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. …
BEAM, the new expandable module attached to the International Space Station, was opened up today for tests and equipment checks. The Expedition 49 crew also explored eating right in space, adapting to new technology and studied a variety of other life science and physics research. Flight Engineer Kate Rubins opened up and entered the Bigelow …
Tropical Storm Julia made headlines in September 2016, but not in the usual way. It wasn’t a particularly strong or destructive storm, although it brought heavy rainfall to coastal areas of the eastern United States from Florida to Virginia. The unusual aspect was where it formed: Julia became a tropical storm while over land, not […]
Marangoni Experiment (Dynamic Surf 3): Overnight another run of the Marangoni experiment occurred in the Fluid Physics Experiment Facility (FPEF). The Dynamic Surf investigation is part of a series of JAXA experiments studying Marangoni convection driven by the presence of surface tension gradients produced by a temperature difference at a liquid/gas interface. By observing and …
The three Expedition 49 crew members measured noise levels on the International Space Station today and continued exploring how physical and organic phenomena are affected by weightlessness. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins surveyed the acoustic environment inside the station today. She analyzed the sound levels of various life support gear and took standard measurements in the …
