→ Logbook

The Logbook is back! Sorry for the very long Loss of Signal, it’s been a busy time: three spacewalks in 8 days can really fill your days and I felt that I needed to focus on my task 100%. Having to run several hours of airlock ops and get two crewmates “out the door” safely and as quickly as possible is something that commands attention: by far the most demanding thing I have done on orbit and, the first time, definitely somewhat stressful. Spacewalks are usually covered quite in detail on the internet, so I’m sure you guys already know more than I could possibly tell you. And as far as my job as IV is concerned, if you’re curious you can take a look at some training logbooks about Prep-and-Post classes, where we train airlock ops and pre-breath protocols. Check out for example Logbook L-70. Of course, some things are hard to practice on the ground. Take the SAFERs, for example, the jetpacks that are attached to the EMU suits for an emergency self-rescue in case of detachment from structure: on the ground we learn how to operate the latches that keep them secured to the suit, but it’s a whole different story to actually handle suit and SAFER in space. Heavy, bulky things don’t have weight up here, but they sure still have mass, hence inertia! Anyway, everything went well, Butch and Terry did a stellar job outside, Anton was a precious help in the airlock and now we’re all catching our breaths as we settle into a less hectic work pace. Also, we’re approaching fast the end of Expedition 42, which means that Butch, Sasha and Elena are getting ready for their fiery ride back to planet Earth next week. Terry, Anton and I will be on our own up here for a couple of weeks, before Scott, Misha and Gennady join us towards the end of March. Yesterday our soon-to-depart crewmates actually put on their Sokol suits for their pre-reentry leak checks and I have spotted Elena and Sasha practicing the Soyuz manual reentry on a simulator in the Service Module. And we’re getting return cargo ready: today, for example, I took water samples from all our potable water delivery stations and stowed them for return on Soyuz. Preparations for the next crew’s arrival have also begun. Yesterday I worked on stowing some cargo delivered on the Russian Progress resupply vehicle, which included Scott’s clothes and hygiene items. We have our little space wardrobe in Node 2, close to our sleeping cabins: each one of us has a big rigid bag with our personal clothing supplies, mostly organized in Ziplocs that cover two weeks each (we call those “bricks”). Butch, efficient as always, had already cleared his bag, so Scott… if you happen to be reading… your clothes are already nicely organized in Node 2 overhead! Not sure that they are enough for a year, though: I bet you’ll have more coming along the way. Hey, by the way, yesterday was our 100th day in space! Well, technically that’s true only for me, since Terry and Anton had been in space before, but for sure it was our 100th day in space together. A bit scary, isn’t it? Compared to the time behind us, the time we have left already looks little, only a couple of months left. Of course there are things from my Earthling life that I miss – a shower being pretty high on the list – but it will be really hard to leave the Space Station. In the past 100 days I have gone from uncontainable excitement and constant discovery to familiarity and a sense of quiet affection for the Station itself, our crew and the teams on the ground spread all over the world with whom we interact every day. It feels like home and, by the way, a home in which you can float and that offers an unbeatable view out of the window! 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

After working on a tight schedule through the weekend to get Dragon ready for departure and then to release it on Tuesday, on Wednesday we were given a day off. Hurrah! I’m a night owl, so I like to sleep in when I can. On Tuesday night, before going to bed, I took a last look at Wednesday’s schedule for a confirmation that there was no need to set my alarm. Confirmed! So on Wednesday morning I slid my arms out of my sleeping bag around 9:30 and, as usual, opened my laptop to check the schedule and the Daily Summary, a message from ground controllers containing information about the state of the Station and any questions/answers/messages for the crew. Imagine my surprise when I saw an activity on the schedule at 7:30 in the morning. How could I possibly have missed that the night before? And weren’t we supposed to have a day off? And how bad was it that I hadn’t done it yet? But our Commander Butch is always up at 5 in the morning, so he would have woken me up if needed, right? So, don’t panic, let’s see what this is about… Now, take a look at the picture with a snapshot of that activity. I’ll let you be the judge: our ground teams have some sense of humor, don’t they? We did miss the reading session on that day, and I’m sorry to report that I did not find a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy in the indicated location, but we’ll make this happen somehow! Thursday and Friday we were back to a normal work schedule. I got to be the operator for Butch on a number of eye exams, part of the Ocular Health research for which he is a subject: I supported his ultrasound, optical coherence tomography and fundoscope exams, taking images of his eyes in more ways than I would have ever imagined possible before ISS training. I’ll also do the same exams this coming  week, but I do them less frequently than Butch and Terry, because mine are a purely medical requirement, while my crewmates also serve as subject of this research effort focused on ocular health. Then we had to get ready for ATV undocking. Sasha and I had an On-Board-Training session on Thursday in which we reviewed all the pre-departure procedures and our monitoring tasks. Then on Friday we closed the hatches on ATV and ISS side and… you guessed it, I’m sure you know how these things work by now…  we did a leak check. We depressurized the vestibule between the hatches and then we monitored the pressure change for 30 minutes: had the pressure increased, either the ATV hatch or the ISS hatch would have been leaking air into the vestibule. Actually, Mission Control Moscow took care of the depressurization: vestibules on the Russian sides have a valve that can be commanded from the ground to vent the air to space. And our hatches passed the leak check with flying colors: up to 1 mm Hg of pressure increase is allowed and we only had a change of 0,5 mmHg. That was it, the very last ATV was ready for undocking the next day! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42  #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

It’s been quite a historic day here on ISS: the last of the Automated Transfer Vehicles of the European Space Agency, ATV-5 George Lemaitre, has just departed and is now safely separated from the Station, on track for a destructive reentry into the atmosphere tomorrow: it’s taking away tons of waste and discarded items, thus giving us quite a relief on ISS in terms stowage space. But we’ll have time to talk about the departure of ATV and all the pre-departure ops in a future logbook, today let’s go back a few days and look at the departure of another vehicle earlier this week: Dragon! Last weekend was really busy here on Station as we got the last things ready to be loaded. I wrapped up the “Epigenetics” experiment on Saturday, fixating the last generation of our C. Elegans worms for return to Earth. Scientists on the ground took a look at the culture bags in the camera and reported that, judging from the color, the worms had been growing just fine, so hopefully there’s now three generations of space-born C.Elegans on Earth. The weekend was also the time to reinstall in Dragon a number of cold-stowage facilities, called Polar and Glacier: these moveable fridges fly up and down powered by the Dragon power supply, but in between they are actually installed on Station. Moving them is quite time-critical, because we don’t want them to remain unpowered for more than 30 minutes, so Terry and I worked together on a timed choreography that allowed us to operate in parallel, minimizing power-off time. Last but not least, there was a last-minute entry on our timeline on Sunday morning: the removal of a fan-pump-separator (FPS) on a EMU, the suit for spacewalks. In Logbook L+16,L+17 I have told you about the FPS, since Butch and I replaced one back in December. Unfortunately, the FPS has failed on another suit. We don’t currently have spares onboard, but it was decided that the failed one should be removed and returned on Dragon for analysis on the ground. Doing it the second time was not as daunting as the first time, especially since we did not install a new one, but it was still a challenging task to remove all the hard-to-reach, non-captive screws and washers! We were glad when we were done and could hand it over to Terry, so he could properly pack it for return. Talking about packing, that was the big task for Monday. In the morning it was cold-stowage ops again, as Terry and I packed and loaded six cold bags with samples from our MELFI freezers. Cold bags are like coolers with a very thick insulation, in which samples for return are stowed together with cold bricks to keep them cool until they can be retrieved on Earth and put in an actual freezer again.  For each cold bags we had diagrams which showed exactly how they had to be packed and, in some cases, in what precise orientation. Unfortunately, that’s one of those things that works a lot better with the help of gravity, because up here there’s nothing to keep all those items where you put them, until of course the bag is full and the lid will press everything in place.  Also, as you can imagine, packing cold bags is necessarily a last minute operation: we packed them on Monday morning and on Monday afternoon we closed the Dragon hatch. Terry and Butch then installed the controllers for the motors that drive the bolts keeping Dragon attached to ISS while I, In the meantime, took a trip to ATV to install the Break-Up Camera, which will actually observe the breakup of ATV from inside tomorrow! Tuesday, of course, was release day. After a successful leak check of the hatches, making sure that neither Dragon nor ISS would have a leak when demated, Butch drove out the bolts, disconnecting Dragon from us, and then controllers on the ground started to fly the robotic arm to move Dragon to the release position. In the early evening, Terry and I were ready at the robotic workstation in the Cupola to perform the release and send Dragon on its way home. At the release time, I ungrappled it and backed away the arm to a safe distance of about 4,5 meters. At that point, Terry sent the Depart command and Dragon performed its first burn, commencing a slow but clearly visible separation from ISS. Really strange to see it go, after having had it as our neighbor here in Node 2 for several weeks. But hey, we’ll get another one soon! 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

We have sent Dragon back home yesterday! I’ll tell you more about this in the coming days, but for now, I’ll just say this: looking back at the past weeks since Dragon arrival, it’s very gratifying to think of all the work we’ve done, from the experiments to the loading and unloading operations, up to the last-minute transfer of cold samples from the coolers and freezers to cold bags for return. It’s also nice to catch our breath today, though: since we had to work hard all weekend, we’re getting this Wednesday off. A nice and welcome surprise! But now let’s go back to last week once more to catch up with the release of something a lot smaller from a somewhat smaller robotic arm: a tiny Cubesat, with the dimensions 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, was deployed by the Japanese arm on Friday. Pretty cool to see! There were a lot of preparation activities the days before the release, in close cooperation with the JEM Control Center in Tsukuba, Japan. As you might remember if you’ve been reading this logbook, the JEM module has its own small airlock: we can open the door to the inside and slide a table into the cabin. The week prior to the release Butch had installed on this table the satellite deployment system with the Cubesat inside. On Thursday last week I got to depressurize the airlock. By the way, just like the big airlock for spacewalks, the Japanese airlock has provisions to recover most of the air into the Space Station volume: just the last bit of air, when the residual pressure in the airlock becomes too small (around 2 PSI), must necessarily be vented into space. Once the airlock was at vacuum, I opened the outer hatch into space and slid out the table with the satellite and deployment system. At that point, robotic controllers from Tsukuba grabbed the deployment system with the Japanese robotic arm and, once they had a firm grip, I got a GO to release it from the slide table, so that the arm could get full control of it and move it to the deployment position. My next task was to take pictures of the deployment and I have to say that this one made me a bit nervous: you only get one chance to get it right and that satellite goes away fast once it’s released! Really didn’t want to mess this up, can only imagine what a disappointment it would be for the students who developed the Cubesat not to have pictures. Talking about students, on Wednesday I also got a chance to talk on the HAM radio to a group of school pupils from the schools “Locatelli-Oriani” and “Bachelet” in the Milan area: thanks for your great questions and you hard work preparing for this! On Friday I got to spend quite a lot of time in our big airlock working on the EMU suits (the suits for spacewalks). In particular, I worked on the cooling water loops of both suits that will be used in the upcoming planned EVAs by Terry and Butch, “scrubbing” the water with different kinds of filters and adding iodine for microbial control. After that I took water samples that were returned on Dragon for analysis on the ground. The loop scrub can also be used as an opportunity to do some checks on the suits and get telemetry on the ground, so both suits were connected to a laptop on which we ran a data gathering application. Hey, on Friday I also got to talk to Mission Control Moscow, which doesn’t happen very often to us non-Russian crewmembers. As we get ready for ATV undocking this Saturday, I ran with Moscow a checkout procedure for the ATV remote control panel that we will have deployed in the Russian Service Module when ATV departs. We’ll only need to send commands to ATV in case of an off-nominal situation, so I’m confident that we will not really need the control panel, but we’ll be ready! 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

In the last logbook I’ve mentioned that the ISS is a very busy laboratory these days, with many experiments going on in parallel in multiple disciplines. At the same time, this is also a spaceport where spaceships full of goods come and go. And right now, we have two vehicles, Dragon and ATV, which are going to leave in the next couple of weeks and need to be readied for departure and reentry. So, for a couple days I have (mostly) doffed my virtual lab coat, I have rolled up my sleeves and gotten into cargo-packing-and-loading mode. Loading a vehicle for reentry into the atmosphere is a delicate process: the overall mass and how this mass is distributed (hence the center of mass) need to be known quite precisely in order to properly calculate the reentry burns for the desired reentry trajectory. That is especially true for a vehicle that is recovered on Earth, like Dragon, but it’s also extremely important for ATV5, because this ship will perform a special controlled reentry in the initial phases to gather data that will help prepare for Space Station de-orbiting (when that time comes, which is not any time soon). I’m sure you’ll be able to read everything about ATV5’s so called “shallow reentry” on the ATV blog! As you probably know, ATV is destroyed in the atmosphere, so we load it with trash: waste, packing material, old clothes and discarded items. And we are making sure that we fill it up to the maximum, because  after the loss of the Orbital -3 mission on launch last October, the logistics onboard has become challenging: we have a lot of “stuff” (very technical space term), that was supposed to be long gone by now! Also for this reason, we are even putting a limited amount of trash into Dragon, although this vehicle is recovered intact on the ground (or more specifically in the ocean) and therefore its main job is to take return cargo back home. But how does this all work, if the distribution of mass needs to be so precise? Well, actually I don’t quite know. There is some miracle of planning and coordination happening on the ground and we receive two products onboard: a cargo list, that lists all the bags, their content, where to get them, where to put them and special packing instructions; and a choreography message, that tells you in which order to do the packing and, again, any special instructions (like taking pictures, reporting a serial number, packing an item in a particular direction). If there’s any free space in the bags, we fill it up with filler foam that cargo goods were launched in and with ziplocs of old clothes. And then hopefully they will fit in their assigned stowage areas – which of course have a location code, so we always know exactly where each bag is supposed to go. On Wednesday, as we were busy planning, flight controllers flipped the Station around 180 degrees – instead of flying with Node 2 forward, we ended up flying with the Russian Service Module leading the way. It was absolutely unnoticeable to me – in fact, I had forgotten about it. I would have noticed immediately if I had looked out of the Cupola, of course, but that was not possible, because the shutters had to be closed all day due to the series of maneuvers. Here’s a new psychological disorder for you: Cupola Withdrawal Syndrome! So, why did we fly “backwards” on Wednesday? Well, we had to point the thrusters of ATV forward, so that they could be fired to brake the Station just a little bit, enough to lower the apogee (the higher part of the orbit) by a couple of km. We typically use ATV to do just the opposite – raise the orbit periodically, with a so-called reboost – but this time a “deboost” was necessary to make our orbit just right for the next Progress vehicle coming up. The deboost lasted about 4 min: I floated still in the US Lab and I let myself being propelled to the other side of the module as ATV was pushing the Station around me. It was fun! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42  #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

Lots of experiments filling up my days this past week – sorry I didn’t keep you updated much, but it’s really busy up here on humanity’s outpost in space!

Some experiments were old acquaintances, like “Circadian Rhythms”, and several were new entries, like ESA’s “Airway Monitoring”. I talked about this latter pretty extensively in my training logbooks, like for example in L-129. For now, after some teething problems with the hardware (which is quite complex and partly used onboard for the first time), Terry and I got all the required data for the “normal” pressure session: in a few weeks we’ll perform the reduced pressure measurement, for which we will lock ourselves up in the airlock and lower the pressure around us. You know, I don’t think that there any laboratory technicians on the planet who get to work on such a wide range of science as we do: I assume that all laboratories on Earth are more specialized and the scientists and technicians well trained on discipline-specific  tasks! We, on the other hand, don’t have refined skills and wide experience on any of the science activities we perform: in some cases we’ve had a training session many months ago, in other cases we get some training onboard, like videos or slides. And of course some astronauts have a background in experimental science, but they are not the majority: most of us rely on very detailed procedures and, for the most complex operations, on real-time support from the ground by the experiment developers and/or the investigators. Sometimes they only talk to us via the regular communicators on duty in the control centers, like the Eurocom for ESA activities, while sometimes they are even enabled to talk to us directly on a space-to-ground channel, which in that case is dedicated only to them. My own background in science is limited – what you get with an engineering degree – and if I had chosen an education in science, instead of engineering, it would have been physics, so even then I would have hardly had a chance to work with cell cultures and multi-generational experiments on fruit flies and worms. And I’m not sure that I would be cut for it as my full-time job – it probably requires more patience than I possess – but I do have a lot of fun working on these experiments here on ISS! For example, on Monday I got to work again on the experiment “Epigenetics”.  My little friends in this case are not fruit flies, but another animal commonly used in research as a model for larger organisms: a millimeter-long worm called Caenorhabditis Elegans, for friends C. Elegans. And just like with the fruit flies, we want them to make babies: a total of four generations will grow onboard and specimen of each generation (adults and larvae) will be preserved in the freezer for return. Dragon brought up the C.Elegans in starter syringes and I injected them into culture bags last week to start incubation. Then on Monday I extracted the babies using a special syringe equipped with a filter, that would not let the bigger adult worms go through. The first generation adults remained in the original culture bag and were frozen, while I inserted the second generation babies into another culture bag to let them further incubate.  The purpose of the experiment, as the name suggests, is to study inherited epigenetic changes: that means changes in gene expression, but not in the DNA itself. Let’s put it this way: the environment cannot change the genes in your DNA, but it can affect how your genes are expressed, or “activated”. The worms will adapt to weightlessness and that will cause changes in their gene expression, so the question is: how, if at all, will these changes be inherited by the offspring? Fascinating, isn’t it?

This has been one of those weeks when the subject of the experiment is often… me. Human physiology has definitely been very present on my science schedule, starting already on the weekend, when I got to do some data gathering while sleeping! In fact, Dragon has brought me a very fancy night wardrobe: a vest for the Wearable Monitoring experiment that I had to wear for two nights in a row for the first data gather. This vest has been custom-made for me and is a very tight fit, because it integrates instruments that need to be adherent to the body: electrodes, for a “classic” electrocardiogram, and a three-axis accelerometer to monitor the mechanics of the heart, namely the opening and closing of the heart valves. The hypothesis to be tested here is that tiny variations in the cardiac functions cause micro-awakenings that compromise sleep quality on ISS. Although I have to say, from a purely subjective and non-quantitative point of view of course, that I feel like I sleep great up here! Early in the morning on Monday it was also time for the first session of Drain Brain. Actually, we already had an ultrasound session early on in the mission, but for this particular set of measurements we had to wait for the replacement hardware to be delivered on Dragon, following the loss of the Orbital-3 mission. Specific instruments for Drain Brain include three strain-gauge pletismoghraphs, which look like collars of a stretchable material, as you can see in the picture.  They are actually sensors able to measure blood flow in the veins in a very simple and non-invasive manner, which is not dependent on the skills and interpretation of the operator, as is the case with ultrasound. While wearing these collars on my neck, arm and leg, I performed a series of breaths at 70% of my lung capacity, either remaining still or stretching and flexing my hand or my ankle. While doing that, I was breathing into our Pulmonary Function System and the software, via a graphic interface, was giving me instructions on when to start exhaling or inhaling. The main goal of the experiment is to study how the return of blood from the head to the heart changes in space, since we don’t have gravity effects helping with that. It’s something that we know little about for now and a better understanding of these circulatory mechanisms could potentially help in understanding some degenerative diseases of the brain. After Drain Brain, I moved on to the second in-flight session of the Cardio Ox experiment, taking ultrasound images of the carotid and brachial arteries and Doppler measurements of blood flow. And to wrap up the human physiology day, I also did another data collection for Skin-B, that I have told you about before. And since many of these experiments need a matching sample collection, on Tuesday I performed a 24-hour urine sample collection and “Terry the Vampire” (a close friend of “Terry Scissorhands” the hairdresser) got do draw blood from me. But hey, as you know, there’s not only us humans on ISS! No, no, don’t get excited, I’m not aware of any stow-away alien living onboard nor of any UFO flying combat air patrols in the area, but we have of course our friendly fruit flies! Some of the cassettes with fly and larvae did end up in the freezer at this point, but I put more cassettes in the centrifuge and static position of their dedicated facility and this multi-generation project is continuing on. For some of the fixation operations I got to build and use a disposable glovebox, as you can see in the picture: I didn’t even know we had those onboard, the Space Station is always full of surprises! 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 – Currently not updated) Tradducción en español aquí: https://laesteladegagarin.blogspot.com.es/search/label/SamLogBook

I know, I’m a bit late with the logbooks, but bear with me, I still want to bring you back to last week one more time, because last Friday we had a very special event on the Space Station: Butch,  Elena and I had the pleasure and honor to host in the Japanese Laboratory the finals of the 2014 Zero Robotics competition! To participate in Zero Robotics, high school students need to write code that will control a SPHERES satellite – on Earth, of course, only in simulations, but for the teams that made it to the finals, their code actually controls one of the real SPHERES units we have on the Space Station. SPHERES determine their position in space thanks to five beacons that we deploy in the JEM, thus defining the volume in which the satellites can operate. Small thrusters allow the SPHERES to move around and rotate as needed. Working gas for the thrusters is CO2, coming from small tanks that we can quickly changes out when empty. At the beginning of every run we set two satellites in a predetermined initial position and orientation and then let go, letting the code of the two competing teams take control. While watching mostly the SPHERES moving around the cabin, we could also keep an eye on the computer display showing the virtual environment in which the satellites were moving, which included an asteroid in the middle of the volume: the tasks for the satellites was to take pictures of this asteroid. But that was not enough: to actually gain points, they needed to point their antennas to Earth and transmit the pictures, all the while dodging solar flare by taking refuge in a safe zone behind the satellite, or else risk having their stored pictures corrupted or even the satellite (virtually) damaged if hit by a flare. Don’t think that writing good code was the only skill required here: Zero Robotics is very much a strategy game as well and it was fun to watch the different styles, some more cautious, some more aggressive. Fuel management was a big concern as well: for each run a satellite had an allocated amount of CO2, once that had been consumed they would not be able to fire the thrusters any more. Unless, that is, the satellites would start moving outside the allowed volume, in which case the code from MIT would take over and fire the thrusters to bring them back. MIT runs Spheres and the ZeroRobotics competitions and most of the US finalists were gathered there watching the finals live, while most of the European finalists were at the ESA facility ESTEC in the Netherlands, including a team who came all the way from Russia! And several more Russian finalists were gathered in Moscow. Actually, after the initial stages of the competition last year, teams had to join forces in alliances of three: I believe all of the alliances included teams from the US and from Europe, which I thought was great. For the record, the Zero Robotics 2014 champions are the LakeElevenVADARS, the alliance of Team Lake (US), Cora’s Eleven (Italy) and VADARS (US). Heartfelt congratulations! And to all who participated, we’re very proud of you up here: for your enthusiasm and dedication in participating in a game that tested your skills, your creative thinking and your ability to work in a team even across continents. You guys rock. And for 2015… GO Zero Robotics! 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