Loredana Bessone, designer of the CAVES course and responsible for special skills and exploration training at EAC writes about the preparation dry runs which took place in June:

Last Friday we were officially declared “GO” for CAVES 2013. The official minutes state “The board members are impressed by the excellent status of the course preparation …”

We’re back for more than two months now from that beautiful island of Sardinia which hosts ESA’s CAVES course. We were all there. I mean the CAVES staff. One would think that after having run the course twice, everything is settled and we just need to run it through again and again.

It would be great, other than we would not have a chance to spend a week in Sardinia’s Supramonte. But heck, there is really a lot to prepare!

First of all, we had a few new entries in the team, and they need to be integrated and trained on their roles: Alessio, Diego and Germano sneaked their way in and were coached throughout.

The science programme this year is excitingly new. We’ll be monitoring a whole new set of parameters, looking for life in a much more targeted way, and especially we have now ISS procedures for all activities. And all needs to be tested and verified, as it’s done for ISS, only we can go “onboard” the cave for testing. We also checked out the Cave sniper, which will give us 3D survey maps of the cave in a fraction of the time, speeding up the exploration and providing a much better resolution.

And then we checked all riggings in the areas explored in the last two years, and identified areas where we want science to occur. Stefan, our microbiologist, was able for the first time to visit the places where his samples were taken in the past. With Diego he visited a non-tourist cave for the first time, and they slept in it too (Diego strategically placed some rocks on his side just in case he would roll during sleep, which does not sound funny unless you saw the edge of the cliff a few meters away). Training them allowed to also review the lessons and the sequence in which training will occur. When CAVES starts, everything shall work as a Swiss clockwork, every bolt in the machinery needs to move along in synch.

Diego installed and tested with major hick-ups the IT infrastructure for CAVES2013. It’s going to be a major help for the team when that finally works: we want to be able to share with you pictures and videos of the event on a daily basis.

We also took a video of the educational experiment that Paolo prepared for us: Catch that bug! We hope plenty of schools will repeat the experiment with the astronauts in September. We want to see your videos, it’s going to be exciting!

Loredana BessoneI already said it, we were in the Sardinian Supramonte: home of the ESA outdoor training since that 2004, when I flew with Paolo Nespoli over those valleys with a helicopter, to check the areas for a potential course. It’s great to have Paolo onboard in CAVES 2013. He’s been one of the promoters of ESA outdoor courses (although CAVES technically is not such an outdoor course).

We did not have lot of free time during the June dry runs, but once the frenzy of the day was over, at night, it was wonderful to think that unless you took a car and drove it for 20 minutes on an unpaved road, all around there was us, the sheep, and the stars. It felt like home. It always does.