A group of U.S. Navy divers, Air Force pararescuemen and Coast Guard rescue swimmers are practicing Orion underway recovery techniques this week in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to prepare for the first test flight of an uncrewed Orion spacecraft with the agency’s Space Launch System rocket during …
Multi-Purpose Small Payload Rack (MSPR) Combustion Chamber Adapter Plate Attachment: FE-5 installed the Combustion Chamber adapter plate in the MSPR Work Volume. Next week, the crew will be installing and with ground support, initiating the Group Combustion experiment. The Group Combustion investigation tests a theory that fuel sprays change from partial to group combustion as …
The United States and Russia are working to get a pair of cargo ships ready for a mid-October launch schedule to the International Space Station. While the new shipments are being processed, the Expedition 49 crew conducted eye checks, wore carbon dioxide monitors and prepared for a fuel combustion experiment. The U.S. company Orbital ATK …
By Eric Lindstrom The R/V Revelle expedition has been the opening round in a yearlong effort to understand the upper ocean physical processes in the eastern tropical Pacific. We put moorings in place to collect a time series of upper ocean measurements over the year. We launched the first round of Lagrangian drifters and floats. […]
Field campaigns are hectic. Everyone is always thinking ahead to the next flight, rarely taking the opportunity to experience the, often times, incredible location they are operating from. ORACLES has been no exception. On September 10, the ER-2 joined the P-3 in the sky, measuring aerosols and clouds from above. Since then, it has been […]
Japanese Experiment Module Airlock (JEMAL) Repressurization: This morning, FE-5 initiated a repress of the JEMAL then performed a leak check of the airlock. Later this week, the crew will remove the NRCSD from the airlock. Water Monitoring Suite – Microbial Monitoring System (WMS – MMS): FE-6 began operations with the MMS subset of the WMS …
By Alek Petty Hello and welcome to my new blog. I’m Alek Petty, a sea ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, currently making my way to the northern coast of Canada (a small town called Kugluktuk) to embark on the 2016 Joint Ocean Ice Study (JOIS) – a research expedition around the Arctic […]
By Eric Lindstrom A six-week voyage on the open ocean is not for everyone. On this trip we had plenty of veterans and few first timers. Channel fever is commonly considered something that happens at the end of a voyage as you head for port. It is maybe easier for those of you ashore to […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The September 2016 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be […]
