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Starting the week with a long class on EMU maintenance operations. The EMU (Extravehicular Mobility Unit) is the US pressure suit for spacewalks. It’s like a little spaceship that you wear on yourself and keeps you alive for 7-8 hours in vacuum. The suit has oxygen tanks that provide you with oxygen to breath and to keep the internal pressure at about 4.3 PSI. It also keeps you cool thanks to a sublimator that gets rid of excess heat. And of course it provides communication and protection against micrometeorite strikes and radiation. There are periodic maintenance operations that are carried out on orbit and we will start learning about those in today’s class. Sometimes there might also be the necessity to perform troubleshooting. That has been the case in recent weeks after the water leak problem in Luca Parmitano ‘s  suit last month. In the picture you can see Chris Cassidy busy with some of that troubleshooting work!

One of the classes from last week I haven’t talked much about is the introduction to the Periodic Fitness Assessment (PFE). PFEs are scheduled periodically on orbit: the first one about 14 days after arrival to Station and then monthly thereafter. The exercise device of choice is the CEVIS (Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation System), which is installed in the US Lab. Crewmembers are very familiar with CEVIS because they perform on it about half of their daily cardiovascular training sessions – the other half is on the treadmill T2. The class I had last week was about setting up the equipment necessary for the PFE data collection: attaching the electrodes for the electrocardiogram, positioning the blood pressure cuff and the heart rate microphone, configuring all the cables and interfacing with the software to record the data. For their PFE crewmembers perform an ad-hoc protocol based on their pre-flight VO2max. Data lands on the desk of their flight surgeon, who can track the evolution of the cardiovascular condition throughout the flight and possibly recommend adjustments of the training protocols. In the picture you can see Chris Hadfield performing a PFE on orbit. And yes, the CEVIS we train with on the ground does have a seat and handlebars. On orbit, the shoes that can be attached rigidly to the pedals are all you need!

It’s weekend! Looking ahead to what’s coming up next week, one of the big events will be a Track & Capture class with Butch (crewmate Barry Wilmore). Track & Capture training prepares crewmembers for the grappling of a visiting vehicle, specifically the ones that we call Free Flyers, because they can not dock autonomously to ISS.  All those cargo resupply ships (HTV, Dragon, Cygnus) have a grapple pin that can be captured with the end effector of the robotic arm and, right next to it, a visual target for the astronaut to align the arm properly. The “Track”  part of it consists in matching the residual translation and rotation rates of the vehicles with respect to Station while it’s in station keeping. Real vehicles have been pretty steady so far, but we see quite significant rates in training! I’ve done a lot of solo Track & Capture training, meaning myself and the instructor. Next week’s class with Butch will be the first one in which we practice coordination and team work with actual crewmates. While one person is at the hand controllers concentrating on the target and performing the capture, the second person has the overall awareness and runs the checklists in case of an off-nominal situation. Btw, yesterday on orbit Karen Nyberg captured HTV-4 with the assistance of Chris Cassidy. You can see them at their Cupola workstation in this picture shared by Luca Parmitano.

Late and short update today. Terry and I ran one of the pump module replacement EVAs, as I mentioned in an earlier post. Days in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab are always long and full. We get there around 6:30 – 7:00 and then it’s a busy program until around 17:00. We prepare all our tools on the pool-deck first thing in the morning, then the doctors sees us to make sure we’re OK, then on to the briefing with the whole NBL team and back to the pool deck for suiting up. We work under water until 15:00 then we get the suit off, get a quick shower and it’s debrief time! It was great training, full of challenges and learning points. Now it’s time to go and get a drink: I don’t know how it happened, but it’s already Friday night! PS: thanks to our Chief Training Officer Josh Matthew for coming out to the pool and for the pic!

Today’s training seems to be focused not so much on technical content, but rather on some aspects of functioning well as a human being, both on the ground and on ISS. I’ll start the day in a few minutes with my highly-anticipated briefing on sleep shifting. We sleep shift a lot in training, because of all the travel between training locations in different continents, but also on orbit, typically to support the arrival of new crewmembers or resupply vehicles. Key in sleep shifting is of course… sleeping. How good that my next class will be about the crew quarters on ISS. In the picture you can see my fellow Shenanigan Luca Parmitano sleeping in his crew quarters on orbit! Then I’ll have a short class highlighting the procedures to be followed by crewmembers to download personal fotos and videos from ISS. Nothing ever gets lost, but following certain procedures ensures that you’ll get certain material back quicker when you get back, for example to use it for post-flight presentations. In the afternoon, on to a class about the Periodic Fitness Evaluation that we do on orbit. And finally, one more class on Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR).

I’ll be flying around ISS today! Not really, but I will be scuba diving in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) with my EVA instructor, Faruq, to prepare Friday’s run in the pressure suit. And since we have a full scale replica of the ISS under water (except the Russian segment), it feels really like flying around Station! When the training schedule allows it, diving is a great preparation for a suited run. We can get a feel for translation paths, obstacles along the way, safety tether routing. And we can check out worksites and understand the geometry involved. What body position is better? How can I secure myself? Where should I attach my tool bag or temporarily stow a spare unit while we remove a failed one? As you can see in the pictures, somehow you even meet a suited crewmember or two when you dive in the pool! Recognize my fellow Shenanigan Alex in this “old” picture?

Training today has started with a class on the SAMS payload: that’s the Space Acceleration Measurement System, a series of interconnected sensors throughout ISS that for over ten years have been characterizing the microgravity environment on Station. The internal cameras might be off past working hours, but the SAMS ground controllers always know from the acceleration telemetry whether it’s bedtime on orbit or if there’s still activity onboard! The rest of the day I’ll mainly be planning Friday’s training run in the pool. As I already mentioned, we’ll be practicing a contingency scenario in which we have to swap a pump module. That’s a vital component, because it keeps cooling fluid running in one of our two external thermal control system loop. With one pump module down, we loose a lot of redundancy on Station, starting with half of the power supply. Replacing a pump module is a 3-EVA task, but on Friday we’ll only practice one of them, EVA number 2. Prep work will already have been done and we’ll be ready to slide the failed pump module out of its location and install a spare one. A pump module has failed in the past! In the picture you can see a failed unit being stowed in the Shuttle payload bay during STS-135 two years ago. It gives you an idea of its size. And some units, like batteries, are even bigger!

Starting the week with some serious emergency scenarios! I’m not talking about fire, leaks or toxic spills, but rather medical emergencies. Whether we are designated Crew Medical Officers or not, we are all trained in responding in case a crew-mate has no pulse and/or is unable to breath. We have a permanently deployed Crew Medical Restraint System with which we can keep someone in a stable position to administer CPR (Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation). I attached a couple of pictures from Expedition 34 in which you can see that crew-members have different options in weightlessness when it comes to body positions to administer compression. My day will start with a refresher on the emergency response equipment, from the restraint table to the AED (Automated External Defibrillator) and the Respiratory Support Pack and then I’ll move on to a class on the actual emergency response procedures. They’re not unlike any procedure you might have learned in a first aid course, but optimized for the specific situation we have on-board, the equipment we have available and the fact that we can’t call 112 or 911. Later I’ll have a meeting at the Food Lab to start discussing the content of my bonus food container and then I’ll drive to the NBL for the 1G class of Friday’s pool run. We call 1G classes the preparatory events in which the instructors describe to us the tasks for the upcoming run and we get to manipulate in a 1G environment, i.e. outside of the pool, the tools and equipment we’ll be dealing with in the water. Some giant components can be very heavy in 1G, but the pool models are made as neutrally buoyant by adding foam. It’s as close as it gets to weightlessness!

Sharing some pictures from training events this past week today. You might remember I had a class on the EVA camera this week. It’s actually a commercial off-the-shelf camera with minor modifications, like the use of a lubricant that is suitable for vacuum operations. There are many such cameras on ISS and crew-members use them to take pictures inside all the time. When a camera needs to go outside, it’s nicely wrapped in a white garment, as you can see in the picture. That’s mostly done for thermal balance purposes. I also had a class on the 3D camcorder. Now, that really opened a new world to me. Convergence, negative parallax, positive parallax… there’s a whole new complexity compared to shooting 2D video! As for the dental procedures class, don’t worry: nobody plans to have us do major dental work while on orbit. Main things I have been shown is how to temporarily fill up a hole in the tooth if a filling has come off and how to reattach a crown. Also, I had some instructions in how to give a local anesthesia as a temporary relief in case of a bad tooth ache. Finally, a picture of our class taking apart the spacewalking suit. Its real name is Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), but everybody calls it simply “the suit”. That was a fun class!  

Really busy day today. Mostly at the Neutral Buoyancy Facility (NBL), the giant pool where we practice spacewalks. I helped suit-up crew-mate Butch early in the morning and then I operated the robotic arm in the pool for several hours. You can see parts of the arm sticking out of the water in the pic. Then Terry and I had a three hour class in which we pretty much took a spacewalking suit apart and put it back together. I’ll share more pics over the weekend!