Blogs

As many of you probably heard, there was an 8.2-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Northern Chile on Tuesday night. As with any earthquake around a coastal region or on the ocean floor, there is a concern about the formation of a tsunami. However, the wave height (the height from the base of the wave at the water line to the top of the wave) in the deep, open ocean is very small, maybe a few feet tall. As you can imagine, a boat or ship in the open ocean wouldn’t even notice such a tiny wave.

Conjunction with Object #35758 Status: Ground teams received updated tracking data for a possible conjunction with Object #35758. The conjunction is of high concern and ground controllers will be tracking it throughout the evening.  If a debris avoidance maneuver is needed, a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM) would be executed at approximately 3:42pm CDT on …

Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) Advance Recycle Filter Tank Assembly (ARFTA) Change Out and Shock:  Commander (CDR) Wakata and Flight Enginer (FE)-3 Swanson removed ARFTA serial number (S/N) 1 and installed S/N 2.  Swanson then started a series of activities to shock ARFTA S/N 2 using pretreated water from the Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC).  The …

Dust off your telescope and prepare for a spectacular viewing opportunity of Mars in the night sky. The Earth will fly between the sun and Mars on April 8, 2014, and, for the several weeks around that time, Mars will be rising in the east when the sun is setting in the west. Mars will …

By Ludovic Brucker Kulusuk, 29 March 2014 — For our deployment to the field, we need two flights to bring our scientific equipment and camping gear. As mentioned in our previous post, we decided to avoid being on the ice sheet while the third storm system of the week affects the area. However, thanks to […]

By Clément Miège Kulusuk, 26 March 2014 — “Opa” is a Greenlandic word for “maybe”, as we learned it this morning while talking to Danish guests at the hotel Kulusuk who have been stuck for a few days due to bad weather. To give you a little bit of background, the southeastern part of Greenland […]

X2R12.1 Software Transition:  Today the ground team completed the X2R12.1 software update that was started on Saturday.  All activities were successfully performed and the system is back in nominal configuration.  The X2R12.1 software update provides enhancements to the following Multiplexer/Demultiplexer (MDM)s: External (EXT), Internal (INT), Payload (PL), Lab (LA)-3, Starboard Thermal Radiator (STR), Port Thermal …

I thought the March Puzzler would be an easy one, but it turned out to be one of the more difficult we’ve posted. As explained in our March 29, 2014, Image of the Day, the image shows Nalabana Bird Sanctuary in India’s Chilika Lake. Despite more than 50 guesses on Earth Matters and 500 on Facebook, […]

At approximately 60° South and 174° East the FSG members sampled their first official station of the field campaign. The objective of the Climate Variability and Predictability of the ocean-atmosphere system, or CLIVAR, program is to understand this dynamic coupling and model future ocean-atmosphere variability by collecting and analyzing ship-based global observations.