Blogs

Our first destination in Potrillo was Kilbourne Hole, a maar crater that was formed about 16,000 to 24,000 years ago. It’s an irregular hole measuring about 1-1/2 miles by 2 miles. Kilbourne is thought to be the result of a steam explosion that occurred when hot magma encountered shallow groundwater. The result was excavation of […]

USOS Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) #47:  Today, Mark Vande Hei (as EV1) and Scott Tingle (as EV2) successfully completed USOS EVA #47 with a Phased Elapsed Time (PET) of 7 hrs 24 min. The primary goal of the EVA was to swap the Latching End Effector (LEE) from the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) …

Expedition 54 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle of NASA completed the first spacewalk this year at 2:13 p.m. EST, lasting 7 hours, 24 minutes. The two astronauts replaced a Latching End Effector (LEE) on the station’s robotic arm, Canadarm2. There are two redundant end effectors on each end of the arm used to grapple …

Tom and I have returned to McMurdo Station! Our traverse is complete, our gear has been stored for next season, and we are ready to head north to warmer climates. But in the meantime, we are awaiting our flight to Christchurch, New Zealand, at Antarctica’s largest research station. McMurdo is one of three permanent US research stations in Antarctica. […]

Your challenge for the January 2018 satellite puzzler is to use the comments section to tell us what we are looking at, when the image was acquired, and why the scene is interesting.

Light Microscopy Module (LMM) Petri Plants Plate Operations: Over the weekend, the crew used the light meter in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) to take light intensity measurements before transporting the plates to the Lab to photograph the plates with and without lids.  Plants cultivated in microgravity look mostly normal, but space-grown plants have a …

Vascular Echo: After completing the Cardiolab (CDL) blood pressure measurement earlier this week, today the 53S subject performed the Vascular Echo Exercise Portable Doppler (PDOP) measurement with ground team assistance. Using the CDL PDOP, the crewmember donned the PDOP femoral probe and performed a 1-minute exercise followed by a resting period during which data was …

The International Space Station has been orbiting Earth for 7,000 days as of today Friday, Jan. 19, 2018. The first module, the Russian Zarya cargo module, launched to space in November of 1998. The first crew arrived at the young three-module orbital laboratory in November of 2000. 54 crews and 205 spacewalks later, the current …

NASA’s new deep space exploration systems will send crew 40,000 miles beyond the Moon, and return them safely home. After traveling through space at 25,000 miles per hour, the Orion spacecraft will slow to 300 mph after it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere. The spacecraft then slows down to 20 mph before it safely splashes …