Mark Shuttleworth: No problems in Houston today. We spent the morning learning about some
of the software that is installed on the US laptops in the ISS. The
software is designed to help the astronauts coordinate their day, and
their equipment.
The first piece of software tracks timetabling for the crew. It gives
each crew member a day plan, together with supplemental information such
as day/night times, S-band, Ku-band and Russian comms, procedures,
equipment manifests etc. This makes it a lot easier to know what to do
when. We'll probably use this in combination with a PDA to tell me when
to prepare for comms slots, when to be ready for camera work and earth
observation, and when to setup and work on the science experiments.
The second piece of software, though, is a bit of a 'mare. It's the
equipment tracking software, and it's supposed to keep track of every
plug, cap, adapter, wire, bolt, ration, camera, lens, etc on the
station. There are 16,000 items in the database, the station is nearly
100m long and packed with storage cabins, each of which is packed with
STUFF. So losing track of something is very easy. In theory, this piece
of software is supposed to tell us exactly where to find something, or
where to put something. Everything that we move has to be logged in
here.
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