The Cygnus spacecraft is targeted to launch atop an Antares rocket Oct. 13 from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. NASA and Orbital ATK officials successfully completed a flight readiness review and are working towards an Oct. 11 roll out of the vehicle to the launch pad. This will be the sixth cargo mission to …
The Expedition 49 crew is getting ready for the mid-October arrival of the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft. The trio is also exploring human research and setting up a student Earth observation experiment. First-time astronauts Kate Rubins and Takuya Onishi are brushing up on the robotic capture techniques necessary to grapple the Cygnus cargo craft. The …
Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle Schools (EarthKam) Set Up: ISS CDR set up the Sally Ride EarthKam equipment in the Node 2 window which begins a week-long imaging session. The objective of Sally Ride EarthKam is to integrate Earth images with inquiry-based learning to enhance curricula in support of national and state education …
In the United States, we say “it’s raining cats and dogs” when we get a heavy downpour. In South Africa, it rains “women with clubs.” In Slovakia, a good soak means “tractors are falling.” World languages brim with rainy day idioms. But when it comes to describing copious amounts of wet stuff, meteorologists do not […]
By Alek Petty After five days of cruising through open water, it was clear we had to change course and venture further north to find ice. The satellite imagery was showing ice above 76-77 degrees North (we were around 74 degrees North), and the ice edge didn’t seem to be drifting south at any real […]
ENERGY (Astronaut’s Energy Requirement for Long-Term Space Flight): Today, FE-5 continued with Day 2 of the 11 day ENERGY experiment. The second day activities include the consumption of a standardized breakfast, continued diet logging, continued wear of the Armband Activity Monitor, double labeled water intake, oxygen uptake measurements, and urine collection. FE-6, as the control …
September was a busy month on the International Space Station filled with a wide variety of space research, a spacewalk, a crew departure and a test of the new BEAM module. One science highlight this month includes a new experiment that may improve how medicine works. This week, astronaut Kate Rubins tested the endurance of …
September 22, 2016 Light rain this morning in Svalbard, but we soon took off and left the clouds behind for bluer skies. Today’s plan was ambitious since ice cover was present at almost every drop point. Ice conditions ranged from loosely packed sea ice, to thick sheets with just a few cracks, to fast ice with no […]
Group Combustion Module (GCM) Installation: FE-5 continued with the third day of installation and preparation for the GCM experiment and was to perform two pressure decay leak checks. After the first check, a leak was detected in the Air/O2 line, thus aborting the second check until specialist can determine the cause and develop a solution. …
