→ Logbook

Just got back from a briefing about the fire simulation I’ll have in the afternoon with Anton and Terry. We had this type of training once already last year, during our backup flow, as I reported in these two logbooks from last December 348: Service Module smoke and L-345: Fire evacuation training. Since I’ve told that story already, let me dedicate a few words to an experiment I trained for in Houston couple of weeks ago and I didn’t tell you about yet. It’s called BCAT, which stands for Binary Colloidal Alloy Test. A colloid is a special type of solution, in which tiny particles, so small that you can not see them with the naked eye, are dispersed evenly in another substance. Foam, for example, is a type of colloid: small gas particles are trapped in a liquid or a solid. If it’s liquid particles dispersed in a liquid, we talk about emulsions: milk is a common example. Several runs of BCAT have been performed on ISS already. This particular one, BCAT-KP (Kinetic Platform), is interested in phase separation kinetics. You’ve heard about phase changes in school, I’m sure: we all learned about transition of substances between their solid, liquid or gaseous phase (ice, water and water vapor, for example). Now, phase changes in colloids are a lot more complicated. They are also very interesting both from a fundamental science point of view, as well as for immediate commercial applications (detergents, pains, inks, medicines,…). In fact, a major private company owns some of the BCAT-KP samples! Better insight into colloids could lead to new ways of producing plastic or help extending the shelf-life of some consumer products. Let’s say we’re interested in the stability of a colloid: how long will it take for the dispersed particles, interacting with each other, to gather together, separating the two phases? What kind of structures will those particles form? These are only a few of the questions scientists are interested in. And although we’ve been studying colloids on Earth for a long time, there’s a lot we still don’t know because, guess what, gravity-induced effects are stronger than the interaction between particles, for example the electrostatic interactions. Basically, if the particles are denser that the substance they’re dispersed in, they will migrate to the bottom – that’s called sedimentation. If the opposite is true, they will migrate to the top – and that’s called creaming. None of that happens in space! The BCAT experiment consists of a unit that can hold 10 samples, tested one by one. When it’s time to get one started, crewmembers will use a magnet to homogenize the sample, i.e. mixing it so that the dispersed particles are evenly distributed. Then they will set up a camera, so that it will automatically take a picture at a preset interval and download it to the ground for analysis. Each sample is observed for one week and it’s very important not to bump the unit while the experiment is running. That’s why BCAT is setup in an area of little passage, tucked between the JEM airlock and the forward wall. 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Back in Star City, after returning to Europe from Houston and following a brief stopover at home on the weekend. Time to dive back into the Soyuz world, at least for the next three weeks! But first, I’d like to talk to you about one last class I had at the Johnson Space Center last week, before leaving Houston. It’s a non-mandatory class that crewmembers can request if they feel the need to review one of the most important pieces of equipment on-board, and likely the first one I’ll want to use after my arrival. It’s the Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC): for friends, the space toilet. The WHC is contained within a standard rack, one of the tiltable elements that are installed next to each other along the four walls of any USOS module.  All the components – pump, fan, pipes, tanks, filters, etc.. – are hidden behind the panels. In front of the panels, but still contained in the standard rack volume, are the user interfaces: a yellow funnel with a flexible tube for the urine and a solid waste tank with a hole in top, on which a “seat” is mounted. In front of the rack, sticking out into the free volume of Node 3, is the WHC cabin, which provides some privacy. The WHC has a control panel with enough switches, buttons and LEDs to make you think Japanese toilets are boring (they’re not). In fact as a user, when you step in, you want to glance over the main panel to make sure the lights reflect one of the expected configurations. It’s either three or four green LEDs, depending on where the urine is going. Most of the time the urine flows directly to the Urine Processing Assembly to be treated and then is sent on to the Water Processing Assembly to be turned into potable water. However sometimes, for example if the UPA is undergoing maintenance, the urine can be directed to a removable tank instead. As you can imagine, the panel also has a number of red lights that can come on and indicate a malfunction or simply the need of some action: replacing a full urine tank, for example; or refilling the flush water tank. The whole system is based on airflow carrying liquid and solid waste away from the body and into respective collection tanks. Therefore, the first thing we do to use the toilet is to turn on the fan that creates that directional airflow. Urine is collected via a funnel and is mixed with flushing water and a chemical agent before being sent to the UPA or the tank. Solid waste is collected in single-use bags installed in the solid waste receptacle – after every use, a new clean bag is prepared for the next user,  while the expended one needs to go into the tank just below the “seat”. On Earth, it would just fall down. In space, it takes some guiding: granted, as I hear, not the most glamorous part of living in space. You probably guessed that the one malfunction that could potentially create a real mess is a power loss during use, since the airflow would stop and there would be nothing pulling the waste in the right direction. The immediate action: close the “seat” cover and cap the liquid waste receptacle! Then you can worry about the rest of the troubleshooting. Photos: NASA/Expedition 31 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

This was one of those weeks in astronaut training when I feel like a kid at summer camp. I got to spend three full days at Ellington Air Field, where NASA’s T-38 fleet is based, training basic maintenance skills with the amazing mechanics who fix those jets and make sure they’re safe to fly on. Great opportunity to refresh some skills and to learn many new tricks. Incidentally, I had a blast! There’s something fun and rewarding in mechanical work: I guess it’s that combination of manual skill, knowledge about tools and materials and that basic human pleasure deriving from building something or repairing it. Anyway, of course I wasn’t there for my entertainment. We do a lot of maintenance work on the Space Station. It’s an extremely complex vehicle and the equipment does require periodic preventive maintenance and, occasionally, corrective maintenance to recover from a failure. The ISS training flow includes a number of maintenance classes, in which we get familiar with the tools we have onboard, the way maintenance procedures are written, what the ground controllers expect in terms of reporting and interactions and some typical maintenance activities. This Field Maintenance Training is a fairly recent addition and is meant as an immersive experience, in which you get a lot of hands-on practice and.. well, you learn from the best. It’s actually a two-week course, but unfortunately there is no way we could find two weeks in my schedule right now, four months from launch. But since I was really keen on doing is, the course is very flexible and I have stellar schedulers, I was able to participate for three intense days. The first day I was in the avionics workshops, practicing soldering skills, multimeter use and working on electrical connectors, for example removing or installing pins. The rest of the time I shared between the battery and sheet metal workshops, practicing things like drilling, tapping, riveting, metal bending, removal of bolts with a stripped head… This latter one, I really hope it doesn’t happen on ISS: trying to drill through a steel bolt is not fun even on the ground, must be very challenging in weightlessness! Last time I did something like this, I was 19-year-old and I was doing a 6-week metal work internship in a mechanical apprenticeship workshop in Munich, a requirement to start my engineering studies… I would have never thought that, 18 years later, I would be practicing cutting threads with manual tap-and-die sets as an astronaut, to possibly do it on the Space Station. Isn’t it cool? Picture: trying to take picture of a poorly accessible and poorly illuminated detail. Ground controllers are the second pair of eyes for our ISS maintenance tasks… but since we can not bring them up there, it’s really important to be able to photo-document our work. You can find more pictures here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astrosamantha/sets/72157645855530706/ 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Yesterday I had my second BDC (base data collection) session for the ESA experiment Airway Monitoring. You can find some information about the science background in this older logbook from EAC, where I had my introductory class. Why do we need to gather pre-flight data on the ground? Well, if you need to understand the effect of weightlessness on a phenomenon, you need to observe it first in normal 1G conditions. Then you’ll be able to compare that data with the data you collect in space and determine what changes are induced by microgravity. In the case of Airway Monitoring, as you might remember, we’re interested in studying the gaseous exchange in the lungs in two conditions: normal pressure and reduced pressure (10 PSI, that’s about 2/3 of normal atmospheric pressure). In space we’ll do the reduced pressure measurement in the airlock, that we will depressurize accordingly… but how do we do this on the ground? That’s what makes the Airway Monitoring BDC intersting: we do the BDC in a hypobaric chamber, a facility that is typically used for the hypoxia training that pilots, parachuters… astronauts periodically go through. In the chamber you can progressively reduce the pressure simulating flying to higher altitudes. The 10PSI we targeted are roughly equivalent to an altitude of 10.000 ft. The first type of measurement is fairly simple: I need to exhale into an analyzer that will measure the nitric oxide (NO) content of my exhalation. NO is a marker of airway inflammation, but since there might be some NO in the air that I breath in, I also need to inhale through a scrubber that removes it. Now we’re sure that any NO measured in my exhalation is really from my lungs! The second type of measurement is a bit more complicated and is needed to understand the lung NO turnover: how much NO is actually diffused into my blood, instead of exhaled? That’s where we need the Portable PFS facility: I inhale from a bag containing a known gas mixture (including NO and an inert trace gas) and when I exhale the central portion of my exhaled breath is collected in another bag and analyzed. This experiment is exciting both from a fundamental science point of view, as well as for applications in space and on the ground. In terms of knowledge, it will improve our understanding of how lungs and respirations function. This will help in diagnosing and treating lung disease: think for example that over 300 million people worldwide have asthma and in some regions of the worlds the condition unfortunately is often not diagnosed. For space exploration, it’s really important to understand what happens to astronauts’ lungs during long duration spaceflight. We are bound to inhale a lot of small particles that float in the air in microgravity, while on Earth they fall to the ground – just think of how fast dust can accumulate in your house (or at least it does in mine!) 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Yesterday was the day of goodbyes… very special goodbyes. How often does it happen that you can say “See you in space in a few months?”… First Terry and I said goodbye to Butch after one last robotics class together… next time we’ll see him will be in November in MRM1, the Space Station module to which we’ll dock our Soyuz. Later in the afternoon Sasha and Elena came to say good bye, joking that we’ll see them at “customs control”  before being allowed to enter Station. These people have been part of my world for years – every time I was in Houston or Russia or Europe or Japan, depending how our respective schedules looked like, one or more of them could be “in town”  at the same time. Well, we won’t be in town together any more before we rejoin in space. Butch, Elena and Sasha will leave in September, so I was expecting this moment to come soon. But amazingly enough, looks like I also said my good bye to Scott, whom I will see again on Station when he joins us next March. If we’ve recalled our schedules correctly, for the next four months we’ll be dodging each other around the planet, arriving “in town”  when the other has just left. Besides giving bitter-sweet hugs, I had a full training day yesterday with many short events ranging from HAM radio to robotics, from retinal imaging to LAN troubleshooting. One very “different” event I had is the HAP sensitivity training. The HAP is the absorption pad we now apply in the helmet of a spacewalking suit to help mitigate the risk of a water leak event, like the one that happened to Luca last year. Just like we have glove checks built in our EVA timelines to verify periodically that there is no damage, we now have periodic HAP checks, when crewmembers are asked to “feel” the HAP in the back of their head and report any changes. To get an idea of how it would feel to have the HAP loaded with different quantity of water we now have this HAP sensitivity training. We progressively added more water until, at about 150-200ml, I was confident that I would be able to feel that there is fluid in the HAP. Then we went to maximum capacity – about 600 ml and that’s what you see in the picture. The HAP thickens significantly at that point and really pushes your head forward towards the front of the helmet. Of course, we wouldn’t let it go that far. We have procedures in place now to stop the accumulation of water in the helmet! 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Sorry for the long interruption in the logbook, but it’s been a really busy training week here at the Johnson Space Center! In the last logbook I told you about the upcoming vacuum chamber run, so first of all, if you’re wondering how that went… well, we had to interrupt the altitude run yesterday because of a technical issue, so the event will have to be rescheduled. I’ll tell you more soon! But today let me tell you about the training day last Friday at the Neutral Buoyancy Facility, the giant pool in which we practice spacewalks underwater. With veteran spacewalker Randy Bresnick I practiced a LEE R&R. LEE is the Latching End Effector, the component at the end of the robotic arm that can capture a grapple fixture, for example on a cargo vehicle, and make a rigid connection with it. For some pictures check out this older logbook. R&R stands for Remove and Replace: remove a failed unit, install a spare. So, the goal last Friday was to practice removing a failed LEE from the robotic arm and replace it with the POA – that’s an end effector that is identical to the ones at the extremities of the arm, but it’s located on the Mobile Transporter instead and is used to temporarily stow big units, if they have a grapple fixture. There are some situations in which this swap would make sense, because an end effector might be degraded in such a way that it can not capture reliably a visiting vehicle, but it can still work fine as a POA for temporary stowage. In this picture you can see all the POA just below the base of the robotic arm. As you can see, it looks just like the arm end-effectors: Photo: removing one of the six bolts that attach the POA (or rather it’s NBL mockup) to its install location on the Mobile Transporter. (Credit: NASA) 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa  ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/

Another busy day feeling like a scientist yesterday, training for several life science experiments, including one in which we’ll work with small plants. One last class late afternoon was dedicated to the preparation of my vacuum chamber run next week, working with a Class 1 EVA suit and gloves. Class 1 is the designation of hardware that is meant for use in space (as opposed to training). The gloves, in particular, will be my custom-made prime and backup gloves: if we find no issues with them in the chamber, they will be packed and sent to Russia to fly with me on the Soyuz. On Monday I will have a dry-run: we will go through all the pre-EVA airlock procedures, but the depressurization will be simulated. As in prep-and-post classes in the past, we will instead pressurize the suit to the 4.3 PSI over ambient. Here’s the story of a prep-and-post class. On Tuesday we’ll have the so-called altitude run, in which we’ll actually depressurize the chamber to almost vacuum. For this, we need to go through pre-breath procedures, purging nitrogen from the body to prevent decompression sickness as the pressure is lowered. The protocol used in the chamber is the 4-hour in-suit protocol, which is exactly what it sounds: breathing pure oxygen in the suit for 4 hours.The suggestion here is to bring one or two movies to watch through a small window in the chamber door! By the way, this will be my first time in the vacuum chamber in the NASA EMU suit, but I had the chance a while back to do a chamber run in the Russian Orlan suit. Here is that story, if you missed it! https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2012/11/05/a-trip-into-vacuum/ Picture: Terry’s chamber run a couple of weeks ago. I helped suiting him up.  (Credit: NASA) 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 ES) Tradducción en español aquí: https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/ (Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici: https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/