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The big news of the day here on the Space Station is that we’re not going to grapple Dragon on Sunday any more: as you might have heard, the SpaceX-5 resupply mission has been delayed for a few weeks, and now of course the teams on the ground are working hard to replan the days ahead to make good use of our time up here as all the SpaceX-related activities have disappeared from our timeline for now. In particular, tomorrow was supposed to be mostly a day-off, in view of a very busy Sunday working on Dragon arrival, but now we’re back to a regular working Friday and an off-duty weekend. During our evening Daily Planning Conference with the control centers the typical opening call from Houston “The plan is onboard” was replaced by “The plan is NOT onboard”, meaning that the planning teams were still working out the details of our schedule for tomorrow – it will be finalized in the next hours and uploaded during our sleeping period, so we’ll be ready to go tomorrow morning. Yesterday I got to work with Japanese airlock again: Butch and I removed the satellite deployer that was installed on the slide table and, with the real-time assistance from the JAXA control center in Tsukuba, we did some inspection work to troubleshoot an anomaly with some limit indicators (the sensors that tell you the current position of the slide table). These have also been a couple of intense ocular health days for me: there’s been a great deal of focus in recent years on the eyes, since we’ve become aware of some vision degradation in many crewmembers of long duration mission. The jury is still out on the exact cause and it’s therefore important to gather a lot of data. I started yesterday with a relatively simple vision acuity exam, not much different from what you probably know from your eye doctor visits. Then Terry measured the pressure of the fluid inside my eye bulb by gently tapping the surface of the eye with an instrument called tonometer (did I mention already that we really have to trust our crewmates up here?). And today we got images of the eye using two different instruments: a fundoscope (which is the one in the picture) and a tomography machine (specifically, if you’re savvy about these things, which I am not, an Optical Coherence Tomograph). All these tests require the assistance of another crewmember, interacting with a remote guider on the ground who has real time images from the equipment and a camera view of us working up here. That’s not all, though: tomorrow we’ll also do an eye ultrasound! 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

You likely missed the memo, but I’m letting you know now: tonight is a Marangoni night! At least here on the Space Station. We like to joke that it sounds like some trendy dance party (I wonder.. can you dance in space?), but it’s actually quite the opposite: on Marangoni nights we’re asked not to exercise and to be particularly gentle in pushing off handrails. And we really should stay clear of the Ryutai rack in the Japanese laboratory, where the Marangoni experiment runs: this experimental protocol is very sensitive to G-jitter – call that the small accelerations we impart on the structure – therefore we need to be careful. So, whenever you want a quiet evening being a couch potato, we can say you’re having a Marangoni night! As the name implies, this investigation is about Marangoni convection. What, convection? Isn’t it true that you don’t have convection in weightlessness? Well, yes, if you mean the natural convection induced by density differences: for example, on Earth hot air rises because it’s less dense than cold air. But not in weightless conditions, because buoyancy is an effect of gravity! However, Marangoni convection happens at the surface of a liquid and is in fact driven by surface tension or, more precisely, by differences in surface tension induced by temperature. Sounds fancy, but if you’ve observed oil in the center of a hot pan moving to the sides, you’ve observed some Marangoni convection. Space is the perfect place for Marangoni studies: first of all, as we already mentioned, we don’t have density-driven convection to confuse the observations. But you can also do some neat tricks that on Earth wouldn’t be possible: the experiment that is currently running makes use of a liquid bridge that could never be obtained in that size on Earth – it would collapse under its own weight! Hey, I got so carried away with Marangoni that I didn’t tell you about my day at all. First I spent the morning working with Elena on Spheres, as you can see in the picture. I’ll write more about Spheres in the future for sure, but for now I’ll tell you that we did a test run in preparation of the finals of the ZeroRobotics competition in January. We had a lot of fun and I’m sure we’ll have even more fun when we’ll have the competing student software loaded on the Spheres satellites! Butch and I also did another session of offset grapples, similar to what we did on Saturday, in preparation of Dragon capture. We even practiced a transition to our backup robotic workstation in the US Lab, to be prepared for a malfunction on capture day. 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

Yesterday I had my first HAM radio contact with school pupils. A big hello to the students of the schools “Elena di Savoia” in Bari and “Alessandro Volta” in Bitonto!  It was fun talking to you and thanks for the great questions! Amateur radio contacts between astronauts and school kids have a long tradition on ISS, thanks to a little army of volunteers in many countries who work with the local schools not only on the day of contact, but also in the weeks and months leading up to the event: they teach students about radio technology and about space, to get them ready and hopefully excited about the event. From my side, I only needed to be ready on the proper channel at the proper time: it is very important, because we need direct line-of-sight with the amateur radio station on the ground and the pass is only about ten minutes long. A couple of minutes before the expected acquisition-of-signal time, I started making calls to check if someone was already picking me up. Eventually I picked up a call from the ground station and sure enough, we started our conversation. I heard them loud and clear, which positively surprised me: somehow I expected signal quality not to be as good. I hope they had the same quality on the other side. On such contacts, there’s no time for small talk and formalities: in less than ten minutes, we had to make sure that the 20 students who were lined up to ask their question got their chance. So here I was, ready to go. And here came the first question – are you ready? Here’s it is: “ It is known that people become taller when they are in space. What happens to bio-molecules? Is there any alteration in the tertiary structure of proteins?” I almost fell off my chair… well, if I had had a chair. (Wonder what a good equivalent of this expression would be in weightlessness… any suggestions?) Where are the good old question about space food and the space toilet? Jokes apart, I was really impressed with all the questions: they showed a great interest and knowledge in science and technology and gave me great hope for our future generations of scientists and engineers. Keep up the great work, girls and boys! 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 third weekend on ISS is coming to an end and I find myself being very ambivalent about the passage of time. On the one hand, days have just flown by and it seems like yesterday that we arrived. On the other hand, the time when I used to walk and sleep in a bed almost seem like distant memory and it feels like I’ve always floated, always slept in a sleeping bag, always run on the wall and lifted weights on the ceiling.  In other words, the Space Station is starting to feel like my home and my normal life. Then I get to fly a huge robotic arm lurking in the darkness outside our  window, with the Earth passing by beneath, and I still wonder if it’s real or if it’s a dream. That’s right, Butch and I spent some time in the Cupola yesterday at the controls of the robotic arm in preparation for Dragon capture next week. After hundreds of hours of simulation, it was my first time moving the actual Station arm! I have told you in the last logbook about our onboard simulator, Robot. Sim time is good, but it’s important to get a feel for the real arm before capture day. That’s why Saturday afternoon we got to practice so-called “offset grapples”. Our target was the grapple fixture of Dextre, the multiarm roboto currently living outside on the Lab, and the starting position was a high over about 5 meters above the target. I messed up the alignment for Butch and he got to adjust it on the fly while approaching the grapple fixture, then we swapped roles and I got to do the same. Of course, we didn’t really grapple Dextre: in fact, triggering closure of the end effector snares was not even enabled on the hand controllers. The purpose was purely to get a feel for how the real arm responds to inputs, especially in terms of oscillations. I was actually surprised by the steadiness of the real arm: it seemed less of a challenge than in the simulator to keep the oscillations under control. I should tell you that oscillations are the big enemy, therefore we train to give very smooth and progressive hand controller inputs. One jerky movement and the arm can start to oscillate more than you like it. With Dragon arriving next weekend, we have a busy week ahead of us. We’ll get probably half days off on Friday and Saturday and, of course, we’ll have a full working day on Sunday with the arrival of Dragon. In fact, after Capture Dragon will be berthed to the Node 2 Nadir position, so we’ll have it just outside our crew quarters, almost like adding another small room to our living area. And this room will come already full of goodies! 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

In the past two days Butch and I did many hours of maintenance on an EMU suit and this was without a doubt the most difficult and delicate activity that I have performed on orbit so far. The EMU is the NASA pressure suit for spacewalks – basically, it’s a little spaceship for one person that can keep you alive outside of the Space Station for several hours, providing oxygen for breathing and pressurization,  cooling water, scrubbing of CO2, communication and probably a few more things I am forgetting. One of the most important components of the life support system is the Fan-Pump-Separator, FPS for friends. It’s one single, surprisingly small unit containing the fan that provides ventilation, the pump that circulates cooling water and the separator that removes condensate water (from sweat and breathing) out of the ventilation loop, to keep humidity under control in the suit and prevent fogging of the helmet. The FPS has failed on the suit that is intended to be used by Terry in January and we flew a replacement part with us on the Soyuz, which Butch and I got to install. What makes this work so difficult is that is wasn’t originally intended to be performed on orbit, so the design is not weightlessness-friendly. For example, the screws are non-captive: not a trivial detail when you’re trying to remove and then install tiny screws with multiple washers in difficult-to-access places. So, how do you approach a task like this? Well, for one thing, with a lot of eyes: not only ours, but also of a team of specialists on the ground following along on multiple camera views. Then you have a person on the ground serving as CAPCOM for this particular activity, who is extremely familiar with all the aspects of the procedure: how nice that this person was Mark Vande Hei, from our NASA sister class of 2009. Always nice to talk to Mark! Then you have a very well-honed procedure and a number of videos detailing every step, in addition to special measures such as putting a mesh on the head of a vacuum cleaner and have it placed appropriately to catch any part that you might lose hold of. And then you need to take it very slow and be extremely meticulous about every action and about tracking parts and tools.  Butch and I joked that we were performing surgery on the suit. So, the new FPS is in place and Butch is scheduled for the checkout tomorrow – hopefully that will confirm that we have a functioning suit for Terry to use in January. Which reminds me that the astronaut profession really requires an extra measure of faith and trust in your fellow human beings. For example, in your crewmates, who replaced a component your life will eventually depend on! Of course, it’s not only trust, we do have a checkout planned: in fact Butch will perform it tomorrow. So it’s still early to cheer, but if everything goes well it will be very rewarding to look back at this challenging work! 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 got to float all the way back to ATV again, this time taking with me a big full tank of brine. What is brine, you may ask? Let’s put it this way: brine is what is left over when we are done “transforming yesterday’s coffee into tomorrow’s coffee”, as fellow astronaut +Don Pettit famously said (not sure if he was quoting somebody else!). As you might know, we recycle urine onboard thanks to a facility called Urine Processing Assembly or UPA. You put urine from the toilet into UPA and you get two products out: one that will become potable water after some further work in the Water Recovery System and then the waste, a concentrate of all the stuff in your urine that you really don’t want to be part of your future cup.. ehm, pouch of coffee. The brine is collected in the recycle tank: when this is full, we take it out and float it down to ATV to transfer it into one of the big liquid tanks – of course, once we’re done pumping out any water that might have been launched on ATV in that specific tank! Only the toilet in Node 3 is directly connected to the Urine Processing Assembly. In the Service Module toilet, mostly used by our Russian crewmates, the urine is collected in a tank. Of course, for our water balance onboard we need to process that urine as well, so periodically some full urine tanks will materialize in a temporary stowage location in Node 1 and we will progressively transfer the urine to the UPA. If you’re one of those who find this somewhat disturbing or even disgusting, try to look at it this way: our spaceship Earth is, among many other things, a giant UPA. We’re just not used to think about the previous history of those molecules of water in our drink: wouldn’t make much sense, would it? On ISS we don’t think about it either! By the way, I have to plead guilty and admit that I have not contributed to the water balance at all today. But it’s for a good reason: science! I am doing a 24-hour urine collection, so we’ll have to detract from our onboard water all my filled tubes, frozen in the Melfi freezer by now. It’s one of those things that you’re a bit nervous about the first time, because it’s easy to make a mess in weightlessness, but I’m happy to say that it turned out to be smooth and easy! 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

Another weekend has gone by and it’s time to get ready for a new week of work on humanity’s outpost in space!

As I wrote last weekend, Saturday is the cleaning day. It’s also the day when you have some more time for personal hygiene, when you can take a luxurious bath… ehm, just kidding. But, in space terms, it’s still a luxurious day: you may choose, like I do, to inaugurate your fresh, clean, new towel on Sunday. It’s not exactly shower size, more like what you would use in your home for drying hands, but it’s still nice. We also get a “shower in a bag” every second day: it’s one of those camping towels that you impregnate with water – most of ours come wrapped in an pouch with the same interface for the water dispenser as the drinks, so you can dispense water directly into the bag without spilling any drops around. And we have a pouch of liquid soap every second week. So, recapping, wash with your camping towel and the liquid soap, dry with your weekly real towel. We also have a washcloth per week, I typically use it for drying off sweat during exercise for one week, the next week it graduates to spitting towel for toothpaste. I know, I’m high-maintenance: many astronauts just swallow it. Hey, if the spitting in the towel was already too much information for you, you might want to stop here, because it gets better. How about cutting your fingernails in space? I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I had postponed this operation until yesterday, because I was  a bit intimidated by it. How do you make sure that your don’t lose a cut-off piece of fingernail in the cabin, which could end up in somebody’s eyes? That would be very poor space etiquette. People have told me that you do that close do a ventilation return grid, but I wasn’t 100% convinced that it would go smoothly. Anyway, I’m happy to report that it worked great. I found a return grid with a very fine mesh and a robust airflow and I carefully cut my fingernails just in front of it and sure enough, all the pieces went in the right direction and stuck to the surface of the grid. In the end I only had to vacuum clean. Another thing we like to do on the weekend, if it sort of matches the prescribed usage rate of food, is to refill our boxes of dishes in Node 1. Food supplies are organized by type, like meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts, breakfast, etc… when we get a new package out, like the one I’m holding in the picture, we scan it and move it to the “deployed food” location in the inventory system, so the ground always knows where we stand with food. Little boxes, like the ones you can see in the left part of the pictures, serve as our kitchen shelves to store the  deployed food packages in Node 1. There’s a label on the front of each box to note the date on which that type of food was last replenished: this way we can make sure we’re not going through the food too fast! Today I have take over from Terry what we call “The Duty”, a weekly rotation involving a number of administrative and housekeeping responsibilities: turning on the lights in the morning, turning them off in the evening, closing the shutters of the Cupola windows at night, but also running our Daily Planning Conferences with the control centers and keeping an eye on the Daily Summary. This latter is a document that is uploaded every morning to ISS and contains some critical information for the safety of the Station (for the case we had a major failure and we went Loss of Com with the ground), as well as a Q&A section: questions for the crew and answers to questions the crew had earlier. It also has the manning roster of all the control centers for the shifts of the day, so we can always know who is on console in Houston, Huntsville, Munich, Tsukuba and Moscow.

Wow – where did this week go! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re very busy and you’re enjoying what you’re doing. On Thursday, Butch and I were both absolutely convinced that it was Wednesday: poor Terry had to show us OSTPV (our electronic planner application) to make us change our mind! Talking about planning, the plan for me yesterday was to complete a series of swabs for the experiment Microbiome, for which I have already been collecting urine and blood this whole week. In the morning I took skin swabs at several locations on my face and arms. Later I repeated some of those swabs after exercising and I took surface swabs at some highly-touched locations on ISS: the ARED lift bar that we use to “lift weights”; the knobs we rotate to open and close the shutters of the Cupola windows; the handheld microphones and so on. As usual, everything goes into the MELFI freezer for return whenever the sample can hitchhike a ride back to Earth. I also relocated a SAMS unit in Columbus: SAMS units are installed throughout the Station and measure acceleration. If we were in a condition of perfect microgravity SAMS would measure zero acceleration. But of course, although we float around weightless, we don’t have perfect microgravity on ISS; any input on structure, be it from a pump running or from someone pushing off a handrail, causes a little acceleration locally that the SAMS units can measure. Looking back at the work week, I’ve tried hard to become better at not letting things float away: remembering to properly close a bag full of items, even if I’m turning the other way only for a few seconds; scanning the area in 3 dimensions before leaving a work area; properly securing things with Velcro or bungees, even if it seems like a good idea to just press them beneath the knees or stick them under a handrail… it’s not a good idea. On the positive side, though, the fact that things float also means that you have the third hand you always wanted, or the fourth, or the fifth… Let’s say you need both of your hands to do something, but you’re holding something: well, as long as you don’t turn away, you can just let it float. A “third hand”  will keep it floating in front of you, you just need to give it a gentle push if it starts to get out of your field of view. There’s something magic indeed about a weightless environment! And it’s interesting how you have to learn that: I have heard several times Butch telling me “Just let it go.” Last thing I’ll tell you tonight: Butch has set up our Christmas tree in the Lab and even hung socks for the six of us. So from now until Christmas, if we come across someone’s favorite dish when searching through a food container, we can stick it in his or her sock! 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