Curate, connect, and discover
Yeah, we had to troubleshoot problems pretty much every day. So, we have our tasks that we’re doing every day: a science experiment or some maintenance, but things don’t always go as planned. So that’s one of the really interesting things about science experiments is that sometimes you observe things that are different and that’s how science gets done.
One of the experiments I worked on was actually doing a chemical reaction with some small little pockets of–they’re plastic kind of tubes that contain pockets of water. And we heated the reaction and we noticed that there were bubbles being formed. When we did this reaction on Earth we didn’t have the same thing, so we had no idea was to expect when we did this on board. So we documented this and actually found it to be a really interesting phenomenon. The scientists took that back and that ended up being part of our analysis of the experiment.
Sometimes you’re just troubleshooting equipment because things aren’t working. So I was working on one of the vacuum furnaces one day, and it has these quick disconnects that you can use to supply power or water to the vacuum furnace. And I tried to do one of the quick disconnects and all of a sudden the connection–the valve–stayed full open and there was water spreading everywhere.
So that was some really quick troubleshooting, I had water going in my face and I wasn’t really sure what to do so I closed the thing as quickly as possible, backed off, got the water out of my eyes, and then I called the ground and we did a lot of troubleshooting that day.
Have you ever had to troubleshoot a problem in space?