Live from space: new HD cameras stream images of Earth from ISS – Video

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Live from space: new HD cameras stream images of Earth from ISS
NASA tested out the new High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) during an experiment Wednesday morning (May 7) from the International Space Station (ISS). See LIVE images here: http://www.ustream.tv/...

By: euronews (in English)

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Live from space: new HD cameras stream images of Earth from ISS - Video

space station — Encyclopedia Britannica

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space station,an artificial structure placed in orbit and having the pressurized enclosure, power, supplies, and environmental systems necessary to support human habitation for extended periods. Depending on its configuration, a space station can serve as a base for a variety of activities. These include observations of the Sun and other astronomical objects, study of Earths resources and environment, military reconnaissance, and long-term investigations of the behaviour of materials and biological systemsincluding human physiology and biochemistryin a state of weightlessness, or microgravity.

Small space stations are launched fully assembled, but larger stations are sent up in modules and assembled in orbit. To make the most efficient use of its carrier vehicles capacity, a space station is launched vacant, and its crew membersand sometimes additional equipmentfollow in separate vehicles. A space stations operation, therefore, requires a transportation system to ferry crews and hardware and to replenish the propellant, air, water, food, and such other items as are consumed during routine operations. Space stations use large panels of solar cells and banks of storage batteries as their source of electrical power. They also employ geostationary relay satellites for continuous communication with mission controllers on the ground and ... (200 of 4,801 words)

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space station -- Encyclopedia Britannica

Sunpower Cryocoolers Delivered to International Space Station

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ATHENS, OH Two CryoTel CT-F cryocoolers, designed and manufactured by Sunpower Inc., Athens, OH, were delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of a SpaceX mission, which docked with the space station on April 20, 2014.The unmanned SpaceX mission, dubbed CRS-3, delivered 5,000 pounds of science experiments, a pair of high-tech legs for Robonaut 2, a high-definition Earth-observing camera suite, a laser communications experiment, spare parts, food, clothing and other supplies.

The Sunpower CryoTel CT-F cryocoolers were incorporated into the General Laboratory Active Cryogenic International Space Station Experiment Refrigerator (GLACIER) from the University of Alabama's (UAB) Birmingham Center for Biophysical Sciences and Engineering. The cryogenic refrigerator is used aboard the ISS to conduct scientific experiments. The current experiment involves protein crystal growth in zero gravity.

The GLACIER refrigerator was developed to provide cryogenic preservation of samples aboard the ISS and to transport cryogenic samples to and from space station. The refrigerator is able to achieve temperatures from 4oC (39oF) to -185oC (-301oF).

Measuring less than two feet on all sides, the refrigerator fits within the stations mid-deck size constraints and is able to support up to 22 pounds of research samples. The GLACIERs sophisticated telemetry capabilities allow NASAs Huntsville Operations Support Center, the Johnson Space Center in Houston and UAB to continually monitor its status aboard the ISS.

Each of the GLACIERs Sunpower CryoTel CT-F cryocoolers has been qualified for 10 launch missions by UAB without any maintenance or requalification needed, enabling NASA to make many return trips with scientific payloads. UAB has successfully launched 16 CryoTel CT-F units to the ISS to date.

Sunpower's high-reliability cryocoolers are suitable for use anywhere liquid nitrogen is used. They provide cryogenic cooling for such applications as radioisotope detection, materials research, high-temperature superconductivity, cryogenic preservation, laser cooling and medical devices.

Sunpower is a unit within AMETEK Advanced Measurerment Technologies (AMT), which is a division of AMETEK, Inc, a leading global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with annual sales of $3.6 billion. More information is available at http://www.sunpower.com

Contact: Jimmy Wader (704) 594-2221, ext. 1071 E-mail: jimmy.wade@ametek.com

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Sunpower Cryocoolers Delivered to International Space Station

Watch gorgeous HD video from the space station

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Earth-o-vision! Live-streaming cameras mounted to the International Space Station are now beaming down an impressive video feed to folks back on Earth.

A peek from the side of the ISS. Video screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET

I know I'll never get a chance to step a floating foot on the International Space Station, but I can at least tap into the spectacular views with a new live-streaming video offering from NASA. The High Definition Earth Viewing experiment involves cameras mounted outside the station. It is fed to all us earthlings on the Ustream website.

The stream was supposed to be up and running a few days back, but ran into some technical difficulties. That has now been resolved, and the video is pouring in. The images are fascinating, showing a silently rotating marble of blue below, mottled with clouds.

Occasionally, the image goes gray, which just means it's switching between cameras. When the image is black, the ISS is on the night side of Earth. All you have to do is wait a little bit for things to lighten back up. There's no audio because, in space, no one can hear you scream. Just kidding, the no-audio is by design. It's quiet out there in space. NASA suggests you make up your own soundtrack.

Off to the side of the video feed is a box that contains a social stream of sometimes entertaining comments by other viewers. You might see someone opine about feeling like Sandra Bullock or welcoming everyone to the dark side when the screen goes black.

The video experiment isn't just for our viewing pleasure. NASA will be keeping an eye on how the space exposure impacts the equipment to help guide decisions on cameras for future missions. No matter the purpose, it's extremely cool to get a continuous astronaut's-eye view of our humble planet from on high.

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Watch gorgeous HD video from the space station

Space Launch System Structural Test Stands To Be Built At Marshall Space Flight Center

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May 7, 2014

By Megan Davidson, NASA

NASAs Space Launch System (SLS) will have the largest cryogenic fuel tanks ever used on a rocket. Stands to test the tanks and other hardware to ensure that these huge structures can withstand the incredible stresses of launch will be built at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

NASA is contracting for the construction of the test stands through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has awarded a $45.3 million contract to Brasfield & Gorrie of Birmingham, Alabama.

SLS will be the most powerful rocket in history and the launch vehicle that will send astronauts in NASAs Orion spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit into the solar system on missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

The test stands will be used for the SLS core stage, which will store cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The core stage is made up of the engine section, liquid hydrogen tank, intertank, liquid oxygen tank and forward skirt. As the five parts of the core stage are manufactured, they will be shipped by barge from NASAs Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to Marshall for testing.

These stands are necessary to accommodate the sheer size of the core stage components, and the extreme loads we are putting on them some up to 9 million pounds, said Tim Gautney, element discipline lead engineer for SLS core stage testing. We will use hydraulic cylinders to push, pull, twist and bend these pieces to make sure they can withstand the loads and environments they may experience on the launch pad and upon ascent. The tests also will verify the models already in place that predict the amount of loads the core stage can endure.

The 215-foot stand, Test Stand 4693, with a twin-tower configuration, will be made with 2,150 tons of steel. It will be used for testing the liquid hydrogen tank, which will be 185 feet when completed. The tank will be placed in the stand vertically, and be loaded with liquid nitrogen for stress testing. It is being built on the foundation of the stand where the Saturn V F-1 engine was tested.

The second test stand, Test Stand 4697, is a 692-ton steel structure about nine stories high, or 85 feet. It will be used to test the liquid oxygen tank and forward skirt in Marshalls West Test Area. Within the foundation of this stand, we have 1.75 miles of embedded anchor rods that gives you an idea of the type of stability we need to test these parts with such high-level force, said Byron Williams, project manager for the liquid oxygen tank and forward skirt test stand.

The estimated year-long construction is expected to begin in late May.

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Space Launch System Structural Test Stands To Be Built At Marshall Space Flight Center

Moment of Truth Nears for Sleepy US Town on Cusp of Space Flight

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Artist Roy Lohr, 69, stands by a sign at his home in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico May 2, 2014.

It's no wonder the lanky 69-year-old embraces the real Spaceport America in his town's backyard, the world's first space base built expressly for commercial launches and soon-to-be site of the first space flights with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic.

"It is hard for locals to realize the impact it is going to have, but it is slow coming and this is a tiny little town," said Lohr. But he has no doubt "things are happening."

The inaugural flight of the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo should take place this year, carrying Branson from the 12,000-foot (3.6 km) runway to suborbital space 65 miles (100 km) from Earth.

"As always, safety will ultimately call the shots, but right now, I'm planning to go to space in 2014!" Branson wrote in an e-mail this week. The first of 600 "astronauts," who have already paid $250,000 for the two-hour-plus flight and some minutes of weightlessness, should follow a month later.

After 10 years of conception and construction at the state-run, taxpayer-funded, $212-million Spaceport, the people of Truth or Consequences, population 6,500, are sensing a shift in confidence as the countdown nears.

While the economic windfall is difficult to estimate for the town that famously renamed itself after a radio quiz show in 1950, most everyone in these parts agrees the Spaceport should inject new energy into the somewhat tattered and totally quirky T or C, as it is known in local parlance.

"There might have been some doubt about how much T or C would be ready for all of this future endeavor," said Cydney Wilkes, who bought and renovated a motel with his wife Val a few years ago and called it, aptly, Rocket Inn.

"I think that in the last few months that shifted ... that maybe we can pull up and measure up," she added, noting that the Virgin team is helping the hospitality industry spiffy up.

There's a new Walmart north of town, next to where a Spaceport visitors center will go up. It is not yet known where Virgin will lodge the astronauts for three days of training. It could choose the bigger town of Las Cruces to the south.

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Moment of Truth Nears for Sleepy US Town on Cusp of Space Flight

Seasteading | Online Only | n+1

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Ephemerisle, 2009. Photo by Liz Henry via flickr.

To get to Ephemerisle, the floating festival of radical self-reliance, I left San Francisco in a rental car and drove east through Oakland, along the California Delta Highway, and onto Route 4. I passed windmill farms, trailer parks, and fields of produce dotted with multicolored Porta Potties. I took an accidental detour around Stockton, a municipality that would soon declare bankruptcy, citing generous public pensions as a main reason for its economic collapse. After rumbling along the gravely path, I reached the edge of the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta. The delta is one of the most dredged, dammed, and government subsidized bodies of water in the region. Its estimated that it provides two-thirds of Californians with their water supply.

At the marina closest to the festival, I spotted a group of Ephemerislers in swimsuits crammed into a dinghy. I approached them, but they were uninterested in small talk: their engine had run out of gas, and the marina was all out, too. They could give me a ride, they said, if I tracked down fuel. I contemplated the sad marina, its shabby rental boats, the murky water. Almost an hour had passed when the festivals ferry service showed up. At around noon, six of us took off in a small motorboat, speeding past Venice Island, a private sliver of land where Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton hotel fortune, hunts ducks and puts on an annual July 4th firework display. Five minutes later, Ephemerisle came into sight, bobbing gently in an area called the Mandeville Tip.

It looked, at first, like a shapeless pile of floating junk, but as the boat drew closer, a sense of order emerged. The island was made up of two rows of houseboats, anchored about a hundred feet apart, with a smaller cluster of boats and yachts set off to the west. The boats had been bound together with planks, barrels, cleats, and ropes, assembled ad-hoc by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of knots and anchors. Residents decorated their decks with banners and flags and tied kayaks and inflatable toys off the sides, giving the overall landscape the cephalopodan quality of raver pants. Dirty socks and plastic dishes and iPads and iPhones littered the decks. An enormous sound system blasted dance music, it turned out, at all hours of the day.

Each of the two-dozen boats at the party had a nameBayesian Conspiracy, Snuggly Nemo, Magic Carpet, Mini-ocracyand each name a personality to match, conveyed by the resident boaters choice of drug, beverage, or degree of exhibitionism. When I arrived, the Ephemerislers were partying in various stages of undress. They had been encouraged to make the space their own, to mind their own business, and to do as they pleased. This was, after all, a celebration of the laissez-faire lifean escape from the oppressive, rule-bound grind of dry land. In this suspended, provisional unreality, everybody was a planner, an economist, a designer, a king. Attendees were ready for everything the elements had in store, but knew escape was just a few clicks away, should the experiment go terribly wrong.

It is apparently a coincidence that Ephemerisles location shared a name with the 16th-century proto-libertarian philosopher Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville Tip is a breezy point in the middle of the Delta, flanked by levees and a short boat ride away from a former county park. Its named after a 19th-century Californian politician, J. W. Mandeville, but the more well-known Mandeville, of the Fable of the Bees, had much in common with Ephemerisles freewheeling spirit. The Fables most famous lines, cited by Keynes, come from Mandevilles poem entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turnd Honest, which argues that allowing private vices makes for good public policy. Bare Virtue cant make Nations live / In Splendor; they, that would revive / A Golden Age, must be as free / For Acorns, as for Honesty, concludes Mandeville, after bemoaning the unhappiness and lack of prosperity the bees experience while living in a more wholesome, regulated hive. Ephemerisle was its own little beehive of decadence, a floating pillow fort saturated in sex and soft drugs. It billed itself as a gathering of people interested in the possibility of permanent experimental ocean communities, but felt more like Burning Man, if Burners frolicked in the tears of Ludwig Von Mises.

Ephemerisle got its libertarian streak from its founders: the event was originally conceived of by the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit that supports the creation of thousands of floating city-states in international waters. After overseeing the first Ephemerisle in 2009, the Institute handed over responsibility for the festival to the community in 2010it turns out a raucous floating party costs too much for a tiny think tank to insureand last year, the group consisted of 300 amateur boaters, intoxicated partiers, and a committed clan of Seasteaders.

Seasteaders made up about a quarter of Ephemerisles attendees. If they took the operation somewhat more seriously than the young Californians who came just to party and build things, its because they dream of a day when theyll have their pick of floating city-states to live on, work from, and eventually abandon in favor of a different platform when they get bored. Borrowing from the lexicon of evolution, the Seasteaders say that a Cambrian explosion of these new countries will bring about greater freedom of choice for individuals, stimulate competition between existing governments, and provide blank nation-slates for experiments in governance. Ephemerisle is supposed to distill the ambitious project into a weekend that would give people the direct experience of political autonomy. It combines its political ambitions with appeals to back-to-the-land survivalism, off-the-grid drug use, and a vague nostalgia for water parks. There are no tickets, no central organizers, no rules, no rangers to keep you safe, reads the Ephemerisle mission statement. Its a new adventure into an alien environment, with discoveries, adventures, and mishaps along the way.

I was dropped off on the North neighborhoodthe most raucous of the threewhich, in addition to a row of houseboats, had a big platform serving as a communal front yard. One of the boats had pirated a radio station, Radio FMerisle. Other boats had tents pitched on their roofs to accommodate boatless hangers-on. It was a vision straight out of Neal Stephensons cult sci-fi novel Snow Crash (1992), which turned out to be one of the most influential texts in the Seasteading communitybeloved for its dystopian portrayals of life in a virtual, post-statist society. Small pleasure craft, sampans, junk, dhows, dinghies, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam, wrote Stephenson two decades ago, describing an itinerant flotilla full of refugees called The Raft. A good fifty percent of it isnt real boat material at all, just a garble of ropes, cables, planks, nets, and other debris tied together on top of whatever kind of flotsam was handy.

As I hopped from boat to boat and onto the platform, I noticed many of the men in attendance had sparkly turquoise polish on their grubby toenails. On one of the houseboats, a body-painting session was in full swing, but the hot California sun quickly reduced the painted swirls to an eczemic crust. Within minutes, I overheard an endless stream of conversations about start-ups, incubators, hackerspaces and apps. Naked bodies ambled by. While looking for a bathroom, I walked in on a couple having sex in a houseboats aft cabin.

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Seasteading | Online Only | n+1

Guingamp's Mustapha Diallo sees red for head clash with Monaco's Jeremy Toulalan

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Diallo and Toulalan appear to compete for 50-50 ball Monaco man was knocked out by the challenge Referee saw fit to send Guingamp striker off for challenge

By Paul Collins

Published: 17:24 EST, 7 May 2014 | Updated: 18:16 EST, 7 May 2014

Guingamps Mustapha Diallo seemed to be hard done to when he saw red for what looked like a 50-50 clash of heads with Monaco's Jeremy Toulalan.

The Senegalese international looked to be going for the ball and in doing so clashed heads with the French defender.

Pain game: Monaco's Jeremy Toulalan reacts after his head injury

Seeing red: French referee Stephane Lannoy shows Diallo a red card

Heads up: Mustapha Diallo and Jeremy Toulalan compete for the ball

Clash of heads: Diallo and Toulalan go for the ball

Ouch: Toulalan ends up out cold after the challenge

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Guingamp's Mustapha Diallo sees red for head clash with Monaco's Jeremy Toulalan