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| Cristoforetti on her first full day - Credit: NASA, ESA |
----- Logbook L+1 ------
For now, I will tell you of one moment, which was so fortunate and unexpected. You know, when you fly to the Space Station in the Soyuz, unless you are the Commander sitting in the center seat, you can only see your destination from far away in the black and white camera view (the same image that is transmitted to Mission Control and usually shown during media coverage of docking).
As a left-or right seater, you only have a side view and there’s no way to see the Station until you’re really close and parts of it start coming in your field of you. Before the flight, previous Soyuz fliers had reminded me to start looking for the Space Station in the side window in the last part of the approach and so I did: but I wasn’t prepared in the least for what I saw when we were at about 30-40 meters.
I had released my shoulder straps quite a bit at that point, so I was floating over my seat. As I turned to look outside, at first I looked back and saw one of our Soyuz solar panels, which I had seen before of course. Then my eyes caught something in the peripheral view. And as I slowly turned my gaze and when I realized what I was seeing, I was overcome by pure amazement and joy: the Space Station was there, but not just any view. The huge solar panels were flooded in a blaze of orange light, vivid, warm almost alien. I couldn’t help exclaiming something aloud, which you can probably hear in the recordings of our docking, since at that point we were “hot mic” with Mission Control. Anton reminded me of that and so I tried to contain my amazement and return to the docking monitoring. When I peaked again later, the orange glow was gone.
----- End of Excerpt -----
Be sure to read Logbook: L+2 as well. She talks about her first full day experience. It is quite enlightening.
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