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Another great training day in the Orlan today with Sasha. We repeated Wednesday’s tasks and of course, after having already seen the profile once, we were much more efficient. We also optimized the tool setup, which helped a lot. In the picture, taken just after the crane got me out of the water at the end of the run, you can see a peculiarity of the water version of the Orlan.  If there was ever a problem with the air supply from the surface, flipping that white lever would switch to the emergency air bottles located in the backup. The other peculiarity is of course that the front control panel and the computer are missing in the Hydrolab version. The only thing remaining is the analogue pressure gauge (the gray cylindric box), which of course comes in handy in the water as well. Traduzione italiana a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ En español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/

Four hours of Soyuz sim this morning with Anton. And we didn’t have any major engine or computer failures today, not even a fire or a depressurization. But we certainly were not bored. The instructor threw at us many little malfunctions that we don’t see very often and are not so easy to detect. They might not kill you, but for sure they can easily turn your 6-hour trip to ISS into a two-day trip, if not dealt with properly. After lunch, I had a theoretical lesson with Terry about fighing fires in the Russian segment: how the smoke detectors work, what kind of gas masks and fire extinguishers we have, where they are located, what are the rules of engagement. Next we’ll have a practical session in the mockups, similar to the one you can see in the picture with ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli. Traduzione italiana a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ En español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/

Challenging day in the Orlan today! With crewmate Sasha we showed up at the Hydrolab at 9:00 and, after seeing the doctor, we changed into our cooling undergarments and had some time to set up our tools and bags. Then we had spent about four hours in the water practicing tasks mainly on the Mini Laboratory Module (MLM), a new Russian element that should be launched next year. You can see the MLM mockup in the picture showing the platform before it was lowered in the water. Of course after the training we had a debrief with our instructors. I assure you, we were not posing in that debrief picture! After a late lunch, there was still time to brief tomorrow’s Soyuz sim with my Soyuz commander Anton and our instructor. We’ll have our sim first thing tomorrow morning. Did I mention already that I love being in the Soyuz simulator?   Traduzione italiana a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui: https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/ En español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/

Back in Star City! Sometimes getting from one place to another on the surface of the planet seems more difficult than going to space. So it happened that I was a bit delayed and only made it to Star City early this afternoon. Too late for scuba diving in the Hydrolab, unfortunately, but early enough to get an extensive briefing of the tasks Sasha and I will practice under water tomorrow. The nice things about the Hydrolab is that you can raise the platform with the ISS mockups, so you can take a close look even without putting your scuba gear on. You can read much more about the Orlan training in the attached post on the Shenanigans blog.

After a day of recovery at home yesterday – sorry I missed our Open Day and SocialSpace! – and a Shenanigans tagup with management and colleagues this morning on a variety of topics – thanks Thomas Pesquet for organizing this! – it’s time to hit the road again. I’m at the Frankfurt airport waiting to baord my flight to Moscow to pick up training in Star City tomorrow. Really busy week in the Hydrolab coming up, first with some preparatory scuba diving tomorrow and then two training runs in the Orlan suit on Wednesday and Friday. Also on the training plan Soyuz sims with my Commander Anton and emergency training on the Russian segment of ISS. I’m sharing a picture from Orlan training back in April: judging from my hair, I’d say it was taken after the run!

Sharing a couple more pictures from our ATV training last week. As I mentioned in the L-439 Logbook, one of the initial ingress operations consists in installing an air filter that cleans the atmosphere of the newly arrived vehicle. Before letting the filter do its job over the next several hours, we install a curtain, as you can see in the picture. This little trick prevents ATV atmosphere from mixing with Station atmosphere while the filtering is ongoing. You can also see our mockup of the filter itself in the other picture. Btw, in the real vehicle we install the filter on the endcone: that door of course doesn’t exist] But in our mockup getting through the hatch from the Service Module is rather cumbersome, since unfortunately we can not float: hence the extra door on the “vacuum” side! One final reminder of our Open Day tomorrow at the European Astronaut Centre! Unfortunately, I have to take care of a personal issue that has arisen last minute, so I will not be able to participate. https://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10705/1245_read-7609/#gallery/11670  

Today Sasha and I finished Part1 of ATV training. First we got to see some In-Flight-Maintenance procedures concerning the replacement of cabin fan and smoke detectors. Then we had a pretty long paper-based test aimed at assessing our knowledge and understanding of the malfunctions that can occur during docking and rendez-vous. When we come back for another week of ATV training in November we’ll spend most of the time in the simulator practicing our reactions to these malfunctions. Here’s a pic with a good view of our ATV mockup at EAC. Btw, if you come and visit us on Sunday on our Open Day, you’ll also get a tour inside!

Some more ATV training with Sasha today! We starting delving into the world of rendez-vous and docking malfunctions: all those scenarios that would cause us to send a manual command to interrupt the approach of ATV. We also had an evaluation simulation on ATV emergencies, in particular the cases of fire in ATV and of a Station depressurization with the leak located in ATV. A lot of the emergency procedures are common to generic station-wide response we train in Houston, but there are some peculiarities related to ATV. The main one is that it is a vehicle that can, and must eventually undock Station. If you’re going to close the hatch of ATV in an emergency knowing that you will never open it again, you better make sure you leave the vehicle in a configuration in which it can safely undock and fly autonomously until atmospheric reentry! All the ingress operations we worked on yesterday were very helpful for today’s sim, because we were familiar with the location of equipment. In the picture, you can see us yesterday working on the installation of the air filter.

I have picked up ATV training with crewmate Sasha today. One of the classes dealt with the operations related to ingressing ATV after docking. Sounds easy enough, but ingress operations actually take several hours. For one thing, before opening any hatch you need to make sure that you have a good seal between Station and the vehicle itself. We call these type of procedures leak checks: you basically create a pressure differential between two volumes that are sealed off and check that the pressure equalization across the seal over a certain time is within the limits. Once the leak check is passed and you open the hatch, it’s time to take a long series of air samples, part for return to ground and part to test onboard for different contaminants. Then you need to install an air filter and let it fully clean the ATV atmosphere for many hours. Only after the filtering is complete are you allowed to enter ATV without protective mask and goggles. If you think about it, it makes sense: on Earth, small particles fall to the ground, but in space they float, so they can easily get into your eyes or your lungs. Of course, we don’t expect that on space vehicles, which are prepared in clean rooms, but better be safe than sorry! You can see in the picture a crewmember entering ATV with protective gear. And what are those yellow things? Those are clamps that are installed on the hatch to increase the mechanic rigidity of the link between ATV and Station. After all, an ATV is a much bigger beast than a Progress or a Soyuz! Those clamps are pretty interesting. Since you need to be able to close a hatch quickly in an emergency, they are designed so that you just need to pull on the string of one and they all come off. Just make sure you don’t have your fingers in the way when the spring loaded lever snaps to the release position!