Day off — symbolic. Slept badly, fell asleep around three in the morning, woke at 11:30 and dozed until one in the afternoon. Got up and decided to install the radio-telemetry transmitters in their proper places, since our first set failed long ago.

When we replaced them, we had connected them with cable adapters, and it’s unpleasant when things are dangling and not in their place. I wore myself out, but managed to get them into the regular mounts. Now the station is in the same condition as when we received it. Afterward the ground peppered us with questions about how we managed it and whether they’re really installed the way the documentation shows, because the designers had considered replacement impossible — the instruments behind the panels are packed too tightly.

During the day we worked on preparing Piramig, calibrating film with different filters.

We observed the eastern coast of South America. Near Cape Horn there’s a strip of plankton about 80 kilometers wide and roughly a thousand long. Here it has an unusual violet color, even a bluish-violet. I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere else.

We used to live by the milestones of the other crews’ long-duration flights, but now those are behind us and we’re setting our own. A week goes by — good, then the next. Right now we live in hope of the last cargo ship’s arrival in early November, and after that it’s the home stretch — one month left.

I observed an interesting structure on the western coast of Africa opposite the Canary Islands — a set of different colored rings, like a child’s stacking toy. In the center a yellow spot, then a gray circle, then a ring of dark rock, all wrapped in spirals of red-yellow sand. I checked the catalog. It turns out this is the well-known Richat ring structure in Mauritania. The rings are sedimentary rocks of different composition, uplifted here into a dome by magmatic rock pushing up from below. Then time did its work — the dome eroded, and the resistant layers emerged as colorful ring ridges and scarps on the Earth’s surface, visible only from space.