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>> With us today here
in the flight control room is a gentleman
by the name of Tom Erkenswick.
A very familiar face and name in operations here
in the flight control room.
He is one of the visiting vehicle officers whose post is a
console in the very back row here in Mission Control.
Tom is one of the experts of course
in Russian vehicle operations.
And Tom is with us today.
He is the lead Visiting Vehicle Officer
for this Progress activity.
Tom, first and foremost the Progress almost 24 hours
into its mission.
How are all of its systems operating?
>> All of the systems are nominal.
We had a good launch yesterday.
Good test of several
of the onboard systems yesterday as well.
And two rendezvous burns and all is nominal.
>> So the Progress, unlike recent Progress
and Soyuz vehicles that took a fast track of one day,
six orbit journey to the International Space Station
over a six-hour period.
This one is going to prolong its journey.
A slow trek to the Station
with an interim flyby scheduled for Wednesday.
What is all that about?
Explain this flyby, the rationale
for it, and what's involved.
>> Sure. So this particular Progress has a new rendezvous
radar system.
It's an upgrade to their Kurs systems,
which provides the rendezvous radar.
And they wanted to do a test of it by flying by Station
and testing that system and interacting
with its counterpart system on the Station called Kurs Passive.
So on Wednesday the Progress will do a flyby about one
and half kilometers to the starboard of the Station.
And they'll turn on both systems both on the Progress
and the Station and allow them to interact,
record all of that telemetry,
and then check it out on the ground.
That will all happen Wednesday.
They'll do the check out of the data overnight and on
in the day Thursday to make sure they're happy
with how it's operating.
And then they'll come back and rendezvous again
and do the docking on Friday.
>> The Kurs system has been used year in and year
out by the Russians on both their progress
and on their Soyuz man vehicles, what is the impetus here?
The rationale for the Russians moving to an upgraded system.
>> There are a couple of reasons.
The first part is that the parts for the old system are not
as easily available anymore
because it has been used for a long time.
More importantly by invoking a new system it provides some
power savings and some mass savings, which then, you know,
correlate into additional cargo they can carry up.
So what they'll do is they'll replace the avionics.
And that's what they did in this particular vehicle to test it.
They'll replace the avionics box inside the Progress
and also several of the antennas on the outside.
So when you see video or pictures of the outside
of the Progress you'll notice they're actually only three
of these Kurs antennas on the outside of the vehicle instead
of what used to be six.
That will allow them, in particular, with one antenna
that is out on the front of the progress, it used to stick
out beyond the docking interface.
Now the new antenna no longer does that.
So you no longer have to worry about retracting
that antenna before docking.
So there are several benefits of that type.
>> So the Progress will fly underneath the Station I presume
at a distance of about one statute mile
or as you said about 1.6 kilometers.
Then what?
Johannes Kepler takes over and it's all orbital mechanics
to bring it back around a couple days after that?
>> Actually it requires a set of maneuvers.
And actually the flyby will be
about 400 meters below the Station and about one
and a half kilometers or one statute mile actually
to the starboard side of the Station.
That's just the geometry
of the trajectory they use for their flyby.
About three orbits after that flyby they'll do a couple
of maneuvers to basically stop phasing away from Station.
That will put them out about 500 kilometers
in front of the Station.
They'll stay their overnight.
They'll do another maneuver the next day
to come back towards station and set up for the re-rendezvous
and docking on Friday.
>> And the docking will be to the aft port
of the Zvezda Service Module once again putting four Russian
vehicles at the Station keeping not only you
but your colleagues busy here at the Johnson Space Center
and over at the Russian Mission Control Center in Korolyov.
How do you interact with the Russian Flight Control Team
over there to make sure that all of your data is synced
up for the information that our Flight Control needs as well
as the Russian Flight Control Team?
>> Well, as with all the visiting vehicles,
a lot of the work is done preflight.
So there is a lot of work that is done in advance in order
to set up all of our data exchange,
what type of reports we need to make to each other to make
that overall process work well.
In this case we'll basically have our standard data exchange
with our Russian colleagues.
We'll talk to them about how well did the test go,
how well are their systems working, and basically
in this case we'll just do it twice.
We'll do it once on Wednesday during the flyby and then again
on Friday for the docking itself.
So in that case it's basically just repeating the same
process twice.
>> And Tom, just going back for a second
to the expedited rendezvous that has become sort
of a staple item now this year through process
and Soyuz missions, it's the started four orbit,
six-hour approach from launch to docking to the Space Station
which has a great deal of benefit for the crews
on board particularly for the Soyuz vehicles.
The coordination for that, to find that sweet spot,
the right day in which to launch a vehicle out of Balkonur
so it can make that fast track rendezvous to the station,
how complex is all of that?
>> It is pretty complex.
It involves very detailed planning of the ISS trajectory
to support that four orbit rendezvous
which is done primarily by our [inaudible] colleagues
and their Russian colleagues on the ballistic team.
So, yeah, it requires quite of a lot of advance planning
to make sure that the ISS trajectory meets all
of the requirements in order for the Progress to get there
in just four orbits as opposed to two days
which was the old standard or, for example, what we're doing
with this progress where it's going to be four days total.
>> And that four orbit rendezvous
to the International Space Station supplanted this week
by a four-day rendezvous
by the progress resupply ship to the complex.
Tom Erkenswick, Visiting Vehicle Officer,
thanks very much for joining us today.
>> Thanks for having me.
[ Silence ]