Station maintenance and repair day (TOR). Whatever you say, our home is a complex technical structure with a multitude of onboard systems and hundreds of instruments that work automatically under the control of Mission Control and the crew, providing us with living conditions much like on Earth, but with certain differences — weightlessness and, through the portholes, the panorama of the Earth’s surface racing past. The station’s equipment runs around the clock, maintaining comfortable conditions on board — temperature, humidity, and air purity — and protecting us from fire and depressurization through monitoring and warning systems. Naturally, in this household of instruments and assemblies in various life-support circuits, failures and deviations happen; automation protects us from many of these by switching to backups or shutting down, but deeper diagnostics, repairs, and troubleshooting still fall to the crew with the ground’s assistance.

That’s why our program includes TOR days. Today an issue cropped up that the ground flagged from thermal regulation system (TRS) telemetry — the coolant temperature in the station’s cooling circuit isn’t staying within the set range. To fix it, we found a cable adapter in the spares kit, disconnected connectors behind a side panel, and installed the adapter into the coolant flow regulator control circuit, then reconfigured it. We ran test checks of the TRS, and after analyzing the telemetry, the ground confirmed everything is now normal.

Today I woke up at 9 o’clock. My mood was poor; the headache has passed. After the repair work we ran several sessions of the “Piramig” experiment. It went well. I talked Tolya into bending the rules in the radiogram and placing “Piramig” on the MKF porthole for the experiment, since it’s the cleanest.

In orbital orientation, when you look through the porthole — beneath your feet, in the station’s floor — our altitude of 380 km doesn’t register; the sensation is as if you’re looking through an airplane window.

Only the picture of the Earth, like an artificial simulation in the form of a bright large-scale color map, races beneath you. At 15 hours 44 minutes 08 seconds, approaching Ireland, to the right at roughly 250 km I noticed a small greenish plankton patch about 20 km across. In the English Channel, in the sun glint on its leaden water, a large number of ships are visible. An interesting, lively picture. Their wakes are like arrows or whiskers, as from water striders in a stream. Took a photograph.

On the ascending leg of the 5th daily orbit, passing through the Red Sea and the Bosporus, the fault stretching from the Red Sea northward along the Gulf of Aqaba, the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, along the Lebanon Range, and further north to the foot of the Turkish Taurus is clearly visible.

In the evening we talked with Viktor Savinykh. He asked us: how are the visual observations, have you settled in? We answered that the work is interesting but we lack hands, tools, and time. We’re gaining experience in geology now, looking at the ocean. It’s pointless to try to grab everything up here. He asks: and astrophysics? I answered that these experiments are a passion of mine since my first flight. Then he told us that the article we co-authored about astrophysical research on “Soyuz-13” with the “Orion-2” telescope will soon be published in the journal of the Moscow Institute of Geodesy and Cartography.

Before bed we jettisoned the waste container and I wanted to watch it drift away, but didn’t make it in time. On the next orbit, passing over South America, I look down at the Earth and suddenly, below us, against the passing landscape through gaps in the clouds, something silvery flashes, like a fighter jet. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, then I say to Tolya: “Look, I see a satellite.” We took a closer look, and it flew alongside us for quite a while. I examined it through the “Puma” sight with magnification — it turned out to be our waste container, like a bright star with four narrow glinting rays.

Today we went to bed late, and tomorrow we’re up at 7 AM. In short, there’s more to do than hours in the day, but it puts the mind at ease. I switched the systems to nighttime standby and floated through the station to sleep; I peeked into a porthole — we’re passing the yellow coast of northwestern Africa, and nearby are the Canary Islands; I counted five of them.