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Just back from a long and challenging day at the NBL. The Interface Heat Exchanger on the Lab endcone is one of those few components that we really, really hope never fails (see L-468 for the location). It is well-know that an EVA to go and replace it would be a very difficult one. Now I can confirm it from direct experience in the pool! Time to grab dinner with a few friends now and later get ready to leave. I have some more training tomorrow morning and then I’m heading back to Europe in the afternoon.  

I spent the morning at the NBL today diving in preparation of my EVA training run tomorrow. As I’ve mentioned before (see L-481), diving is a great way of getting familiar with a task, especially in terms of translation paths and geometry of the worksite, as well as available handrails and other points of fixation. Moreover, being immersed in the 3D space makes it a bit easier to picture how the safety tether routing will be. Safety tethers are anchored somewhere on structure, typically close to the airlock, and then unwind as you move away from the anchor point. We’re always supposed to stay attached to structure, but if we ever made the mistake of floating off, the safety tether would pull us back towards its anchor. Sometimes we attach two safety tethers together to have more length, as you can see in the picture – the blue foam is for water buoyancy concerns. And as you can read in this account of Luca Parmitano of his recent EVA water anomaly, a safety tether can save the day in a variety of ways!

I had a busy EVA and robotics day! I got to capture Cygnus with the robotic arm for the first time today. As you might know, this is a new cargo resupply vehicle that will fly to Station for the first time probably next month. No big changes from the many HTV captures I’ve practiced so far, but a bit of a change of perspective: the grapple fixture is right next to the main engine nozzle! It’s a bit strange to be looking through the arm camera straight into an engine’s “business end”, but of course engine firing will be inhibited at that point. Then I had a preparatory class for Thursday EVA training in the Neutral Buoyancy Facility (see L-479: Logbook). We’ll be practicing the replacement of an Interface Heat Exchanger on the Lab. In the picture you can see our worksite: we’ll actually have to remove a couple of Lab panels to gain access to the component. It’s a really tight place in the big suits, especially because, since this picture was taken, the PMM (Permanent Multipurpose Module) has been attached to the free CBM on Node1. The CBM is the Common Berthing Mechanism and you can see it in the picture as well: it’s the circle with the four petals.

Water, water, water! Water is extremely important on ISS and we take measures to monitor its quality on a regular basis. Today I took the first of a series of classes aimed at making me familiar with all the water sampling and analysis procedures that I’ll be schedule to perform on orbit.  This intro class focused on the equipment and the logistics. We’ll have more integrated activities in future training events closer to flight. Take a look at the picture! Don’t you love color-coded? A color for microbiology anaylisis, one for the iodine analysis, another one for the Total Organic Carbon Analyser and one final color for return to Houston for ground analysis. Did I mention that the water we drink onboard is mostly recycled from urine? That’s the story for another day, but be assured: it’s probably “cleaner” than most of the water we drink on Earth!

In the L-474 Logbook I have talked a bit about the Prep & Post class, in which I had the chance to perform the suit IV tasks for crewmate Butch and JAXA astronaut Norishige Kanai. As I mentioned then, the Prep & Post class is about all that happens in an EVA day, minus the time spent outside. Airlock configuration is something we would take care of in earlier days, but sure enough the first procedures of the “day of” guide us through a final check to make sure that all equipment is in the proper configuration and all switches in the expected position. Then we start the pre-breath protocol, whose goal is to purge nitrogen from the body to mitigate the risk of decompression sickness when exposed to the low pressure in the suit (about a third of atmospheric pressure): the EV crewmembers don their oxygen masks and the pre-breath clock starts. We all work together to power up the suits and check their configuration and then it’s time to take the suits apart, so that the EV crewmembers can don the lower component (legs, up to waist). Before they can come off the masks to don the upper part of the suit, we close the hatch to Node1 so that we are isolated from the rest of Station. We then reduce pressure in the airlock by about a third and wait for the oxygen concentration to stabilize at a higher percentage than normal to comply with the requirements of the pre-breath protocol. Then it’s time for me to help them don the suit. They need to “slide” the upper body into the suit torso and then it’s my job to build the suit around them: connect the legs to the torso, attach the gloves, help then don the com cap, put the helmet on. It’s hard work, especially in 1G! Luckily I had help and guidance from a suit technician. After more verification steps on the suit and a leak check, we initiate a purge procedure to create a pure oxygen environment inside the suits and I reopen the hatch to Node1. At this point, I help the EV crewmembers work through the In-Suit-Light-Exercise protocol: for about 50 minutes they need to perform cycles of light exercise, mainly moving their legs, to bring up their metabolic rate and accelerate the purge of nitrogen. Once that is complete, I’ll help them move in the smaller section of the airlock (the one that is depressurized to vacuum), close the hatch behind them and get ready to assist in running the depressurization procedure once they reach a minimum of 100 min of in-suit pre-breath time. As you can see, it’s a long day before an EVA can even start! PS: thanks to Josh Matthew for the pic!

I’ve talked about last week’s Track & Capture class with Butch in the L-473 logbook.

In fact, I’ll have another such class coming up next week, in which I’ll have a chance to practice coordination and communication with a different crew-mate: Terry.

With all this Track & Capture training in the simulators I’ve been curious to see how the real hardware looks like, so I’ve taken a look at the pictures from last week’s grapple of HTV4 by Karen Nyberg and Chris Cassidy. I really like these two close-ups taken before and after capture.

In the “before”  pictures, the longer pin you see sticking out of the grapple fixture is the grapple pin: the snares of the arm end effector close around it when we squeeze the trigger – assuming of course that we are in the grapple envelope.

The white line and circle with the shorter pin sticking out is the visual target that we see in the end effector camera. You can see that the pin has a white dot in the center: when we observe the white dot inside the white circle in the camera view, we know that we have a sufficiently good alignment in pitch and yaw.

In the “after” picture you can probably recognize the end effector camera, facing straight down onto the target pin.

Just back from a glove fit check for the gloves I use in the NBL for EVA training. I have used these gloves throughout my training so far, but adjusting the gloves is an art and there is never a perfect, final result. There’s always something different to try to make sure you can work well in the gloves. If the modifications we’re trying are significant, our suit engineers will schedule a fit check to make sure that the overall glove configuration is still good. They can adjust the finger lengths (withing a certain range) and they provide a number of different pads and comfort gloves of different thickness that we wear beneath the EVA gloves. In the picture you can see the small vacuum chamber we test the gloves in. Air is pumped out of the chamber so that the overpressure in the gloves is 4.3 PSI, just like it is for an EVA.

Today I have the class on Track & Capture that I have talked about already in the L-478 Logbook. There’s a lot of preparation work involved in getting ready for a Free Flier rendezvous and subsequent capture. Usually a two-person team will swap leading role when it’s time to transition to robotic operations. The VV1 (Visiting Vehicle Officer 1) who’s had the primary responsibility during the rendezvous phase transitions to a supporting role during capture operations. VV2, on the other hand, will put hands on the controllers to perform the capture. We call that role M1. As you can see in the picture, it’s quite a complex setup in the Cupola on a capture day. We have the robotic workstation, including the hand controllers, with which we fly the arm. But we also have the visiting vehicle control panel, with which we command it to free drift just before capture: when we grapple it and it becomes rigidly connected to station, we don’t want its thrusters to fire so we deactivate its guidance systems and just let it free float in space for a few seconds. On the control panel we also have commands to send the vehicle away in an off-nominal situation. And of course, as you can see in the picture, we have a variety of monitors for external camera views and a few laptops. I also attached a picture posted by Karen Nyberg of her view of HTV4 when she and Chris Cassidy captured it last week.

Today it’s a Prep & Post day! This is a full day training event in the airlock mock-up in which we go through all the procedures that need to be performed in the hours before and after an EVA. We basically simulate an EVA day, minus the time actually spent outside. This is actually the Prep & Post class of my crewmate Butch. My role will be that of the “suit IV”, so I will help with the suit donning and doffing, the prebreath protocol and the airlock depress/repress procedures. We prebreath to purge nitrogen from our blood, in order to prevent problems with decompression sickness. Remember that the suit is pressurized to only about 1/3 of atmospheric pressure! I attach a picture of a Prep & Post class I did almost two years ago. Really time to refresh my knowledge!

Day started with an early exercise session on the ARED. 

ARED stands for Advanced Resistive Exercise Machine. It’s been on ISS for several years now and it has really made a huge difference in the effectiveness of resistive exercise in limiting bone loss in long duration crewmembers. We’re scheduled every day for a session on ARED and we are given protocols that are especially designed to target critical areas of bone loss, like for example the hip.

You can see in the pictures cosmonaut Tolya Ivanishin and astronaut Kevin Ford perform on orbit some of the many exercises you can do on ARED. It replicated the effect of working out with dumbbells and barbells, except that, as you can imagine, those would not be very effective in weightlessness. Instead, ARED has two big vacuum cylinders and we can set the resistance continuously in a very wide range.

The rest of the day will be dedicated to science, as I will get an initial overview of the experiment complement in my increment. Looking forward to start working on that soon!