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Today I had a chance to help the development process of an experiment that I will perform on ISS during my mission. Many astronauts report that they don’t sleep as well on ISS as they do on the ground. Most tend to sleep a bit less than on Earth and feel somewhat less rested. The experiment in question aims at studying the heart activity during sleep. Thanks to a series of sensors embedded in a tight-fitting T-shirt, an electrocardiogram can be recorded while the astronaut sleeps. Also, an 3-axis accelerometer placed on the sternum can record data that can give insight into the cardiac mechanics in microgravity. While I was trying the T-shirt on today, the Primary Investigator could show me on the accelerometer traces the opening and closing of the different valves of my heart. Pretty cool, ah? Investigating these phenomena on healthy people in unique environments (like microgravity) can give scientists insight that can help sick people on Earth. For examples, the same micro-awakenings that this experiment aims to observe in astronauts (via their heart rate variance) have been tentatively shown to exist in narcoleptic people. Learned a lot again today! In the picture, my good friend Cady Coleman peaking out of her crew quarters on ISS!

Next week at the European Astronaut Center my crewmate Sasha and I will have our first week of ATV training. ATV is the Automated Transfer Vehicle, the cargo resupply spaceship of the European Space Agency. It docks automatically to the Service Module of the Russian Segment using the Russian Docking System (the same one as the Soyuz) but a different suite of extremely precise docking sensors. You can not take over control of ATV from ISS and fly it manually to docking, but crews are trained to monitor the rendezvous and send contingency commands to interrupt the approach if necessary. So far, four ATVs have flown and all of them have docked flawlessly with great precision. ATV4 Albert Einstein is on ISS right now. The last one, ATV5 Georges Lemaître will fly next year and should still be on Station when my crewmates and I arrive. In this beautiful picture, taken by Don Pettit, you can see the arrival of ATV3 Edoardo Amaldi last year!

Enjoying a rare weekend at home in Cologne: no training except, as usual, working out. Strength and endurance training are daily activities for astronauts onboard the International Space Station. We have very effective equipment onboard that helps us reduce muscle and bone loss associated with long exposure to weightlessness. But that equipment is also quite bulky. Consider that the ISS is a gigantic space vehicle compared to anything we will use in the future for space exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit, so we’ll probably need smaller devices in the future. Looks like fellow Shenanigan Andreas Mogensen got to assemble and test such a device during his SEATEST mission in the Aquarius underwater habitat. Take a look at his video report!

As of today, Butch and I are officially Columbus specialists! Our training week finished this morning with an evaluation simulation in the Columbus mock-up. And in terms of Columbus systems training, this is it until flight. Except for a quick refresher of a couple of hours in the final months before launch, next time I’ll do any work on Columbus systems will be on the real flight hardware in space. Feels kind of strange, actually. While we were running the simulation inside the mock-up, a lot was going on outside: the team here is getting ready to welcome a lot of visitors in little over a week. The European Astronaut Center will open its doors on September 22nd as part of a big open day of the entire German Aerospace Centre that we are co-located with. https://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10705/1245_read-7609/#gallery/11670 At EAC we’ll have tours of the training facilities throughout the day and a rich stage program. If you can make it to Cologne, we’re really looking forward to seeing you!

Now you have a water leak in Columbus: what do you do? Butch and I were trained on that in one of our Columbus specialist classes today. First of all, why do we have water lines in Columbus, as well as throughout ISS, with the exception of the Russian segment? That’s how we cool our equipment! And it’s also how we cool the the cabin air, thanks to dedicated heat exchangers: that’s our air conditioning system. Think about how hot your laptop computer can get and now imagine how much heat we generate on ISS with so many computers and other electromechanical components! All that heat is collected by cooling water, then transferred to the ammonia lines outside ISS and finally rejected to space through the radiators. So, a water leak is a really bad thing. Not only, or not so much, because you have a water spill, but because you’re progressively loosing cooling efficiency and your equipment will soon overheat. Let’s be clear: Columbus is pretty aggressive when it comes to protecting itself. If a certain amount of water is lost, it will pretty much shut itself down and leave only vital equipment running, reducing the thermal load to the point that no active water cooling is required. But since we don’t want that to happen, we have procedures that have us work together with the ground in a coordinated effort to pinpoint the leak as fast as possible and isolate it. Since most of the possible leak locations are not in plain view, the hunt can be long! One of the possible culprits in a water leak scenario could be the Water Pump Assembly. Good thing that Luca replaced a failed one on ISS a few months ago, so that we’re now back to full redundancy. You can see him in action in the picture!  

Laptops, laptops, laptops! Continuing with our Columbus specialist training, today Butch and I spent some time with our instructor Bernd looking at some maintenance tasks related to the Columbus laptop. We have many, many laptops on ISS and no, not all laptops are created equal. Some laptops, that we call PCS, are  on the ISS control bus and have displays that allow crewmembers to monitor the status of onboard systems and to send commands. Truth to be told, most system commanding is done from the ground by specialists sitting on console in the various control centers. As crewmembers we are mainly trained on procedures that would be critical in case of an emergency or a loss of communication situation. Columbus, just like the Japanese laboratory JEM, has its own laptop for telemetry and commanding, which is called PWS. I hope you’re not getting tired of acronyms already, because this is just the beginning! We also have SSC laptops that are not on the control bus and contain application software for planning, procedure viewing, inventory management but also videoconferencing and IP phone calls. Finally for internet access and some more application software we have CSL laptops. Oh, I almost forgot: lots of experiment racks come with their own dedicated laptop as well!

Second day of Columbus specialist training with crewmate Butch. Yesterday I mentioned that we have to rotate racks out of the way sometimes to access hardware. One example is the Columbus port endcone, which contains a lot of critical ECLSS equipment. ECLSS is the Environmental Control and Life Support System. The ECLSS in Columbus is highly integrated with the rest of the ISS and does not have an autonomous capability of air revitalization, meaning CO2 scrubbing and oxygen introduction. That’s not a problem, though, because many fans at the module interfaces force air to circulate throughout Station. Columbus does have its own air conditioning system though. Condensate heat exchangers, that cool down and dehumidify the cabin air, are in the Deck1 rack that Butch and I rotated up in the picture. The endcone equipment in front of us is mainly redundant cabin fans with their filters and ducting. Also hidden down there are several shut-off valves that allow for interruption of the fluid exchange between Columbus and the rest of ISS: the nitrogen supply lines for our experiment racks, for example, but also the condensate line that brings back the water recovered from the cabin air for reprocessing in Node3. If we had to isolate Columbus for a contingency situation we would have to close those valves. Luckily they are motorized and can be controlled remotely, but if the motor failed we would have to rotate the rack and dive in the belly of Columbus to actuate them manually!    

Back from my vacation and ready for two weeks of training at home-base: the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany. This week is dedicated to Europe’s laboratory in space, the Columbus module. Not so much to the science that we do in Columbus – that’s what we call payload training and it’s for another time. But rather the actual Columbus systems, from thermal control system to power supply or data management. With my crewmate Butch I will receive specialist training this week. I’ll tell you more in the next days about the different levels of qualifications we can have on the ISS systems, but one thing to know is that at any time we need at least a specialist-trained crewmember onboard for each ISS module/system. When European astronauts are on ISS, of course we’re the Columbus specialist! Today Butch and I had several lessons on different systems, including what we call structure and mechanisms. That’s when we got to practice rotating a rack. Imagine that in your house you had wardrobes on all your walls, as well as the ceiling and the floor. That’s the way it is on the Space Station. Each of of these elements, that we call racks, is hinged on one one side and can be rotated, for example to provide access to neighboring locations for maintenance purposes. Some racks are easier than others to rotate and it’s good to have some practice with the trickier ones.

Back in Europe after a long, but very smooth flight. Early next week I’ll take care of some administrative work at my homebase, the European Astronaut Centre (EAC). You know.. email, paperwork, meetings. Plus a couple of interviews. After that I’ll be on vacation for ten days. I’ll be back at EAC on September 9th for Columbus training. When there is no Space-To-Ground communication with the Space Station we say that we are LOS (Loss-Of-Signal). Short periods of LOS are normal and due to discontinuities in satellite coverage. So, this training logbook will be LOS for a couple of weeks. So long and, as they say from Mission Control before the start of a planned LOS, “see you on the other side!”.

Half day of training fully devoted to science today before heading to the airport. First thing in the morning my crewmates and I received brief presentations from a number of PIs (Principal Investigators) who are proposing experiments in which we would be required to serve as human subjects. It’s their opportunity to present the scientific value of their investigations and for us to ask any questions we might have about the experiment protocols and about any risks and constraints involved. Actually, the risks are typically really minimal: before an experiment makes it to this point, it has been reviewed at multiple levels to make sure there are no concerns for the subjects. Then I had the chance to practice making an ultrasound of my eye. Not on my own, of course. As far as I understand, it takes years to train an ultrasound operator. But hopefully now I will be able to implement instructions properly when I’ll do this on Station under remote guidance from a ground-based operator. Now it’s time to drive to the airport and catch that plane to Europe!