RS Extravehicular Activity (EVA) #56: During preparations for today’s Russian EVA, both the primary and backup cooling pumps on EV1’s Orlan showed unstable behavior. After unsuccessful attempts at troubleshooting, the EVA has been cancelled. The European Robotic Arm (ERA) has been returned to its stowed configuration, and the crew and ground teams are backing out of the …
NASA Awards Phantom Launch Services Task Order for CSLI Mission
NASA has awarded Phantom Space Corp. four task orders to launch four CubeSat Launch Initiative missions as part of the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract. The CubeSats will launch no earlier than 2024 on Phantom’s Daytona rocket. Building on NASA’s previous procurement efforts to foster development of new launch …
Roscosmos Spacewalk Postponed
Today’s spacewalk with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin was postponed due to an issue with the water coolant system pump on Prokopyev’s Orlan spacesuit. The team is in the process of returning onboard systems to a nominal configuration. The duo, with assistance from European robotic arm operator Anna Kikina of Roscosmos, were slated …
Artemis I – Flight Day Nine: Orion One Day Away from Distant Retrograde Insertion
Orion is now about one day away from entering into a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. The orbit is “distant” in the sense that it’s at a high altitude approximately 50,000 miles from the surface of the Moon. Due to the distance, the orbit is so large that it will take the spacecraft six …
Artemis I – Flight Day Eight: Orion Exits the Lunar Sphere Of Influence
On the eighth day of its mission, Orion continues to travel farther away from the Moon as it prepares to enter a distant retrograde orbit. The orbit is “distant” in the sense that it’s at a high altitude from the surface of the Moon, and it’s “retrograde” because Orion will travel around the Moon opposite …
ISS Daily Summary Report – 11/23/2022
Payloads: ISS Ham Pass: The crew participated in an ISS Ham pass with Five Bridges Junior High School, Stillwater Lake, Nova Scotia, Canada. Some of the questions asked by the students included if the ISS crew works in different shifts, what will replace the ISS in low Earth orbit if it is retired in 2030, …
Crew Goes into Thanksgiving with Spacewalk and Dragon Preps
Four Expedition 68 astronauts will relax on Thanksgiving day as three cosmonauts continue preparing for a spacewalk on Friday. The International Space Station residents are also expecting a space delivery this weekend bringing new roll-out solar arrays and science experiments. Three NASA astronauts and one astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spent Wednesday …
Artemis I – Flight Day Eight Update: Unexpected Loss of Communication with Orion is Restored
NASA’s Mission Control Center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston unexpectedly lost data to and from the spacecraft at 12:09 a.m. CST for 47 minutes while reconfiguring the communication link between Orion and Deep Space Network overnight. The reconfiguration has been conducted successfully several times in the last few days, and the team …
Artemis I – Flight Day Seven: Orion to Test Search Acquire and Track Mode, Exit Lunar Sphere of Influence
The Orion spacecraft is now on its seventh day into the Artemis I mission, a flight test around the Moon, paving the way for astronauts to fly on future missions. At 12:02 a.m. CST, Orion completed the fifth outbound trajectory correction by firing the European service module’s auxiliary engines for 5.9 seconds, which changed Orion’s …