Prime (Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Artemyev, Stephen Swanson) and back-up (Alexander Samokutyaev, Elena Serova, Barry Wilmore) crews go on with their examination session.
In course of the session cosmonauts and astronauts practice every stage of the space flight from launch to the landing.

Last week crew commanders A.Skvortsov and A. Samokutyaev successfully finished their trainings on Teleoperator simulator. The special simulator of remote approaching and docking control is designed to prepare the crews for manual approaching and docking with such unmanned vehicles as Progress cargo vehicle, add-on modules, ATV cargo vehicle, etc.) We remind that crew members successfully passed examination on docking with ATV on February 6. Despite the fact that unmanned vehicles dock with the ISS in automatic mode (but in case of off-nominal situation the cosmonauts perform manual docking), the cosmonauts have practice manual docking skills.

The crew successfully coped with this task and showed high professionalism.
Russian crew members started new week with exam on manual approaching and redocking of the ISS and Soyuz TMA-M manned vehicle. On Don-Soyuz simulator cosmonauts successfully coped with the task showing high quality of work.

Skvortsov, Artemyev, Samokutyaev and Serova have already passed the exam on TS-18 simulator. This simulator based on TSF-18 centrifuge is designed for practicing spacecraft re-entry in the manual mode in case of automatics failure. In such situation the cosmonauts have to be prepared for emergency actions. Besides the cosmonauts were set a task to land as close as possible to the precalculated position of landing being exposed to minimum g-loads at the same time. According to examination commission the cosmonauts demonstrated great professionalism at this maneuver. At the close of the week the crews passed exams of manual approaching of Soyuz TMA-M with the ISS and successfully meet all the challenges.

Image credit – Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center