We got up late, around 11 o’clock. Overslept. We turned on Delta, and it immediately began dynamics per the program, and we started orienting. After establishing gravitational orientation at shadow entry, we took several frames of zodiacal light with the PSN camera. Then we turned the entire station upside down. For Delta, we needed a cable adapter to assemble the circuit, and I remembered putting it into the Poza equipment bag, on the science instrument compartment, when Lyosha, Sasha, and Sveta were departing from us, and later stowed it behind a panel so as not to lose it.
Having received the radiogram for this work, I pulled the cable from memory and thought we were all set. When the time came to assemble the circuit, I looked — and the connector didn’t fit. I checked the cable markings, and it was that No. 2541, but not the right one — the sub-number was different. What to do? Only 3 hours left before instrument activation. It wasn’t registered in the inventory log, and since that was the case, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I couldn’t find it. The station was already a mess of floating bags, sacks, open panels. I looked around — no Tolya. Peeked behind the science instrument compartment — and he was taking apart the waste management hoses. “Tolya, we need to assemble the circuit, and the cable is missing, the experiment starts soon. What do we do?” He says, I don’t know where it is. And I don’t either, but we have to search. About two hours later, I see him floating over with it. In general, I have to say, Tolya has a real nose for finding lost things. We assembled the circuit linking the Puma optical sight with the Delta system, installing additional cable adapters between the units. Now we’ll have the ability to autonomously determine our spatial position without the ground. For this, I aim the Puma sight at a pair of known stars and feed the reading into Delta, then input their coordinates from the control panel. From that moment, the system knows the station’s axis orientation in space, and we can now slew to any point on the celestial sphere or on Earth by simply entering its coordinates into the computer. About nine years ago, after my flight on Soyuz-13 on the astrophysics program with the Orion-2 telescope, I dreamed of such a capability — transitioning from one star to another automatically, without the ground. And now I proposed this methodology, and it has been realized.
On comm with us is Volodya Alekseev. We hadn’t heard him for almost 2 months. The second wave of vacationers has passed, which means we’ve been flying for a long time already. Saw Greece — an indented peninsula, Athens, beautiful water, straits, many islands, and in the distance — the yellowish-red plateau of Africa.
They asked us what we could say about the sketch paintings by Sokolov that had been sent to us. I replied: “The scale needs to be finer, the way we see it. No need to draw in details. The colors are less bright, but the dividing lines between shore and sea, mountains and steppe, are more contrasting.
Then it all depends on the time of day: in the evening, the water in oceans and seas is black, in the morning whitish, during the day blue. When the Sun is low, you can see many streaks on the surface from currents, wind erosion — ripples that, glinting like fish scales, change their coloring. Near the shores, the water is green from vegetation, and farther out, but not everywhere, there’s a yellow strip of shallows transitioning into the blue expanse of the ocean.
Rivers should be drawn with their floodplains and delta deposits. On land, the patchwork of fields shouldn’t be drawn in — their scale is finer and gets overwhelmed by the landscape, otherwise it looks like a quilt of colored scraps. Earth’s horizon is whitish, then a layer of blue, and above it the sharply defined boundary of space — but not like in the painting.”