New Status: Multi-purpose Small Payload Rack (MSPR) Combustion Chamber (CC) Leak Check: Flight Engineer (FE)-3 Cassidy successfully performed the final portion of the MSPR CC leak check today. He conducted a positive pressure check, which was the third and final required leak check for the Combustion Chamber. Last week he completed the a nitrogen gas supply …
New Status: High Beta Angle: The ISS is at a high beta angle this week and as a result the team has been managing power and thermal requirements across the systems. The Ku-band antenna in particular has been parked several times as it neared low temperature limits, with minimal impacts to operations until today. Today, the Ku-band …
New Status: Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV)-4 Launch: ATV-4 Albert Einstein launched today at 4:52 p.m. CDT from Kourou, French Guiana. Solar array and antenna deployment occurred at 6:28 p.m. CDT. The docking of ATV4 to the ISS Service Module Aft is scheduled for next Saturday, June 15 at 8:46 a.m. CDT. Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) Mesh Cover-Return Grille …
As an undergraduate (from February 2008 to May 2009), I worked for Dan Ceynar, the engineer who coordinates the instrumentation networks for the Iowa Flood Center, and a large part of my job then and since returning to the Iowa Flood Center last October has been taking care of our rain gauges in the field. […]
The following is a guest post from Erin Jones (pictured above), the scientific outreach lead for the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at Goddard Space Flight Center. As a graduate student at Purdue University, she used to chase tornadoes. June 2, 2013, started as most Sundays do. My alarm went off; I got out of […]
New Status: Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) R&R: Flight Engineer (FE)-5 Parmitano and FE-6 Nyberg removed the expired TOCA Protoflight Unit (PFU1) from the Water Recovery System (WRS) 1 rack face and installed a new TOCA PFU2. Nyberg then conducted a WRS sample analysis, recorded the data and transferred it to the …
New Status: 35 Soyuz (35S) Crew Handover: Flight Engineer (FE)-3 Cassidy continued handover with the 35S crewmembers FE-5 Parmitano and FE-6 Nyberg including on-orbit practices and lessons learned related to ISS systems and payloads. They also reviewed topics that are not limited to a particular module or scheduled activity as well as those that are usually …
Vijay Mishra and I went to do a maintenance check yesterday on one of the 4 X-band radars that the University of Iowa is contributing to the IFloodS field campaign. Below is a photo of the radar, located at a topographical high point near Elkader, Iowa. The X-band radar has a panoramic view of part […]
The Landsat Data Continuity Mission is now Landsat 8, and that means images are now public (woohoo!). NASA handed control of the satellite to the USGS yesterday (May 30, 2013), and calibrated imagery is available through the Earth Explorer. Unfortunately, the Earth Explorer interface is a bit of a pain, so I’ve put together a […]
