Expedition Five Letters Home #11 – by Astronaut Peggy Whitson
Hey Guys,
The Progress arrived yesterday. YEAH! I was surprised by the difference in my attitude about this Progress arrival as compared to the previous arrival, just a few days after the shuttle carrying the UF-2 crew undocked. At that time in June we had only been on station for about 3 weeks, and we still had fresh fruit from the shuttle supplies. Now at the beginning of Oct, fresh fruit and tomatoes seemed like a fantasy.
I was able to see the Progress approach through a small window just under the docking cone that the vehicle interfaces with to attach to the station. It’s a pretty small port to be viewing from, but it was an interesting perspective to see the vehicle as it approached directly towards me. It appeared to be moving very slowly until it got within about 30 m or so when I could start seeing the detail of the antennae that are a critical part of this automated docking sequence. As the distance between the Progress and the station shrank, the ship seemed to be approaching more quickly (the approach profile is actually just the opposite, slower as it moves in closer). As the sun set, the silhouette of one of the solar arrays on the Progress sliced through the curved blue line that is Earth’s atmosphere. Attitude and braking thrusters were firing, and in darkness it was possible to see the fan-shaped plume of diffused light with each firing. The station was also maintaining a very precise attitude. I could hear the double-thud of each attitude jet as it fired since many of these thrusters are located in the aft of the service module, surrounding me from my vantage point. After the soft scrape-thud of docking, as the probe on the Progress slid into the docking cone of the station, I watched from a window on one of the hatches in the docking compartment. Looking aft, I was able to see the attitude engines of the service module firing in an intricate dance to maintain a stable attitude.
It was several hours later, after all the appropriate leak tests were complete, that we were able to get access to the loot that folks from the ground had sent us. Of course, the vehicle was also carrying other important supplies for experiments, food for Expeditions 6 and 7, fuel for the engines and oxygen, but we were initially concerned most about the notes, letters, photos, CDs and, yes, the fresh food that arrived. Tomatoes have never tasted so succulent and apples so sweet!
I wrote you earlier about the carbon dioxide removal assembly (CDRA, pronounced ceedra) that we removed/replaced with a new bed that we brought from the ground. Unfortunately, all this work seemed for naught, since the system would not switch from absorption to desorption properly. After considerable trouble-shooting by the ground, they suspected that one of the connections was leaking. Using an ultrasonic leak detector, I was able to determine which connection was leaking, but I was not looking forward to the all-day process of rotating the rack, disconnecting the bed from behind, and removing the bed from the front to gain access to this connection. Some really bright folks on the ground asked me if I could fit behind the trace contaminant control system (TCCS) if we slid this neighboring component out (a much smaller component, easier to disconnect and no rack rotation involved). I was able to squeeze in behind the TCCS and with a flashlight in my teeth, disconnect, fix the seal and reconnect the gas line. This whole procedure took less than 1 hour as compared to the expected 1 day to access and repair if we rotated the rack. I was really excited after several more days worth of testing, that they called from the ground to tell me that CDRA was fully operational. The ground team was so happy that they generated a song and sent up the lyrics for me!
The ground medical team was interested in demonstrating the capability to use ultrasound as a diagnostic tool. We have an ultrasound onboard to be used for human research experiments that require this device. In order for this method to be feasible as a diagnostic tool, it was necessary to demonstrate that you could, with very little training (I had about 30 min), an informative cue-card and a doctor on the ground, instruct a crew member on how to get good images. The doc on the ground was receiving the images that I was generating, with a 3-4 second delay. So he had to describe to me what was a good view of a particular organ/site and I would try to obtain that for him. Once in a location, he would instruct me to pan/tilt/rotate the ultrasound probe and which keys on the complicated keyboard to use (the cue-card was color-coded and sub-divided in order to simplify these instructions.). The guys on the ground seemed happy with the images I generated, and I demonstrated that I do in fact have blood flow to my head, so I was happy, too!
Communication is such a key element to success here. It can make a huge difference in how you interact with the ground and their understanding of the situation here. I can make a comment, which I might think is clear, and the ground team will try to analyze a situation that is not accurate. This week for instance, I was having problems with a couple of my computers. I reported that I had a green flashing light, indicating that the computer was communicating with the network. Based on this comment, the ground assumed that I had taken that computer from a radio frequency connection and made it a hard-line connection. I’m sure they were sweating bullets to try and understand why I would have changed the configuration of the network without telling them, so eventually they asked me why I had done this. It was ironic that after explaining that in fact I had not changed the configuration of the network, the next trouble-shooting step was to change the configuration of the network to make this computer hard-line…
We have been doing a number of activities in preparation for the shuttle arrival. In order to be optimally efficient during the short period of time that the shuttle is docked to the station, the ground team sends me a list of items to pack in advance, so that for the most part, all that is required is some transfer once the shuttle arrives. This is not a job on the ground I would really want…it requires an immense amount of patience and an incredible eye for detail. The lists the ground sends up are preliminary, and they tell me on a day-to-day basis which items have been approved so that I don’t waste time packing items that the shuttle won’t be able to take home because of mass and c.g. (center of gravity) issues. On the previous flight we had an entire logistics module to transfer, but because the truss that is coming up on this mission fills the payload bay of the shuttle, there is no room for a logistics module…this makes logistics simpler in some ways, but more complicated in other ways. There are fewer items to be transferred, but changing priorities can have a greater impact with less total volume available. I consider myself pretty lucky that I’ve only unpacked 2 bags so far that I had previously packed!
We are also preparing the airlock, the suits and the tools for the shuttle team that will be doing the EVAs from the station. These tasks are interesting, so it’s fun to do them. The most challenging part was figuring out where to put everything that we normally have stowed in the crewlock (the portion of the airlock that the crew egresses the station, which when not in use, is FULL of equipment/spares/tools). Even though we moved a lot of items from the node to the FGB to open up some space for the airlock items, the node looks like a disaster area with all these items from the crewlock and the pre-packed items that I have temporarily stowed there, too. Progress unpacking is proceeding well, so the FGB doesn’t look any better. Typically, when you have houseguests coming, you try to tidy up…not going to happen here!
Mr. O’Keefe also came to Mission Control in Houston a couple of weeks ago and announced that I was to be the first Science Officer of the ISS. I obviously don’t mind the new title, in spite of the fact that my many supportive friends have sent an incredible amount of Star Trek/Mr. Spock-related email!
Live Long and Prosper,
Peg
