At night I got up twice for Korund — alarms indicated a malfunction. But in the morning Mission Control reviewed the telemetry and said everything went normally — the crystal was grown.

All day I feel like sleeping. We worked on preparing the launch of the second student satellite from the Moscow Aviation Institute, Iskra-3, and shot several footage segments in the process. During filming we nearly had a serious incident — the airflow carried the satellite close to the lamp, and the satellite is covered with tiny solar cell elements. Luckily, we smelled the burning glue in time. Fortunately, it all turned out fine. The satellite’s unique feature is that it’s not hermetically sealed, and its instruments operate directly in open space, that is, in vacuum, which imposes strict requirements on the hardware.

We’re traveling along the terminator. I look at the Earth — to the left of our flight path it’s in a lilac twilight with faintly pinkish clouds, and to the right the matte whiteness of its surface with a smooth blue horizon that gradually fades into the blackness of space. Right now the sunsets and sunrises are astonishingly beautiful, with almost no shadow. I’m trying to photograph them.

Today’s flight program already included an hour for stowing return equipment in the ship. I went into the transport ship, sat in the seat, and imagined how we’ll go down for landing. There’s a lot of work right now. A lot of handheld equipment remains on the station that needs to be carefully secured and stowed somewhere, so that before the next occupants arrive it won’t be floating around the station but will be right there in plain sight and ready to use.

In the transfer compartment, the docking unit from our ship is floating around — an expensive piece — which we removed since after undocking we won’t need it anymore, and the crew after us will have the opportunity to return it to Earth in the descent module of the new cargo ship that will come to them.