→ Logbook

After the unplanned excitement of Wednesday, we woke up on Thursday morning to return to relative normality. Relative, because external cooling loop B was still shut down and unpressurized: due to the possible presence of gas bubbles after Wednesday’s events, the re-pressurization was a delicate process that would take the ground a few days to perform safely (Loop B is back online as of today, Sunday, as I’m writing this). Ventilation was restored that morning, meaning that camping was over and we would be able to get back into our crew quarters, but cooling in Node 2 relies on Loop B, so it was going to be a bit warmer for a few nights (I think that I didn’t mind that part at all). We also had no cooling in Node 3, where we have our treadmill T2, so we did our daily cardiovascular training in the Lab on CEVIS, our space bike.  The other modules had cooling because it had been possible to transition them to “single-loop”, which entails connecting the two internal cooling loops and have them reject their combined heat load via external loop A, the one unaffected by the previous day’s events. Because of the loop B situation, we were also did not have all the power channels available, causing some limitations, but nothing dramatic: in JEM and COL, for example, we only had half of the lights working and one of the two communication panels available. Nothing that would prevent the science activities to pick up the pace again and shortly after our morning planning conference with the ground, Butch, Terry and I were getting started with our respective experiments and the Space Station was a very busy laboratory again! I had been tasked with setting up the Fruit Flies Lab. Yes, Dragon brought up some living company in form of about a hundred fruit flies or, to be formal, Drosophila Melanogaster. Actually, by now we probably have more: the point is to observe multiple generations and the short life span of fruit flies makes that possible. And since we share with those tiny fellows about 77% of the genes known to be involved in disease, they are a very interesting animal model! The flies came up in cassettes, that you can see in the pictures. As I retrieved them one by one from the foam cutouts in their transfer boxes, it was good to see that they were alive and healthy: as far as I could tell, they were very happy astroflies in space! Each fly cassette was matched to a special food changeout platform, with which I could insert fresh food without breaking containment, while simultaneously extracting larvae for preservation in our MELFI freezer. After the food changeout, I inserted each cassette in a specific location in one of the Nanorack facilities: as it’s commonly done in life science experiments, half of the cassette were stowed in a centrifuge to simulate normal Earth gravity, while the other half was stowed in a static location, hence in weightlessness. Moreover, each cassette was paired with a small camera unit that monitors the flies behavior and provides an artificial day/night cycle. It was a very gratifying work, looking forward to the next feeding cycle! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

Hello everybody, now that things have mostly returned to normal on ISS, it’s time to catch up with the logbooks of the week. And what a week it has been! Looking back to Tuesday, we got to ingress Dragon and unload all the urgent cargo, mainly everything that needed to be in cold stowage. And then on to Wednesday when, as you might have heard, we had quite some excitement here onboard and in the control centers around the world as the ammonia leak alarm went off. I had just finished a monthly video conference with my ESA management and I was about to start a review of the installation procedure for the Airway Monitoring experiment on the laptop in my crew quarters, when all the speakers throughout the Station started to transmit the one tone sure to catch everybody’s immediate attention: the emergency tone. I came out of my crew quarters and looked at the Lab aft bulkhead, the closest Caution and Warning Panel I could put my eyes on, and there it was, the third light from the left was lit red: even without reading the label, I know that the third light is the dreaded ammonia leak. Not that I cherish the thought of having a fire or a depressurization (the other two scenario that can trigger an emergency alarm), but ammonia, I am told, can kill you really fast. I couldn’t distinguish any ammonia odor in the cabin, but I certainly didn’t sniff around much: I immediately grabbed an oxygen mask, put it on and headed towards the Russian segment together with Terry, Butch and Sasha. Elena and Anton were in the Russian segment already at the time. After making sure that nobody was left behind, we closed the hatch isolating the Russian from the American segment of the Station and started to prepare the ammonia measurement equipment and the ammonia respirators. Before I go any further, if you’re interested in some background (like why there is a danger of an ammonia leak, or why the Russian segment is a safe haven or how the ammonia response looks like), you can take a look at my training Logbooks:L-140, L-142 Back to our story… a few minutes after the tone went off, Houston called and declared it a false alarm, so we stood down from the emergency response and came back to the US segment, finding it of course unusually quiet, since the vehicle auto-response had shut down all of the Station’s many fans. Why a false alarm? Well, looking at the telemetry from Station, the flight controllers couldn’t initially find any confirming cues that there was indeed an ammonia leak and everything pointed instead to a computer malfunction. But that was just the beginning of a long day for everybody… As we were starting to restow the emergency equipment and get back to normal, we received the unexpected call from CAPCOM: “Ammonia leak. Execute emergency response. Ammonia leak, execute emergency response. Ammonia leak, execute emergency response”. As we learned later, Houston had in the meantime started to see some signatures in the telemetry that could possibly indicate a real leak of ammonia into the cabin, in particular a slight increase in the cabin pressure: at the very least, a real leak could not be ruled out at that point any more. So we put on our masks and took refuge in the Russian segment again. Even more than the first time, I believe that the thought did cross everybody’s mind as we closed the hatch: we might never reopen it again. We went through the full ammonia response procedure and, after swapping the oxygen masks for the respirators with ammonia filters, could confirm with Draeger tubes that the atmosphere in the Russian segment was uncontaminated, hence safe to breath. We doffed the respirators and eventually we all gathered in the Russian Service Module, eager to hear words from Houston about the suspected leak. We learned that to mitigate the possible leak, the pump in the external cooling loop B had been shut down and that the loop pressure had been reduced, but we were relieved to hear that the ammonia had not been vented from the loop into space: a possible scenario in a situation like this, but also an action that would cripple the Space Station for a long time. Following the shutdown of the loop, a thermal clock had started for a lot of equipment onboard: if not shut down within a certain time, it would overheat. So control centers in several countries were busy trying to do a powerdown that would have as little impact as possible on Station systems and science. I think you get the point: the control centers had the hard job from now on. We were safe, doing well and with very little to do, except waiting. Knowing what a stressful time the guys and girls on the ground were having, we tried to keep quiet and never asked for any update, patiently waiting for them to call us, which of course they did periodically. At every update if became more and more clear that everything pointed to a false alarm, but we were not sure that we would be allowed to leave the Russian segment before the next day. In all of this time, our Russian colleagues were incredibly hospitable.  They even gave us three food containers that we could use for ourselves, so we wouldn’t feel bad about digging into their containers or asking all the time. When the power was restored to the power outlets I could give a quick call to my family to let them know I was OK. And Elena let me borrow her internet-access computer, so I could write a short tweet and make sure everybody knew that we were doing fine. We didn’t know what information the media were reporting and we were concerned that people might be worried about us. Eventually, in the early evening, we received instructions to reopen the hatch and go back. To be really safe, we all put on our ammonia respirators. Houston directed us to send two people forward to sample the atmosphere first and Butch decided that he and Terry, as the Soyuz right seaters, would go. After a few minutes they called back declaring that the readings were negative and we had the final confirmation: there had been no ammonia leak! After a day of waiting, we were ready for action: we quickly gathered all the used emergency equipment, restowing what would be reused, trashing what needed to be discarded. We tagged up with Houston about the oxygen masks: how many had we used and how best to redeploy the remaining masks on Station to make sure we were ready to respond to any other emergency. And we took a few actions that could not be performed remotely by the ground to safe equipment following the powerdowns. Finally, we got ready for bedtime: since ventilation had not been restored in Node 2, Columbus and JEM, we could not sleep in our crew quarters and had to camp out in the aft modules. I setup my camping spot in the Lab: camping in weightlessness is really easy, you just attach your sleeping bag to a handrail and you’re ready for a good night sleep! By the next day, we were ready to jump back into the busy science program of the next weeks, thanks to the quick re-planning work done on the ground. By the way, as unfortunate as this event was, in many ways we were lucky: Dragon was fully berthed, all the urgent cold stowage items had been removed, none of us was working on an experiment that would suffer damage if delayed or left unattended. That would have been the case, for example for the ESA “T-Cell” experiment, which I performed on Tuesday: had the ammonia alarm gone off on that day, we would have lost the science. So, in the end, we were lucky: must be because, on Expedition 42, we always know where our towel is! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST  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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

My 50th day in space and certainly a big day here on ISS yesterday – as I’m sure you’ve heard, Dragon has arrived! We now have a new room attached to Node 2 nadir, right next to our crew quarters : all the time I’ve been up here there was a hatch to vacuum there, now I can make the turn and “dive down” into Dragon. Our home in space just got bigger! Approach and capture happened in the morning and, at least from what we could tell from our perspective, everything went really well. It was quite touching to watch this vehicle approach ISS and to discern more and more details as it came closer, a messenger from Earth bringing supplies to the only six humans currently not on the planet. I was impressed at how steady it was as it came up from below us: you could hardly notice it controlling its position and attitude. As it stopped at the last holding point at 30 meters it felt already so close, I couldn’t believe that it would get still 20 meters closer before we could grapple it, but of course out there we don’t have many references to gauge distance. It arrived at the capture point, at 10 meters distance, during orbital night, with the red and green lights on the sides reflecting beautifully on the solar arrays. Just after sunrise we got a “GO for capture” from Houston and Butch smoothly maneuvered the robotic arm onto the grapple pin and pulled the trigger to initiate the capture sequence.  I had all the malfunction cue cards ready, but fortunately there was no need for them. Everything went perfectly! After that we safed the arm and ground took control to maneuver the Dragon to its berthing position at the Node 2 nadir port. Once the bolts that create a solid mechanical connection were driven, I received a go to leak check the vestibule: if you’re wondering what that is, let’s say that it’s the space between the doors. We have a hatch on our side, Dragon has a hatch on its side: when the hatches are open, we need a pressure-tight “corridor” in between that allows us to go through; that is called the vestibule. Just after berthing, the vestibule is at vacuum: if you think about it, it’s outside of the hatch on our side and outside of the hatch on the Dragon side. Before we equalize pressure and open the hatch, it’s important to make sure that the vestibule doesn’t leak. For that purpose I opened a patch between the vestibule and the ISS cabin atmosphere and pressurized the vestibule to 260 mmHg, then verified that the pressure remained stable for 20 minutes. At that point, I fully equalized pressure and Terry and Butch took over to open the hatch and work on reconfiguring the vestibule for the time Dragon will stay on ISS. At some point, once the hatch on our side was open, Terry invited me to smell the “smell of space” in the vestibule. It’s sort of a joke, of course, space itself doesn’t smell. But it’s apparently the typical smell of hardware that has been exposed to vacuum. Not a pleasant odor, I tell you:  I’d say the dominant component is “burned” with a touch of “rotten”. But hey, if that means that a spaceship came to visit, I’ll take it anytime! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

We’re not scheduled to work here on the Space Station this weekend after all, except for the usual cleaning activities. As you might have heard, the Dragon resupply vehicle is not here yet, so we’re not rushing to get urgent cargo out and get the science started. The good news is that it’s off the ground now. Hurrah and congratulations! So Butch and I will have a final on-board training session tomorrow to get us ready to capture Dragon on Monday. On Tuesday we’ll ingress and start a challenging few weeks of intense scientific and logistics work, before we send Dragon back at the end of its mission. The mission of ATV5 will also come to an end next month and that’s of course a big vehicle to load. Most of its time onboard it has remained quite empty, because of center of mass considerations in case of an emergency undocking. Fortunately in the past weeks we’ve had permission to progressively move more and more trash to ATV, which has freed up a lot of space in our stowage module, the PMM,  and made it a lot easier to find things in there!  In fact, the unfortunate mishap of the Orb-3 mission back in October was not only a loss of cargo, but also meant that we have quite a bit of trash onboard now that would otherwise be gone by now. Yesterday Butch and I installed adapter plates on top of the filled stowage compartments on the walls of ATV – more bags of trash will be secured to these adapters, so that we fill the internal volume as much as possible. As you can see in the picture, it’s starting to look a bit like caving working in there, it’s kind of fun! On Thursday, I also worked with the Spheres again most of the day – you can find more on Spheres on Logbook L+23. The finals of the ZeroRobotics competitions are approaching fast (good luck!), but this was a actually a series of test runs using a smartphone and its camera, attached to one of the Spheres, to navigate. I also did some work with our acoustic dosimeters, taking 24-hour measurements of the noise levels in specific locations on ISS. Before that, we all carried a personal dosimeter with us for a 24-hour period, so we all had a big mic attached to our collar. Very stylish! The loudest place on ISS is by far the immediate vicinity of the T2 treadmill when someone is running on it, especially a fast runner. That’s why there is a recommendation to wear earplugs whenever we run: we have custom made earplugs with speakers that protect us from the treadmill noise and at the same time allow us to listen to music while working out. Besides the dosimeters, in the past holiday weeks we’ve been tasked with several activities that need to performed periodically to monitor the ISS environment and equipment. One day Terry, Butch and I were all going systematically through the modules: Terry was verifying the condition of all our emergency equipment (the oxygen masks and fire extinguishers stowed throughout ISS); Butch was taking water samples from the cooling lines; and I was measuring the airflow velocity through the ventilation grids, which the ground analyzes to determine if there’s any blockage or clogging of the filters. I guess it’s like the periodic inspection on your car, except that the ISS is infinitely more complex and we can’t take it to a garage to get it fixed! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

Today it’s Christmas again! That’s right: Russia, a predominantly Orthodox country, celebrates Christmas on January 7th, so last night we had a Christmas Eve get together with our Russian crewmates. On the Space Station this is typically a day off in the Russian segment only, but today Terry, Butch and I also got a free day, because we expect to work on the weekend following the arrival of Dragon. We were therefore free to join Sasha, Elena and Anton on their videocon with their families, who had gathered in Mission Control Moscow. Father Ioav, the very kind Star City priest, even brought in a small choir to sing Christmas songs to us, including the Italian favorite “Tu scendi dalle stelle” beautifully performed with impeccable pronunciation! Looking back at yesterday, I performed a third run of the ESA experiment Skin-B, studying the effects of space environment on the skin: if you missed it, I talked about it in greater detail in the L+11 Logbook. I also got to dive into the bowels of our space toilet again: in that same L+11 Logbook I mentioned refilling the flush water tank, this time I changed the pre-treat tank. Pre-treat is a fluid that is added in small quantity to flush water and provides some chemical treatment of the urine. There is a component, called dose pump, that provides the necessary pre-treat quantity at the beginning of every use. In fact, every time we turn on the toilet (which means turning on the fan that provides suction) we need to check for the dose-pump light to come on for a few seconds and then go out. If it doesn’t, there is a problem. This happened to me just this past Sunday, actually: the dose pump light did not go out and a red fault light came on instead. After some troubleshooting lead by specialists on the ground, the conclusion was made that the dose-pump had failed and Terry had the replacement on his schedule for Monday. Before this could be successfully completely, the Node 3 toilet was out of service. Luckily we do have redundancy onboard: the Russian service module has another toilet – in fact that was the original toilet of the space station and the toilet in Node 3 is exactly  the same design with some modifications to account for urine transfer directly to the Urine Processing Assembly. Of course, it’s really preferable for us to use the Node 3 toilet: not only it’s a lot closer, but we avoid disturbing Anton and Elena, who sleep not very far from the Russian toilet. As you know, we’re also ready to receive the Dragon cargo ship here soon. In preparation for berthing, I got to do something which did feel somewhat disturbing for a moment: I unlatched the Node 2 hatch, which is where Dragon will be berthed. Right now, of course, it leads to vacuum. We do that to avoid any issues with the latch-unlatch mechanism on ingress day: several science payloads on Dragon are time-critical and a delay in hatch opening and transfer could cause a loss of science. Of course, the hatch opens to the inside, so even if the mechanism is unlatched, there is no way it can open against the internal pressure of the Space Station. But I guess I’m not the first one to feel strange about unlatching it: the include a reminder that there is a force of about 39,000 lbf keeping the hatch closed when the modules is pressurized. Btw, this also means that hatches opening to the outside would be a very bad idea (yes, I’m thinking of you, “Gravity”). Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamsLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

Sorry, sorry, sorry! My apologies, I never meant for this logbook to take a break for the holidays, but this is exactly what ended up happening. It’s not been an especially busy time up here on ISS, but I did take some more time for personal matters, friends and family. So, here we are, almost a week into 2015 already. By the way, as our Lead Flight Director Tomas pointed out (hallo Tomas!) for a full month the calendar date and the GMT date match, so I will actually know what day it is for a change. Don’t know if I ever mentioned this explicitly, but the Station runs on GMT time, or more properly UTC, which corresponds to the Greenwich time zone. We also like to indicate what day it is by counting up from 1 to 365. In Station jargon, today is GMT 005. Might actually be that GMT is not a correct definition for this, but it’s the usage in the ISS world. It’s easy to see how by, say, GMT 072 you’ve lost track of what the real date is! GMT 365, of course, was pretty easy to recognize as New Year’s Eve. We had a grand time celebrating multiple times down in the Russian Service module. We started with midnight Moscow-time, of course, and then on to midnight Central European time and finally our own midnight on Station. By the way, many have asked whether we could see any fireworks from space. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out very well: from a few days before New Year’s Eve and until today we didn’t have a proper, fully dark night on Station. It was what we call a high-Beta period, a time in which the relative positions of the Sun, the Earth and the Space Station are such that we are never completely without sunlight. In other words, for several days we were flying all the time very close to the terminator, the line between day and night on Earth. The Sun was either just above the horizon, creating very dramatic long shadows on the planet, or just below the horizon, with the twilight lasting until the next sunrise. What I loved the most was the shades of intense blue and orange that appear on the Earth horizon just before or after sunrise: during high-Beta the time this colorful stripe is visible a lot longer, so you can really rest your gaze on it. But I did miss seeing the city lights and the stars in the darkness, so welcome back night. We missed you! Hey, at New Year’s Eve we actually danced, you know? Not sure that it looked like dancing from the outside, but since nobody watched besides our close space family here, and we were very much convinced that we were dancing, we danced: it’s our story, and we’re sticking to it! Sasha and Anton even played songs by Adriano Celentano, a very famous and not-so-young-anymore Italian singer. He is to this day incredibly popular in Russia and I have yet to meet a Russian who doesn’t know his most popular tunes. Which brings me back to a story from our launch I’d like to share. As you might remember, Terry, Anton and I each picked a few songs that were played to us in the last 40 minutes before launch. Anton decided to include a few Celentano songs and selected one of his favorite tunes, without having any understanding whatsoever of the lyrics. So imagine my surprise when, sitting on top of a rocket with the hatch closed and the access towers retracted, I hear these words in my headphones: “E’ inutile suonare qui non aprira’ nessuno, il mondo l’abbiam chiuso fuori con il suo casino!” which translates as “No point in ringing the bell, nobody will open the door; we have left the world and its chaos outside”.  Talk about picking the right soundtrack! Not only we had locked the world outside (or the world had locked us inside), but we were space-bound! After a few hours we arrived to the Space Station – that was an early morning 42 days ago, by the way. A good occasion for a friendly reminder from your friendly Expedition 42: “42” is the answer, so don’t panic and always know where your towel is! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

Happy 24th of December! It’s Christmas Eve, of course – a very special time for many people on Earth and for us on the Space Station. Much more humbly, it’s also the 1-month mark for Terry, Anton and me: on the 24th of November we arrived to our new home in space. Time flies, doesn’t it? One of the peculiar things about living up here on ISS is that you have no commute at all. I’m fortunate that I never had significant commutes to school or to work in my life, but this beats them all: you wake up in the morning and you are already at work. If you’re one of those people who enjoys the commute as a buffer time, you’d be in trouble! The first thing I do in the morning before even fully getting out of my sleeping bag is to open the lid of my laptop in my crew quarter and check the day’s plan on the electronic agenda, called OSTPV (On-Board Short Term Plan Viewer, or something similar). We typically get the plan the night before, but changes could have been uploaded during the night. Moreover, during our post-sleep period in the morning there could be very short activities that are actually reminders: for example, no caffeine today for 2 hours before a certain experiment; remember that you’re closing up a urine collection this morning; no exercise this morning before 5 and 7 (not that I would be a candidate for that, but some crewmembers are early risers and enjoy working out in the morning). This morning my day started again with a meeting with… Terry the Vampire! Just kidding, of course: Terry is a great Crew Medical Officer and always does an awesome job with my blood draws. As usual, after taking the blood samples and waiting the 30-minute coagulation time, I put the tubes in our centrifuge for another 30 minutes, before storing them in one of our MELFI freezers, where they will await an opportunity for return to Earth. A lot of human physiology experiments have a “Flight Day 30” requirement for data so, besides the blood draw, I have been doing another 24-hour urine collection and I have been wearing again the temperature sensors on my forehead and sternum for the ESA experiment Circadian Rhythms. In addition I ran another series of measurements on my skin for the experiment, Skin-B, which I talked about in the L+11 Logbook. I also got to dive a little bit in the belly of Columbus for a water sampling activity. Water runs in the internal cooling lines of all the non-Russian modules and periodically we need to access the lines via dedicated sampling ports and get some water out. I took two samples yesterday: one will be returned to the ground for analysis; the second one was for immediate testing with an ammonia test strip. Presence of ammonia in the water would indicate some leakage at the interface between the internal cooling lines (water) and the external cooling lines (ammonia): since ammonia is very toxic, that would be a very unfortunate finding. But luckily the test strip didn’t show any ammonia in the Columbus water! Merry Christmas from us all up here on the Space Station! Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

Today I had a short task in the afternoon that required me to measure the airflow velocity at a ventilation outlet in ATV, our European cargo ship. ATV is docked at the aft docking port of the Russian Service Module, which makes it the furthest place we can go to from the non-Russian modules of the Space Station. And this is not a small Space Station! From the most forward module, Node 2, where our crew quarters are, it’s about 70-80 meters back to ATV. Since we operate on a pretty tight schedule here, having to go back and forth can cause delays, that’s why I really try to make sure I have everything I need before I head down there. However, as an additional measure, I am proud to say that I have optimized the flight path. And here’s my conclusion, in case you’re curious: the fastest way to ATV from the forward modules is flying belly “up” towards the overhead. Plenty of good handrails in the Lab and Node 1, plus when you arrive to PMA, the adapter element between the Node and the Russian segment, the deck slopes up and the passage becomes quite narrow: if you’re flying on the overhead, though, you can keep on going straight. Then there is the FGB, which is a lot of fun: it’s like a long narrow tunnel with closely spaced handrails along both walls. In the FGB overhead or deck wouldn’t matter, but once you get into the Service Module, the overhead is where you want to be: the deck and the walls are full of equipment and stowed items that would force you to slow down. Plus the Service Module interior design is made very much with a virtual “up and down” in mind, so Sasha, Anton and Elena are mostly feet on deck. By flying overhead, I can stay above their heads and get to ATV without getting in their way. OK, that was probably more detail than you wanted to know. Sorry, I got carried away. But these little things really make a difference up here. Like figuring out the best way to stabilize yourself at a worksite: it’s something that we stress a lot during EVA training, but I have found that it is just as important inside. Today I had a tough one: I had to remove a used cartridge from the Material Science Laboratory rack, which is located on the Lab overhead. But the neighboring wall has the frame of the CEVIS in front of it (our space bike), which is free to move to avoid transmitting load into structures and hence doesn’t provide a stable hold. The other wall has the Combustion Integrated Rack (CIR), which was also “floating” for an experiment run and was not to be touched at all. And the nearby rack fronts along the overhead have plenty of equipment and cables.  Quite a challenge! And sometimes the only way to get stabilization is to have a crewmate help. We’re not shy up here about asking to hold on to somebody’s leg when needed. Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora

I’m the Station’s night owl tonight , everybody else is already asleep in our little ring of four crew quarters in Node 2. I like listening to the sounds of the Station at night. People sometimes tell me that they would like to hear the utter silence that they assume I hear in space, but the famous “In space no one can hear you scream” only applies to the vacuum of space: fortunately inside the Space Station we have a breathable atmosphere at about the same pressure you have on Earth at sea level. Plenty of molecules nicely tight together happily transmitting sound throughout the cabin. There is always a significant background noise, due to the many fans and pumps running all the time: a constant humming that signals that the Station is “alive” and healthy. In fact, if we had an emergency, like a fire or a depressurization, even if the audible alarm wouldn’t go off we would immediately notice it because the Station would go quiet: the computers implement an emergency auto-response that shuts down the ventilation. Some noises have taken me by surprise occasionally. Like the first time I noticed a different noise in our toilet cabin, accompanied by a distinct vibration I could feel through the foot restraints on the “floor”. Turns out it’s a normal occurrence when the ground controllers are running the urine processing assembly in a certain mode. Or one day, as I was floating out of Columbus, I heard one of our science racks making a loud hissing sound for several seconds, then go quiet. I checked with Col-CC in Munich and it turned out that they were doing some commanding of our Electro Magnetic Levitator from the ground. So, all expected! It’s quite common for the ground to send commands remotely. Most of what we do up here as crew are tasks that require us to be hands-on on hardware: all commanding of the station systems and science experiments that can be done from the ground remotely are typically implemented by the ground controllers on console in the different control centers. And it’s probably better to have the specialists for each system send commands to the Station. It’s also a way of saving precious crew time: for example, many maintenance procedures have safing steps at the beginning to make sure that the equipment is not powered and is in a safe configuration. Mission Control is always ahead of us and they will have safing in place before we get a chance to ask. So, as you can imagine, running the Space Station requires a lot of communication and coordination between crew and teams on the ground. And we can always count on dozens of specialists looking over a constant stream of telemetry to make sure all systems are healthy up here. Or even to help us out with little things like disabling smoke detectors: we have to do that in most modules before vacuum cleaning the filters on the weekend, to avoid the risk of triggering a false smoke alarm with dust, and we always get a helping hand from mission control to get that done. Hey, I’ve been in space for almost a month now, which means that today was new-pants day for me! Yep, we get six for the mission, so today was time to see what was on offer in my space wardrobe. I actually thought that I would get six identical pants, but… surprise! This will be a green-pants month. I love these pants, by the way, they are very comfortable and practical, with plenty of pockets and Velcro stripes to secure things. Pockets are also all rigorously closed with Velcro, to prevent things from floating out. That’s because, as a rule and with no exceptions, things always want to flow out in space. Futura mission website (Italian): Avamposto42 avamposto42.esa.int #SamLogbook #Futura42 (Trad IT)  Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiCAST 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://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora