Blogs

Life on an oceanographic research vessel is definitely different than daily life ashore.

Routine—and not-so-routine—housekeeping duties continue for Expedition 53 aboard the International Space Station in preparation for an upcoming Orbital ATK 8 (OA-8) commercial launch targeted for Nov. 11. The crewmates prepared the Permanent Multipurpose Module rack fronts to accept cargo by moving smaller items off and staging them for disposal. During OA-8 cargo operations, the items …

Sally Ride Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students (EarthKAM) Node 2 Lens Change: The crew configured the D2X camera for EarthKAM with the 180mm lens. EarthKAM allows thousands of students to photograph and examine Earth from a space crew’s perspective. Using the Internet, the students control a special digital camera mounted on-board the International …

Eric Lindstrom passed up rocks and geology to pursue oceanography, a path that ultimately landed him at NASA.

Gathering detailed information on the temperature, salinity, and turbulence structure in the upper meter of the ocean is notoriously difficult to do directly from a ship.

Microbial Tracking-2:  The crew collected body and saliva samples in support of the Microbial Tracking-2 investigation today. The Microbial Tracking series-2 continues the monitoring of the types of microbes that are present on the International Space Station (ISS). It seeks to catalog and characterize potential disease-causing microorganisms aboard the ISS. The crew samples from pre-flight, …

Astronaut Energy Requirements for Long-Term Space Flight (Energy): Over the weekend a 51S crewmember completed day 5 and 6 activities of the 11-day Energy experiment run. Today the subject performed day 7 activities by logging their food and drink consumptions throughout the day. The Energy investigation is conducted over an 11 day period (day 0 …

The Expedition 53 crew capped off last week’s investigations with fresh pickings of lettuce, cabbage and mizuna harvested from the Veg-03 investigation. There’s still some left, though, for the remainder of the vegetation will be allowed to grow and sprout new leaves. Since future long-duration explorers will expected to grow their own food to survive …

Every month on the Earth Matters blog, we offer a puzzling satellite image.