Slept magnificently. About 11 hours. Got up with a faint residual headache that soon passed. During the night I felt my stomach — probably mild gastritis.
Until lunch, we prepared for experiments. We hardly talk. But the moment we started working, we were talking. When I began the EFO experiment, Tolya floated up: “Let’s do it together.” We worked well. Recorded three stars passing through the atmosphere: Beta Cygni, Vega, and Altair. Here you really feel the payoff: study deeply on the ground, learn all the subtleties, and up here it’s easy. I’m fully confident in my capabilities and will find my footing in any situation. I just need time.
Today, during the X-ray spectrometer sky scan, the attitude engines were in the third mode — six engines simultaneously on yaw and pitch, four on roll. You can hear them pounding, with dull impacts through the station hull. I wanted to switch to an economical mode. Can’t do it through program shutdown — that would ruin the experiment. We analyzed and found a path — through the main engine ignition command, without entering the conditions needed for its actual firing. The scanning immediately became smoother.
On comm I asked the ground how to transition from third to second mode without shutting down dynamics. They answer: only through program shutdown. But that ruins the experiment. Ten minutes later they confirmed our approach.
The water surface in the coastal zone is a mosaic of intertwined air and ocean currents. Its color depends on wind erosion, bottom relief, depths, bottom sediment, shallow vegetation coloring, plankton, suspended particles, and Sun angle. I recall reading in some articles that cosmonauts had seen from orbit an individual house…, a ship at sea…, a bus racing along a highway… Is this possible? Let’s see.
The human eye’s resolving power with good vision reaches 0.3-1 arc minutes depending on contrast, allowing distinction of objects about 100 meters in size from 350 km altitude — and seeing ships, especially large buildings. Under certain atmospheric, lighting, and shadow conditions, smaller objects may be visible, but seeing a car, let alone identifying it as a bus, with the naked eye is impossible. I don’t exclude that rare atmospheric conditions over certain areas could make the atmosphere act as a lens, but I haven’t observed this.
For linear objects like roads and pipelines, resolution is even higher — down to a few arc seconds, about 10 meters. This is because the eye, repeatedly crossing a linear feature, tracks it and picks it out from the background. The human eye distinguishes thousands of color shades and combinations. That’s why visual observations have value.
Today I saw ring structures in Nigeria, like plaques of mountain rock — about ten of them. Photographed them. Beautiful Earth. Nature is not only a magnificent craftsman but also an artist.