Achievement Unlocked!

Sorry for the radio silence over here for the last week. Between a crazy work schedule, a crazy workout schedule, and Texas Legislature-related rage blackouts, I have simply not been able to put together a post.

Last weekend I worked the evening shift (3pm to midnight) on Saturday and Sunday. Weekend shifts come around every couple of months for me, because our console is one of 6 with constant support, every hour of every day.  (The six are SPARTAN-power and external thermal, ETHOS- life support and internal thermal, CRONUS- communications, and on-board computers, ADCO- attitude control, GC- ground control, mission control itself is their system, and the Flight Director- the boss)

When I came home from work on Sunday, I had to stay up to shift to the overnights. I made it until almost 5am (minus an accidental catnap on the couch, from which I awoke face down in a puddle of drool- sorry, we keep it real here folks!). I woke up again at 7 when Dan got up for work, ate something, and then hung out until a 9am telecon. After the telecon, I headed back to bed until around 4:30 (with the help of my BFF, NyQuil). That night I went to work at 11pm to prepare the ISS for a spacewalk.

The SPARTAN prep was not too difficult on our shift: parking the SARJs (the big rotating joints each of which rotates 2 truss segments, 4 solar array wings), doing some ISS system powerdowns, and configuring some onboard software. The next shift had an early start (5:30 am) and had the bulk of our actions for the day. If you follow space news, you already know how the spacewalk went.

I got home a little after 6:30am, kissed Dan who was on his way out the door for a 7am simulation, and went to bed. I set my alarm for 10, knowing I couldn't sleep the day away if I wanted to get to bed that night. When I woke up, the first tweet I saw said "EVA cancelled due to leak in spacesuit." Which immediately got my heart rate going, because I thought this meant a leak of the spacesuit atmosphere into the vacuum of space- an extremely dangerous problem. I felt a little relief when I learned it was a water leak into the suit... but not much.

Despite being a Florida girl with pool water in my veins, I am totally terrified of drowning. I'm especially afraid of enclosed water slides because there's no escape. What's scarier about water in space is that there is no up, so you can't just scoot to the top of the helmet and find a pocket of air, the way you could in a water slide tube, or a car that drove into a lake. The water can float anywhere, and has an almost-sticky quality due to water tension, unfettered by gravity (see how water behaves in space here). So, basically, being trapped in a spacesuit that is filling with water is worse than my previous worst fear. Eek!  Thankfully*, he was able to get safely back to the airlock and out of his helmet.(*I originally wrote "Luckily" but I realized it isn't luck, it's hundreds of man hours of training and planning that allows the ground team and crew to deal with potentially dangerous conditions like this.)

Tuesday I spent most of the day sitting on the couch trying not to fall asleep, although I did get a short workout and a trip to the grocery store accomplished. Wednesday I was back to the office for regular office hours, starting at 8:30 when I headed to the SPARTAN backroom console (SPOC, pronounced like Spock) to support an onboard test of our little rotating joints (the BGAs, which each rotate 1 solar array wing). I wrote the procedure we used for the test, and wanted to be there to help execute. And that is now I spent half a day on the day shift in mission control too, to round out my week supporting all three ISS shifts- evening, overnight, and day.

When I was discussing my crazy work schedule with a coworker/friend who is a video game enthusiast, he said that if my life were a video game this would be an achievement. (Hi Mike!) So, you know, I should have access to all the better weapons now, or something. (I hope it's Nap pods.)

"...But its going to be okay"

The title is a quote from our favorite article about the ISS ammonia leak that popped up on us Thursday: "The space station is leaking vital fluid, but its going to be okay"

That headline became our motto in the 2 day sprint to Saturday morning's EVA.

The leak was in Photovoltaic Thermal Control System 2B, one of 8 such systems on station, which cools one of our 8 power channels. It would be simplistic to say that this is 1/8 of our power generation, which is pretty much true, because 2B is a special channel. It powers more important stuff (aka critical loads) than any other.

Source

As NASA's own briefing site explains, rather than lose those loads, we performed what's called a seamless power channel handover. This configures the dying channel's loads to be hosted by another channel. (As the word seamless implies, we can do this without powering down the loads.) We are still down 1/8 of the power generation capability, but retain power to critical loads. After that, we powered the leaking loop down and configured channel 2B for dormancy.

Then we got to work planning the EVA that might save the system. For me the days looked like this:

• Thursday, noon
  The email came out to the group that PVTCS 2B quantities had taken a sharp downturn... aka were leaking at a much faster rate than we had been tracking since before I even started at JSC.
• Thursday afternoon
  A coordination meeting was held between program people, engineering people, and flight control people to discuss the problem and how we fix it. It was decided then that we should plan an EVA. Because half the crew is coming home on Monday (regularly scheduled, not failure related) the EVA window would end on Sunday. It was this weekend or next month...
• Thursday evening
  I left work Thursday afternoon around 5, and headed to happy hour with some friends prior to a softball double header with our co-ed recreational team. Just as we were leaving the restaurant to go to softball, I got a call from my boss. The EVA lead team for our group was staying late working on the EVA plan; they had to sleep sometime and there was another meeting scheduled at 3am that they needed me to cover.  
• U-turn!
  Dan and I had carpooled, so he drove me home, missing the first game but heading back for the second. I obviously missed both games, took some Nyquil and went to bed getting about 4.5 hours of sleep before my 1:30am wakeup call.
• Thursday night to Friday morning
  While I was sleeping, and into when I arrived, the on console team (including someone spun up Thursday afternoon to head straight to bed to support the night shift) performed the seamless power channel handover and channel dormancy procedure.
• Friday 3am
  I attended the EVA coordination meeting, and then I hit the ground running on various EVA prep tasks. Among them I worked on much of the timeline for our supporting activities, wrote/updated 3 procedures for various EVA related operations, and even spent an hour sending some commands to ISS. After a long 12 hours, I realized I had to pee. True story, I spent 9 hours in a chair, tied to a console, and never got up to pee. And I ate a giant bag of pretzel M&Ms and a doughnut for lunch. Oops.
• Friday night
  We headed to bed early- Dan because he had to get up at 5 to drive to a karate event in Dallas, and me because I had been up since 1:30 and had to get back around 5 the next day.
• Saturday morning
  3:30 am wakeup call (whoo, sleeping in!) and I headed to work. I spent most of the day squinting at numbers, preparing our console tools for the new pump which was to be installed. I didn't send any commands, but I did take a real, live derivative of a function. (My calculus is a little rusty, but it still works!)
• Saturday noon
  Crew successfully installed the new pump assembly and was headed back to the airlock. We realized that it was just 48 hours since we started the whole thing. I spent more than half of them at work and am amazed how much we accomplished in such a short time. Now we are just waiting to see if that stopped (or at least slowed) the leak so we can keep the loop.
  

Source

 One of my coworkers joked that this scene described the Spartan group on Friday:

Yup, pretty much EVERYONE in my group had a hand in the planning and execution of this amazing feat- planning and executing an EVA in 24 hours. I was on the front lines, but no less than 8 people IMed or emailed to offer whatever help they could provide. And they took the assignments I fired off at them and did them perfectly.  I'm proud to work with so many people dedicated to the manned spaceflight cause.

One other observation: This was made possible not just due to extreme dedication and sleep deprivation by many many Spartans, but due to the amazing powers of the internet. I can't imagine doing everything we did in 48 hours without being able to so easily share all the information we needed. When I went to bed on Thursday night, I woke up 4 hours later to a complete handover from the guys who had just gone to bed a few hours before in my cell phone inbox, information necessary for me to get anything done before they all came back the next morning. Email has truly revolutionized flight control (and our lives in general) and I'm just amazed at what it has enabled us to do.

More info on the spacewalk and state of the ISS can be found:
Spaceflight Now

Previous EVA posts:
A Night in MCC
Another EVA
Pumplemas

A Night in MCC

Today, 2 astronauts suited up and went outside the ISS to perform a spacewalk.

Source

 Today, a procedure that I helped write was executed. We deployed a new radiator and maybe changed the face of the ISS forever.

Source. That's the new radiator on the right, in the back, mid-deploy.

Today I worked a long, exausting, 11-hour shift in ISS Mission Control. I sent about a hundred commands. I commanded rotating joints and power converters. I changed software states and hardware states.

Source. That's a few rotary joints!

 I am lucky I have a job that puts food on the table and a roof over my head. As we say on Passover, "dayenu," which is Hebrew for "it would have been enough."

But I'm luckier than that. I control a laboratory flying 17,000 miles per hour, orbiting 250 miles above our heads. Forget the hours. Forget the stress. This is the coolest job in the world.

Source

I am not just lucky. I'm blessed.

Source

For more info on the EVA:
NASA's Briefing
Spaceflight 101 Coverage
(Disclaimer: Some of the images used here are not from today.  Most of those pictures probably won't be available for a couple of days.)

It's a New World

Early Tuesday morning (2:44 am Central) the private company SpaceX launched an unmanned spacecraft full of cargo to the ISS. SpaceX was given seed money from the government as part of a program to develop commercial spaceflight capabilities. It was a long road for them, including several scrubs over the past few weeks. Spaceflight is not easy, as we seem to have to keep learning, and I am happy to see them finally get off the pad. Read more about their launch here.

Source

This morning the Dragon capsule was grappled (plucked out of empty space, amazingly, while both Dragon and ISS were traveling 17,000 mph, 220 miles above the earth) by the station's robotic arm (read a semi-live-blog from Houston Chronicle here and official NASA coverage here) and will be berthed (attached to another module) in order to allow the astronauts to open it up and take all the cargo out.
From now on we live in a world where a commercial company flies to the ISS. Amazing.

By far my favorite picture of the week:

Dragon launches over Mission Space in Epcot. Source

I do love the confluence of Disney World and space! It's a whole new world. Update: check out video of capture if you missed it live. Truly amazing... http://t.co/GzvQpKzZ

Innovation Day!

Last Wednesday at JSC was Innovation Day. This annual event gives us a chance to see all the cool things going on in other departments at the space center and in other areas of the space industry. 

My department had this interesting mission control experiment set up. A "ground control" team had to watch the Mars lander model heading towards it's landing site while the "crew" had to fire thrusters to guide the lander, without being able to see it.

Ground team relaying instructions to crew.

"Crew" had to build Kinex per ground instructions to "fix" the lander.

They did it! Post it = landing site.

 Other highlights included:

T-38 Training jet. Astronauts fly these to get their flying hours.

Dan taking a look at the cockpit.

Model of the Orion capsule used for ground testing.

Inflatable module prototype, maybe one day will be attached to ISS?

Real-life angry birds! It's Physics.

Gotta kill that pig!

If you're curious how they got that plane into the parking lot, there's a fun article about it here.

Dan and I also did a comm delay experiment. I had the puzzle instructions and he had the puzzle, but there was a 5 second delay when we talked over the headset. It doesn't sound long, but felt like eternity. On ISS and the moon the comm delay to Earth is negligible, but on Mars it's at least 3 minutes each way. Which means if you ask a question, it takes at least 6 minutes to hear the answer! It will definitely change the way we do operations. Even waiting 10 seconds was very hard. We heard that they want to do a comm delay experiment on ISS- even though comm is instant, the capcoms would wait a certain amount of time before answering. I bet it will be agonizing for the crew to wait for the answer... which is entirely the point!

I love to see all the amazing things being done right down the hall or across the lawn that we usually don't get to see. Who knows what we'll see next year!?

Tomorrow morning I fly off to San Jose, CA for a week-long face to face meeting with some software developers we're working with. I know I'll miss Dan and my house... and my kitchen, but there's a lot of work to be done. Plus, switching to Pacific time means I get to sleep in and still get to work at 8am!

Fun with Solar Arrays

Another week on console, another couple of solar array feathering events.

Monday we have a Prop Purge from the Progress. This Progress has been with us since January, and is leaving on Thursday morning.

Source

A Progress is basically a big empty (unmanned) Soyuz. They launch from Kazakhstan full of fuel, food, water, air and other consumables. This one docked to the docking compartment (PIRS) which is on the earth facing (we call that nadir) side of the ISS. We could just say bottom, but really there's no up or down in space so bottom, top, left, and right are irrelevant.

Source

After the Progress docks, astronauts spend some time moving cargo out of the Progress; then before it's time to leave, they spend a bunch more time moving in trash. Before the Progress leaves, whatever extra propellant it has left is transferred to the station tanks. After that, we must vent out the fluid lines safely, to avoid it spraying any which way when the Progress undocks... that's the Prop Purge that we did this morning. Since this involves both propulsive attitude control and contaminants being vented to space, we move the US solar arrays to safe positions where they won't be damaged by the propellant.

What does propulsive attitude control mean? Well, ordinarily we use non-propulsive attitude control- large spinning gyroscopes rotated about an axis. Remember that experiment in high school physics where you spin the bike wheel and try to turn it sideways and it resists? Or when you do that on a chair and the chair spins in the opposite direction.  Or watch the video below, where a spinning wheel resists gravity to stand upright even though its only anchored by the rope to the axle.

These gyroscopes work like that bike wheel to impart forces on the ISS and keep it, essentially, straight. But they are only so powerful. When you vent something, you are subject to Newton's Third Law- every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For example, spraying propellant to the left would cause the ISS to move right, the opposite reaction. These same laws are acting on you when you hold a running garden hose, but other forces (like your weight and the friction between your feet and the floor) keep it from pushing you back. The ISS is just floating there in space, so no friction and no weight are going to help it out. Instead the station's thrusters must act to keep the ISS from moving right. Those thrusters can damage the solar arrays, so we must move the arrays to a safe position.

Source

Thursday morning we will undock this Progress (number 46). It will float away and burn up in the atmosphere, taking our trash with it. Then, a few days later, a new Progress (number 47) will come take it's place. The circle of life.

MCC Update: ATV 3 Docking

Artist rendition of ATV.  Source

Today we are docking ATV 3. The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV)  is a European Space Agency unmanned cargo carrier. They come up, full of food, clothes, water, science payloads, and more. The crew empties them of all these good things, fills them with trash, and sends them off. Since they are unmanned, they do not need to safely return. Instead they burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry... a giant, space-age incinerator. Two have previously visited space station, hence the number 3.

ATV 3 Launch last Friday morning. Source

Dockings of any kind are a busy day for the ISS Mission Control Team. They are considered complex operations and carry a higher level of risk for the station and crew than an average day, running circles around the Earth. In orbit, spacecraft are going extremely fast (ISS goes about 17,000 miles per hour), so you have two fast moving objects coming together in space. Of course, the relative speed (difference between one and the other) should be very small, but that doesn't mean something couldn't go wrong. To be sure that everything is as safe as possible, we do a lot of advance preparations.

At the Spartan console, we have 12 rotating joints: 2 TRRJs in blue (Thermal Radiator Rotary Joint- which move the external cooling radiators to get the best heat rejection angle), 2 SARJs in pink (Solar Alpha Rotary Joint- which move 4 solar arrays each in one dimension) and 8 BGAs in yellow (Beta Gimbal Assembly- which each move a single solar array along a different axis from the SARJ). Between the SARJ and BGA we can point the solar arrays pretty dead on at the sun to maximize power generations.

Source- follow this link for more truss and component details. And an interactive video.

 Well, usually we can point them at the sun. However, when a visiting vehicle like ATV is coming in, we have to park them at specific angles.This is for a couple reasons. We need them to be positioned where the thrusters from either the ISS attitude control system or the ATV attitude control system will not damage the arrays. Thrusters can be powerful and we have concerns both of them breaking the array structure, which could be dangerous to the crew if a broken solar array bit hits a module. We also need to protect them from being eroded by the thruster blast, diminishing their power generation capabilities. We also have concerns called "multipathing"- the communication system of the visiting vehicle works a lot like an aircraft's radar to find the range to the ISS as it is approaching and steer the unmanned craft in. The arrays and radiators are shiny and reflective, which could cause the signal from the vehicle to bounce off and cause the ATV to have no idea where it really is in space. Bad news for docking! Since we position the arrays in what is probably not the best place for power generation, we also have to be concerned with power limitations- some equipment on-board will need to be powered down to ensure we stay within our power generation abilities.
Starting at 10am today (Wednesday), I'll be in mission control, helping to prepare the ISS for ATV 3 docking. You can also watch the docking live on NASA-TV starting at 3:45 CDT or at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/schedule.html.

What I ate Wednesday- MCC Eats

This weekend I worked the evening shifts in Mission Control. I was there on Saturday and Sunday, from 3pm to midnight. Weekend shifts are usually quiet (read: boring), but at any moment something could break and you could spend hours crying fixing it. Also depending on communication satellites, you could have alot of breaks or few to no breaks for bathroom visits or microwaving. Because of this I try to bring an assortment of foods- some that don't need to be heated up, some that are really easy/quick to eat, and some random leftovers or Amy's frozen meals.  I am indecisive like choices, so I bring multiple options. Most days something doesn't get eaten, usually its the yogurt.



Saturday I brought this mega sandwich and tore into it almost right away. Partly because I was hungry, but at least half because it looked so amazing. Hummus, bell pepper, avocado, onion, tomato, and cucumber; inspired by the Mediterranean Veggie sandwich at Panera.

Saturday morning I woke up and did a 4 mile run with my bf/running buddy. I had been planning to make this delicious-looking Spaghetti Squash Mac-less and Cheese from ReadsRecipesRuns so while we were making breakfast, I prepared the squash and popped the cleaned halves it in the oven to roast. After they had roasted and cooled, I followed the recipe almost exactly- I did toss some Italian-style bread crumbs in to the topping. Before packing it up for lunches, I snuck a taste. It was, in fact, delicious! Goat is a good choice because it makes it seem really decadent and creamy without a lot of cheese tossed in... So good, even reheated! This one is definitely a winner!

Here's the giant spread I packed for Sunday:

 Lunch + Snacks + Dinner include: Leftover chicken taco insides (chicken, beans, avocado, pickled onions- aka that purple mess in the middle, and cheese), trusty Diet Coke (never control the Space Station without it), Hummus with pita chips and veggies, hard boiled egg with salt and pepper, and more Mac-less and Cheese.

Demolished. And that's What I Ate... in Mission Control.

Mission Control- the story of overnights

As I've alluded to already, I work in Mission Control for the International Space Station. If you've ever seen Apollo 13, its kinda like that but a little more 2011 than 1969. Instead of old rotary phones and tube screens, we have Linux computers and rows of monitors. Controlling the space station is done not by a joystick, but by packets of computer code sent from the ground computers to the onboard computers telling it to do things. The ISS is up there above your head right now, making 16 orbits around the earth each day, with 3 people (an American, a Russian, and a Japanese crewmember) onboard. Because the ISS is in orbit and manned 247/7, we also must man the control center 24/7. There are about 15 people certified to sit at my console (the electrical power system- we keep the lights on!), so we all rotate through the three shifts a day, week in and week out.
Since there are a bunch of us, I spend some of my time in the office (regular 8am to 5pm hours), pushing paperwork, training newbies, going to meetings etc. But I also spend some of my time on either the overnight shift (11pm to 8am) or the evening shift (3pm to midnight). This week I am working the overnight shift.

As you can probably imagine, switching from a regular workday shift to the overnight is not particularly easy. Because I have office responsibilities during the weeks I'm not on console, I usually only get a day to turn my schedule around.

To shift onto the overnight schedule, I stay up as late as I can the night before (which is like 2am if I'm lucky). I then get a couple hours of shuteye before getting up to do stuff around the house from 6 to 9am. Usually I cook myself a casserole and do other food prep so I'll have easy to pack lunches during the week. When 9am rolls around I take an Ambien and go back to bed for as long as I can. This usually buys me another 6 hours of sleep. Then I get up, often have dinner/breakfast with my bf, sometimes take another nap right before work, and head off to work at 10:30.
Day 1 is ok (that was last night) because I actually get more sleep in the 24 hours before than any other time. Day 2 blows- usually I still only get 6 or so hours that day, but without the benefit of getting some bonus rest the previous night. This Day 2 (tonight) is going to be especially difficult because at 2am the clocks will bounce back to 1am. While you're enjoying your extra hour of sleep, I'll be enjoying an extra hour of overnight shift.

Since this is a fitness blog I'll tell you that overnights are pretty difficult for diet and exercise. For the first couple days I'm hungry during the day when I sleep, and wake up starving. I usually eat dinner for breakfast (which is at dinner time) instead of my usual breakfast of waffles and almond butter. Today this backfired, and my stomach has been kind of upset since starting the night with Chili's chips and queso. I'll eat my casserole at some point tonight, and I brought a couple snacks as well. Then I'll grab a breakfast (cereal or freezer waffles) when I get home before I head back to bed.
As for exercise, on the first few days I just do NOT have the energy to exercise. Sleep shifting takes days, and though I may have had enough sleep (today's 7 hours is not too shabby) my body still does not want to be awake in the middle of the night. I have tried to exercise on previous shifts and really regret it when the 5am crash comes around. Tomorrow (sunday night), day 3, I should be ready for a short run with my bf in the evening. And Monday morning after work I hope to hit yoga after my shift, before bed.

Aside from the negatives of sleep shifting, it really is alot of fun to work in Mission Control. Small failures are like a puzzle or a mystery, to be figured out and fixed. Routine ops can be interesting as well. And though I sit in a windowless room we do have camera downlinks from the external cameras which show the earth sail by below and my shiny golden (actually quite beautiful) solar arrays tracking the sun overhead. That plus 4 sunrises and sunsets a shift is pretty incredible. Here's the view from the Spartan console. I'll explain the Gremlin another day.