André in Sokol suit (credit: ESA/NASA)
The three International Space Station crewmembers, André Kuipers, Oleg Kononenko and Don Pettit, donned their Russian Sokol spacesuits yesterday afternoon and performed a so-called ‘fit-check’ of their personalised body-contoured seats inside their TMA-03M/29S spacecraft.
Dressed in their Sokol suits they sat in their tailormade shock-absorbing seats and used a ruler to measure the gap between the top of the head and the top edge of the seat. The Kazbek-U seats are designed to withstand g-loads during launch and orbital insertion as well as during reentry and brake-rocket-assisted landing.
Each seat has two positions: cocked (armed) and non-cocked. In the cocked position, they are raised to allow the shock absorbers to function during touchdown. The fit check is needed because their bodies will have gained in height during their long stay in zero-G, and they need to check that they will still be adequately protected by the seat liners for their touchdown in Kazakhstan. Their return to Earth is scheduled for 1 July.
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