much load on or skeleton, so the response of our body is to reduce bone mass. If we only could convince our body that we’ll go back to Earth within a few months and all that bone mass will come in handy! To try and send that message we put mechanical stress on our bones by working out every day on a machine, ARED, that simulates weightlifting. Anyway, back to our experiment, the point is to study gene expression in osteocytes in microgravity: that’s because osteocytes, which are the most common cells in bone, are the mechanosensors of the bone; they are responsible for sensing mechanical loads and inducing appropriate biological responses. How this mechanism works, however, is still a bit of a mystery. Here comes Osteo-4 into play! As for my contribution, my job was to remove the bioreactors from the trays they are installed in, to  reconfigure the ducting to close all the loops and then put the bioreactors in cold stowage. What made it a bit more cumbersome than it otherwise would be is that, as you can see in the picture,  I had to work in the disposable glovebox… my good old friend from the fruit flies experiment, remember? Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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 https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook (Trad DE)  Deutsch von https://www.logbuch-iss.de

Busy day of science and logistics for me to start the week. Dragon unpacking continues, yesterday I had one hour of transfer ops on my schedule. Looking at Dragon you may think we have made quite some progress already in the unpacking, but in reality we have cheated a bit. Many bags have been retrieved and temporarily stowed on ISS, so that we could access other cargo with urgent science. But of course, they won’t unpack themselves…  and some of them are huge, believe me. We call them MO bags and I could comfortably fit inside the smallest of them! Today I also dealt with a special type of cargo, the Polar fridges. They need to be transferred to ISS, but since they are powered up inside Dragon and contain refrigerated goods and science samples, they need to be moved and reinstalled quickly, to minimize the time they remain unpowered. Also today I had two science activities for the experiments BRIC 21 and Synthetic Muscle. BRIC stands for Biological Research in Canisters: you can see one the BRIC units in the picture. This particular run investigates microbes and how they adapt to the space environment, with special attention to the development of antibiotic resistance. You’ve probably heard that this is quite a source of concern in healthcare these days and we really need to understand better how pathogens become resistance to antibiotics. Doing research with pathogens on ISS carries some complications, because you need to provide the microbial culture with a growth medium: if the crew has to do this manually, as it’s often the case, the operation has to happen in the glovebox to ensure containment of the hazardous microorganisms. Here’s where BRICs come in handy: using a dedicated tool, as you can see in the photo, astronauts can push a piston and inject the necessary mediums without ever breaking the three levels of containment required by ISS safety standards. It’s very quick and efficient! But I bet you want to hear about Synthetic Muscle… well, turns out that Dragon brought us some samples of a special material that could be used to replicate muscle tissue. It’s an electroactive polymer: you can make it contract and expand by applying different electric currents. It sure sounds a lot like muscle to me, doesn’t it? Applications on Earth are in the field of prosthetics, of course, but we’re also testing how this material reacts when exposed to cosmic and solar radiation up here, because it could potentially be used in robots to enhance their mobility. Cool, ah? Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

Well, the big news of the past few days is of course that Dragon has arrived! It’s always very special to watch a vehicle approach Station. As big as ISS is, this human outpost in space is only a tiny speck of metal in the vastness of Low Earth Orbit: and yet on Friday morning, as Terry and I monitored from the Cupola, a cargo ship from Earth found us and came knocking at our door. I enjoyed watching Dragon getting bigger and bigger, as continents and oceans passed by beneath, but I also consciously tried to detach myself from the romantics of it all to remain focused on my main task ahead: operating the robotic arm to capture Dragon. It’s something I have practiced hundreds of times on the simulator, mostly with the virtual vehicle moving around a lot more than a real Dragon usually does, but doing it for real is of course quite different:  let’s say that it’s one of those situations when it doesn’t take much to become very famous for all the wrong reasons! Fortunately everything went well and, after capture, the ground team took control of the arm to slowly berth Dragon to Node 2 nadir – it’s now basically an extra room just outside our crew quarters. On Friday I performed the vestibule leak check. As you might remember, the vestibule is that space between the berthed vehicle and the ISS, a little corridor that is formed when the two are joined. Before we open the hatch of ISS we need to make sure that the vestibule is not leaking, hence we pressurize a little, to ca. 260 mmHg, and then verify the pressure again after a certain interval of time. Vestibule passed the leak check, then Scott and I opened the ISS hatch and worked a couple of hours on getting the vestibule ready, mainly removing components that are not needed while Dragon is berthed and are in the way of… opening the Dragon hatch! Scott and Terry opened the Dragon hatch yesterday morning and that was the beginning of a weekend of intense work, getting out urgent cargo and starting the science activities, many of which are on a very tight schedule due to degradation of samples as time passes. As soon as the big bags were out of the Dragon center volume, my task was to retrieve a new Kubik, the stand-alone centrifuge-incubators I mentioned in the last logbook, and get it setup and configured to support two cell biology experiments, Cytospace and NATO, both of which started yesterday afternoon and will continue autonomously for a few days, when it will be time to remove the experiment containers from Kubik and put them in the freezer, waiting for return to Earth for analysis. Cytospace, as the name suggests, looks at the cellular cytoskeleton, the structures within the cell that give it its shape. How does microgravity affect the shape of the cell? And, most importantly, how do changes in the cell shape affect gene expression? This sounds like a complicated concept, but in the end it simply means that the shape of the cell, which is changed by microgravity, likely affects the way the cell does its job. And we’re really interested in understanding this better because… well, we’re made of cells and what happens in the cells determines what happens in our body as a whole. And vice versa, what we observe in entire systems of our body, for example in term of bone loss or impairment of the immune system, can be explained by changes at the level of the cell. Next time I’ll talk to you about NATO! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

Well, as you might have heard, Dragon’s arrival has been delayed a few days. Had the launch occurred on Monday, it would already be berthed to Node 2 right now and we would already have opened the hatch and started to get urgent cargo out. But hey, in the space business flexibility is paramount! The launch slipped by one day, delaying arrival to ISS by two days… that’s orbital mechanics and phasing angles for you. But if you think that we had two free days while waiting for Dragon to come knock at our door, I’m afraid you’re not acquainted with the folks who run the ISS ops: they always have a slip plan! A launch is delayed? Voila’, old plan is taken out, new plan is put in. Ready? Go! Yes, whenever things heavily depend on an inherently uncertain event like the launch of a rocket, mission managers, flight directors and planners always fully prepare two plans: that requires a lot of extra work on the ground, but it ensures that no precious crew time on ISS is wasted. In this case they had pretty major plans in store for the case of launch slip. I kind of got that feeling on Tuesday already: when they give you one full hour to study a procedure you’ll do the next day and then they give you another hour to gather hardware you will need for that procedure and then they tell you not to bother taking tools out of the toolbox, just take the entire drawer instead… when all that happens you start to think that you’re going to get your hands dirty on some major work. Which I love! While Terry and Scott were busy on their own major activity with the EVA suits, I spent the day in Node 3 reconfiguring the intermodule ventilation ducting in preparation of moving the PMM module later this year from Node 1 nadir to Node 3 forward. Basically, we need a way to get ventilation to PMM in its future new location. Never thought if would be possible to fit so many bags full of hardware in Node 3, in the pretty cramped space between ARED and the toilet cabin, but somehow it worked. And at 2 am Houston-time specialists on the ground were ready to support, with a ground model of the equipment to replicate any issues had we run into problems. Fortunately, with the exception of a couple of stuck fasteners , everything went smoothly: kudos to the team for having such a great, user-friendly procedure ready! Dragon slip also carved some time to work on the European Modular Cultivation System in Columbus. I got to de-install a number of modules called Rotor Based Life Support Systems –self-contained boxes that are attached on the rotors of this facility. They will hitch a ride to Earth on Dragon and they will be refurbished and launched again in the future to support future plant experiments. Ah, I also worked a little on a Kubik, the stand-alone centrifuge/incubators that we sometimes operate in Columbus for experiments on cell cultures. I wrapped up the experiment Stem Cells Differentiation by moving the experiment containers to cold stowage and downlinking Kubik data to the ground. As the name suggests, this experiment studies human mesenchymal stem cells, which can differentiate into several cell types to build bone, fat, cartilage, musles, tendons. Now, if you’re a stem cell and you have all this choice, how do you know into what you need to differentiate? What are going to be when you “grow up”? That depends on what kind of signals you get from so-called signaling molecules. Vitamin-D is one of those signaling molecules and in particular we know that it is involved in telling stem cells to turn into bone cells. Bone loss is a big issue in microgravity, as you know, so this experiment observes the effectiveness of the Vitamin D signaling by comparing stem cells differentiation in presence or absence of Vitamin D. Pretty cool, ah? By the way, not sure how much sunlight you get where you live (we don’t get much up here), but if you haven’t done so already and get a chance, at your next blood draw it can’t hurt to check you Vitamin D levels! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

The arrival of the Dragon resupply vehicle is now less than a couple of weeks away and it’s amazing to watch the Station getting ready for it. I wish I could say that I have the overall picture, but that’s up to people way smarter than me who sit in the control centers and run the show. Up here, we just try to do our best in performing our daily tasks, but these are of course all pieces of a puzzle that will eventually become a full visiting vehicle mission, from capture to release, with a significant complement of science to perform while Dragon is berthed to ISS. Yesterday I installed new software on several laptops, so they will be ready to support new science. Today I spent two hours gathering from all over the Station into one single bag all the equipment required for a specific experiment, so that everything will be readily available when those operations start a few weeks from now. And of course Terry and I continue to prepare for the capture of Dragon. Today was our “offset grapple” practice, a two-hour session in which we could practiced flying the real arm, instead  of the simulator. I’ve talked about “offset grapples” in my L+20, +21 Logbook: check it out, in case you missed it! When the last Dragon arrived, Butch performed the actual capture. This time I will be the prime robotic operator, so I will be at the controls of the arm, while Terry will be responsible for communication with the ground, running the procedures and the malfunction cue cards (the latter will hopefully not be needed). And speaking of malfunctions, on our last “almost-grapple” today we practiced the response to a “safing event” occurring the arm end effector is already over the pin, so very close to pressing the trigger to capture, or even shortly thereafter. The arm will automatically go into a safe mode following a malfunction, making it impossible to command the joints, the end effector or the arm in its entirety. Luckily, it’s really ‘two arms in one’: granted, there is only one set of beams and joints, but there’s otherwise full redundancy on all the components that allow the arm to function. In order to make use of that redundancy and complete the capture on the backup string, we would have to move from the Cupola to the Lab, where we have a second robotic workstation. On capture day, that second workstation is in a “hot backup” mode, meaning that literally one button press is sufficient to make it prime and put it in control of the arm. Wouldn’t you love to have that kind of redundancy on your car when that red light appears? Ah, yesterday I also spent some time on my periodic fitness assessment. We do that on our bike, CEVIS, once a month, using a dedicated protocol, while our electrocardiogram is recorded and blood pressure is measured every five minutes. Based on this data, specialists on the ground can make an estimation of our VO2max, which is a commonly used measure of cardiovascular fitness. The typical trend observed in 6-month missions is a significant, quick decrease of VO2max early on and then a slow recovery through the daily workouts on bike and treadmill. And the closer we are to returning to Earth, the more critical it is to exercise, to be ready to face gravity again. Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

Quiet Easter Sunday here on ISS, no work at all on my schedule, although I did a little bit of work off the “task list”. Oh, I don’t think I ever told you about the task list, time to change that! The task list is a pool of activities that have been prepared by the ground, but don’t have a high enough priority to be put on the regular schedule. If we want to do some work in our free time, or if time frees up because some activity could be completed quicker than expected, or because a planned activity was aborted, we can browse the task list and find useful things to do. Some are bigger tasks of several hours, others are little housekeeping tasks, like replacing the batteries or the shell of a laptop, or reconfiguring stowage in preparation of an upcoming activity. Packing and unpacking a cargo vehicle is also often on the task list, in case we want to work ahead during our free time. And since being late with packing is really not an option, we always get a head start: the stowage specialists on the ground send up pre-pack gather lists well before a vehicle actually shows up, so we can start getting return bags ready. In the picture you can see the Node 2 endcone with all the bags we already started to pack for Dragon. Compare it with the way it looks about a month ago for our Exp 42 crew picture! Recording video messages or educational videos for outreach purposes is also typically on the task list, as well as a couple of procedures that are permanent entries: changing the solid waste container and the urine container in our space toilet. After the first couple of times, you don’t really need a procedure for that, but an activity also has a stowage note attached, which in this case tells you which new containers to get, where to find them and where to stow the removed ones. As you know, every item is tracked on the Space Station: by part number, barcode , serial number.. or all three of them! Things still get lost occasionally, unfortunately. We’re all humans and as such are prone to making mistakes:  if something ends up in the wrong place (in the real world or in the inventory system), who knows when it’s going to be found! Also, things accumulate over time that should actually have been disposed of a long time ago. Not unlike most people’s homes, we can’t afford to accumulate things that are no longer necessary, because we need the space for new hardware to support the science program. The European laboratory Columbus, after having been on orbit for about 7 years now, has seen a little bit of that. When I arrived back in November there were quite a few stowage bags on the rack fronts: so much science going on, so little space to stow the equipment! Luckily ATV5 and SpX-5 took away some bags that were no longer used and some optimization of the available volume in the endcone has cleaned up the cabin quite a bit. In order to optimize more, on the weekends I have been doing photo-audits of our main stowage rack in Columbus, the Deck 4 rack. The stowage team at COL-CC, the COSMOs, want to have the full picture of what’s in those lockers, in order to devise a consolidation plan that will hopefully save some space! So I have been snapping away… patiently, locker by locker, bag by bag, item by item, nicely showing all the barcodes and serial numbers. And you thought that being an astronaut was all glamour and adrenaline, didn’t you? Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

Yesterday was a relatively easy day, which is always kind of nice at the end of the week. Not that I didn’t have a full schedule –  we always have activities from our morning Daily Planning Conference, or DPC, (somewhere around 7:30 in the morning) to our evening DPC (somewhere around 19:30). However, tasks can be more or less complex and more or less “routine”. Running a new experiment that has not been performed before, which requires a complicated setup, a lot of coordination with the ground or delicate operations is of course a lot more demanding than performing tasks that I have done before and that I can perform autonomously – let’s say sampling the water or removing/installing lockers in our Express racks (modular racks that can support a variety of science operations and are continuously reconfigured depending on current and upcoming ops). Simple or routine tasks that do not require a lot of support from the control centers are usually inserted in our schedule as “pink activities” – the writing is pink on our planning viewer, indicating that you can do them whenever you want, as long as they are done by the end of the day. For non-pink activities, on the contrary,  there is an expectation that they be performed more or less on time. Some tasks are even “blue-boxed” – a thick borderline around the activity on the viewer indicates that the time is to be strictly observed. Typical blue-boxed activities are live interviews with media or public calls with VIPs, which require a complex setup on the ground to provide audio and video connection with the party on the other side for the agreed time. Most experiments are not blue-boxed, but they are also not pink. That’s because very often specialists very familiar with the experiment operations, and sometimes the principal investigator himself/herself, are available on space-to-ground for any assistance or real-time troubleshooting that might be required. In many cases, you don’t get a second chance to get an experiments right (at least not until you fly up new samples or equipment), so it’s important to have the maximum support available in case problems are encountered. Talking about science, today I worked a little bit with the JAXA experiment ANISO tubule. I’ve performed several runs of this experiment, each one consisting (from my side) of a sequence of activities spread over multiple days. Let’s say that today is day 1: you retrieve a new sample chamber, like the one in the pictures, and with a syringe you slowly inject 1,5 ml of water. Then you put the chamber in MELFI for 96 hours at +2C! This simulates winter and promotes good germination of the Arabidopsis seeds. Then the chamber is moved to ambient temperature for about 4 more days (spring has arrived!) and finally, after adding more water, two days of observation in the fluorescence microscope begin, with scientists on the ground directly studying live images from ISS. We have known for a long time that plants grow differently in weightlessness. Since they don’t “feel” gravity up here, they tend to grow a thinner and longer stem. In fact, the ANISO scientists have even done the opposite on the ground, putting seeds in a centrifuge and showing that in “hypergravity” they grow shorter and thicker stems. The difference is likely due to different orientation of microtubules in the individual cells that change their shape. I find it fascinating that something as small as a cell would be affected by gravity, but it is! A particular group of proteins, called MAPs, control the orientation of the microtubules and hence the shape of the stem. Now, you can’t really see microtubules and MAPs directly in the fluorescence microscope, but these Arabidopsis plants have been engineered in such a way that they also produce a fluorescent protein that accurately mimic MAPs: and that does the trick! Now you can use the fluorescence microscope to indirectly observe proteins that you otherwise would not see. Fascinating, isn’t it? Sounds a bit paradoxical, but microgravity is really a great place to study gravity response of plants, which in turn can help optimizing agricultural practices. I don’t have a background in life sciences, so this is all very new to me, but I hope you find it as intriguing as I do! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

Hey, I’m sure you’ve heard: we have two new crewmembers here on ISS who will remain onboard for, no kidding,  an entire year! Might be the first of several extended expeditions and the main driver of course  is the observation of human physiology and health during a longer period of the time than the standard 6-month missions, so it’s not surprising that Scott and Misha are already being put “under the microscope” more extensively than, say, Terry or I. There’ s a wide range of investigations that will target numerous aspects of their adaptation process and all of those experiments need start-of-mission data. Today was a big day of ocular health research! In fact, my working day ended with back-to-back sessions in which I supported Scott and Misha in taking funduscope images of their eyes, but even before our morning Daily Planning Conference I was already tasked with the setup of our Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) machine for their eye scans. Gennady assisted Misha, before it was my turn to assist Scott. I must confess that I dread these events a little bit: getting good scans is not always easy and it’s not uncommon to have to repeat them multiple times to get a satisfactory result. It can be somewhat frustrating for the operator and tiring for the subject, who has to keep his/her eyes open and still for a long time. We have awesome remote guiders who run the show from the ground, but they get the image streamed from our laptop with an ever so slight delay that sometimes makes it difficult to give real-time guidance when the image changes fast. All that said, I really had nothing to worry about today. Scott is a natural at this! He is just the perfect subject (at least certainly much better than me): his gaze was so steady that only minimal adjustments of the lens position were needed during the scans to keep the proper eye layers in view, making my job so easy. Thanks, Scott! Between eye research sessions and a few other small tasks (like troubleshooting one of our Merlin fridge), today I also had three videoconferences with people on the ground – a bit unusual, typically they are spread out in the week. Besides the weekly videoconference with my flight surgeon Brigitte, I got to talk to ESA folks at COL-CC and ESTEC: the mission director and lead flight director, as well as the Eurocom on duty and the mission science officer. Similarly, in the evening  Scott, Terry and I had our weekly conference with Houston and Huntsville  for the NASA perspective and update on current operations from the lead flight director and the rest of the Expedition 43 team. If you are someone who follows the live-feed from the Space Station, including the space-to-ground communications, you might have noticed that you don’t hear such conferences: that’s because mission controls puts restrictions in place, so that nobody beyond the parties involved listens to the conversation. As you can imagine that’s particularly important for the periodic medical and psychological conferences, but also for the weekly family conferences, as well as remote guidance for exams on human subjects, like an ultrasound or today’s OCT scans. I also got to work a little on water balance today. As I’m sure we know, we recycle all the water onboard thanks to a facility called Water Processing Assembly (WPA). Well, WPA has been having some hiccups lately, so it’s not currently producing potable water. But… don’t panic! We have plenty of water in the lines and plenty of full water bags. However, while the specialists on the ground develop a forward plan to troubleshoot WPA, there’s a bit of work to be done to maintain proper water balance. Check the picture captions for more info!   Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #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

As  you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t been writing much this past month – my evenings have been just flying away, divided between the irresistible pull of the Cupola, other outreach projects and many little personal things that need to be taken care of.

During the day the Space Station keeps us really busy with science, maintenance, housekeeping, logistics and maintaining our proficiency in emergency responses, robotics, Soyuz flying…you name it. The variety of things we do up here is mind blowing, if I stop to think about it. Oh, and by the way, we also had a Soyuz undock earlier this month, taking home half of our Space Station population. Well, at least in terms of human presence – I’m sure the microorganisms living up here, who outnumber us by orders of magnitude, would claim that it’s “their” Space Station and don’t care much if three biped mammals are replaced by three different ones. We, on the other, do care. It was hard to see Sasha, Butch and Elena leave after being so close for four months and we did become just a little bit apprehensive when communication with their Soyuz was lost during the engine burn, which was somewhat unexpected. So we were happy to hear from Moscow that the search & rescue teams had made contact with the capsule and even happier to see our friends’ smiling faces as they got their first breaths of fresh air in Kazakhstan. In case you’re wondering, we saw them on NASA TV,  like many of you, I reckon. Not sure I mentioned before, but we can get a TV station transmitted live on one of our laptops when we have satellite coverage for the Ku-Band antennas. For a couple of weeks the Space Station felt even bigger than usual, with Terry, Anton and I as the only (human) inhabitants. Not only were there fewer people around, but of course we were only getting half of the work done, so there was less com on space-to-ground. Overall, if felt a lot quieter. And now we’re back to six! Scott, Gennady and Misha have joined us last week and have added their personalities to the mix to create the new dynamic of Expedition 43. It’s such an invaluable opportunity to be part of two different crews: in the end, it’s the human interactions that determine our experience up here, so in a way it’s like having two space missions instead of one. And if you have such awesome crewmates as I have had on Expedition 42 and have now on Expedition 43… well, life is good! Also, Terry and I have it really easy in terms of handover: Scott has already been up here for six months just 4 years ago, so he really doesn’t need the amount of guidance and coaching (and patience!) that we required at the beginning from Butch. Scott is basically already autonomous and has already given some inputs that have improved our life and work. Always good to add a new perspective to the equation! So, here we are, it’s April 1st already and, barring changes, my Soyuz will undock on May 14th. With me onboard, unless I hide really well. I have only 42 days left on ISS, which is of course a cool number, but it’s also not much. If I sound a little sad saying this, it’s because I am. Anyway, with so  little time left I am committed to resume regular logbooks: there is so much still that I have to share with you! I thought I’d start by sharing some picture of life and work from the past four months: check out the captions for some insight.  Talk to you soon!