International Space Station Program managers met Sunday and gave approval for a contingency spacewalk no earlier than Tuesday by two Expedition 51 crewmembers to change out a multiplexer-demultiplexer (MDM) data relay box on the S0 truss that failed on Saturday morning. The cause of the MDM failure is not known. A final decision on a …
International Space Station managers will meet Sunday morning to discuss a forward plan for dealing with the apparent failure of one of two fully redundant multiplexer-demultiplexer (MDM) data relay boxes on the S0 truss of the complex. External MDM-1 apparently failed at 1:13 p.m. Central time Saturday. Multiple attempts by flight controllers to restore power …
Fluid Shifts: A 50S crewmember performed their Flight Day (FD) 180 Fluid Shifts Chibis operations in the Russian Segment. They donned the Lower Body Negative Pressure (LBNP/Chibis) device while the operator, with ground support in Moscow, assisted in the medical monitoring. While the subject was in the LBNP and experiencing the negative pressure (pulling the …
In 2012, Arctic sea ice extent was unusually low in September. New research suggests that may have contributed to a bad haze outbreak in China the next winter.
Expedition 51 is wrapping up a week of ongoing research into how living in space affects an astronaut’s brain and vision. The International Space Station also boosted its orbit ahead of crew and cargo missions coming and going in June. NASA astronaut Jack Fischer strapped himself in a device for the NeuroMapping experiment today that …
NanoRack Cubesat Deployer (NRCSD) #11 Deploy: The final six CubeSats for NRCSD #11 were deployed today from the ISS: Aerosat, Link, CSUNSat, UpSat, SpaceCube and Hoopoe. CSUNSAT was developed at California State University Northridge (CSUN) in partnership with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It is being used to validate in space a new low temperature …
The week’s final set of CubeSats were deployed today from outside the Japanese Kibo lab module’s airlock. Inside the International Space Station, the Expedition 51 crew continued exploring microgravity’s effects on muscles, bone cells and vision. Over a dozen CubeSats were ejected into Earth orbit this week outside the Kibo module to study Earth and …
The CubeSats that make up NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative ELaNa 17 mission have begun their research in earnest. All three have been dispatched in orbit from the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer on the International Space Station. Orbiting on their own on separate paths, the individual spacecraft will relay data to researchers on Earth as they conduct …
NanoRack Cubesat Deployer (NRCSD) #11 Deploy: Five Cubesats were deployed today from the ISS: Phoenix, Xcubesat, Qbee, Altair and SHARC. ALTAIR is a technology demonstration / risk reduction mission for critical subsystems for the ALTAIR product line of spacecraft. SHARC (Spacecraft for High Accuracy Radar Calibration) hosts a series of experimental payloads including a C-band …
What is a LLAMA? It’s a Line Load Attenuation Mechanism Assembly, designed by Jeremy Parr, a mechanical design engineer in the Engineering Directorate at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He designed the LLAMA to help U.S. Navy line handlers retrieve the Orion crew module after it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean. Parr is …
