Cygnus arrival at space station delayed again

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Sep. 23, 2013 at 1:07 PM ET

Orbital Sciences Corp.

An artist's rendering of the Cygnus spacecraft.

The first arrival of a brand-new commercial cargo ship at the International Space Station has been delayed until no earlier than Saturday to make way for a new crew launching to the orbiting lab this week, NASA officials say.

The unmanned Cygnus spacecraft built by Orbital Sciences Corp. which launched into orbit on Sept. 18 was initially expected to link up with the station on Sunday (Sept. 22), but a software glitch forced controllers to abort the arrival and wait at least 48 hours for the next attempt.

Today, NASA and Orbital officials said the supply ship will not arrive at the space station until Saturday, in part because a new station crew Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy and NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins is launching to the orbiting lab Wednesday on a Russian Soyuz capsule. [See photos of Orbital Sciences' 1st Cygnus spacecraft flight]

"This new schedule will allow the Orbital operations team to carefully plan and be well-rested before restarting the critical final approach to the space station," Frank Culbertson, Orbital's executive vice president and general manager of its advanced programs group, said in a statement. "Meanwhile, Cygnus has all the resources needed to remain in orbit for an extended period of time."

Orbital's Cygnus spacecraft team has now tested software to fix the software glitch that prevented the attempted rendezvous with the space station on Sunday. Because of extra time needed for that troubleshooting, as well as the impending Soyuz launch and docking on Wednesday, the team opted to push the Cygnus arrival at the station until the weekend at earliest, company officials said.

Officials with NASA and Orbital Sciences do not have an exact timeframe for Cygnus' approach and rendezvous yet, but once Soyuz operations are complete the space agency and private firm will develop a schedule.

The now-Saturday rendezvous will mark the first time a Cygnus capsule has visited the space station. The spacecraft is designed to be captured by the astronauts using the station's robotic arm, and then attached to an open docking port. The current mission is a demonstration flight to show that Cygnus and its Antares rocket can safely haul supplies to the $100 billion outpost. Orbital Sciences holds a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to fly eight missions with Cygnus and Antares.

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Cygnus arrival at space station delayed again

Space Station Astronaut Demonstrates the COLBERT Treadmill | NASA Science Video – Video

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Space Station Astronaut Demonstrates the COLBERT Treadmill | NASA Science Video
Visit my website at http://www.junglejoel.com - Expedition 37 flight engineer Karen Nyberg demonstrates how astronauts use the COLBERT treadmill in the weigh...

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Space Station Astronaut Demonstrates the COLBERT Treadmill | NASA Science Video - Video

NASA's Hubble and Chandra Find Evidence for Densest Nearby Galaxy

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 -- NASA issued the following news release:

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory and telescopes on the ground may have found the most crowded galaxy in our part of the universe.

The ultra-compact dwarf galaxy, known as M60-UCD1, is packed with an extraordinary number of stars and may be the densest galaxy near Earth. It is providing astronomers with clues to its intriguing past and its role in the galactic evolutionary chain.

M60-UCD1, estimated to be about 10 billion years old, is near the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, also called M60, about 54 million light years from Earth. It is the most luminous known galaxy of its type and one of the most massive, weighing 200 million times more than our sun, based on observations with the W.M. Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.

What makes M60-UCD1 so remarkable is that about half of this mass is found within a radius of only about 80 light years. The density of stars is about 15,000 times greater -- meaning the stars are about 25 times closer to each other -- than in Earth's neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy.

"Traveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxy, but it would still take hundreds of years using present technology," said Jay Strader of Michigan State University in Lansing. Strader is the lead author of a paper about the research, which was published Sept. 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The 6.5-meter Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona was used to study the amount of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in stars in M60-UCD1. The values were found to be similar to our sun.

"The abundance of heavy elements in this galaxy makes it a fertile environment for planets and, potentially, for life to form," said co-author Anil Seth of the University of Utah.

Another intriguing aspect of M60-UCD1 is the presence of a bright X-ray source in its center, revealed in Chandra data. One explanation for this source is a giant black hole weighing in at about 10 million times the mass of our sun.

Astronomers want to find out whether M60-UCD1 was born as a jam-packed star cluster or became more compact as stars were ripped away from it. Large black holes are not found in star clusters, so if the X-ray source is in fact due to a massive black hole, it was likely produced by collisions between M60-UCD1 and one or more nearby galaxies. M60-UCD1's great mass and the abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are also arguments for the theory it is the remnant of a much larger galaxy.

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NASA's Hubble and Chandra Find Evidence for Densest Nearby Galaxy

12 NASA Explorer Schools Receive Honor Awards and Grants

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NASA has recognized 12 NASA Explorer Schools from 11 U.S. states for their contributions to science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) education in the 2012-2013 school year.

All 12 schools will receive a NASA certificate of recognition that includes an American flag that was flown in space. Six of the 12 also submitted successful proposals to a recent NASA Explorer Schools solicitation and will receive a $5,000 grant to help implement a STEM project in their classrooms by April 2014.

The schools identified as leaders in STEM education and selected to receive a NASA Explorer Schools Honor Award are:

Forest Lake Technology Magnet, Columbia, S.C. Academy of Information Technology and Engineering, Stamford, Conn. Woodrow Wilson Middle School, Glendale, Calif. Mack Benn Jr. Elementary School, Suffolk, Va. Franke Park Elementary School, Fort Wayne, Ind. Ferndale Middle School, High Point, N.C.

The six schools also receiving a $5,000 grant are:

Cardinal Gibbons High School, Raleigh, N.C. Northland Preparatory Academy, Flagstaff, Ariz. Stoney Creek High School, Rochester Hills, Mich. St. Marys Visitation School, Elm Grove, Wis. Corpus Christi Catholic School, Chambersburg, Pa. Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Germantown, Tenn.

"Congratulations to the 2012-2013 honor award and grant winners," said Diane DeTroye, NASA's director of STEM engagement in Washington. "By using NASA educational resources, innovative teachers brought new approaches to their classrooms to engage their students in STEM studies."

A team of NASA education professionals selected these 12 schools for their exemplary classroom practices and innovative uses of NASA educational content to engage a broad school population in STEM activities.

The NASA Explorer Schools project infuses STEM content related to the agency's missions and programs into classroom lessons for students in grades 4-12.

For more information about NASA Explorer Schools visit: http://explorerschools.nasa.gov

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12 NASA Explorer Schools Receive Honor Awards and Grants

NASA and Homeland Security Test Radar for Locating Disaster Victims

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NASA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are collaborating on a first-of-its-kind portable radar device to detect the heartbeats and breathing patterns of victims trapped in large piles of rubble resulting from a disaster.

The prototype technology, called Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response (FINDER) can locate individuals buried as deep as 30 feet (about 9 meters) in crushed materials, hidden behind 20 feet (about 6 meters) of solid concrete, and from a distance of 100 feet (about 30 meters) in open spaces.

Developed in conjunction with Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, FINDER is based on remote-sensing radar technology developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., to monitor the location of spacecraft JPL manages for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

"FINDER is bringing NASA technology that explores other planets to the effort to save lives on ours," said Mason Peck, chief technologist for NASA, and principal advisor on technology policy and programs. "This is a prime example of intergovernmental collaboration and expertise that has a direct benefit to the American taxpayer."

The technology was demonstrated to the media Wednesday at the DHS's Virginia Task Force 1 Training Facility in Lorton, Va. Media participated in demonstrations that featured the device locating volunteers hiding under heaps of debris. FINDER also will be tested further by the Federal Emergency Management Agency this year and next.

"The ultimate goal of FINDER is to help emergency responders efficiently rescue victims of disasters," said John Price, program manager for the First Responders Group in Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate in Washington. "The technology has the potential to quickly identify the presence of living victims, allowing rescue workers to more precisely deploy their limited resources."

The technology works by beaming microwave radar signals into the piles of debris and analyzing the patterns of signals that bounce back. NASA's Deep Space Network regularly uses similar radar technology to locate spacecraft. A light wave is sent to a spacecraft, and the time it takes for the signal to get back reveals how far away the spacecraft is. This technique is used for science research, too. For example, the Deep Space Network monitors the location of the Cassini mission's orbit around Saturn to learn about the ringed planet's internal structure.

"Detecting small motions from the victim's heartbeat and breathing from a distance uses the same kind of signal processing as detecting the small changes in motion of spacecraft like Cassini as it orbits Saturn," said James Lux, task manager for FINDER at JPL.

In disaster scenarios, the use of radar signals can be particularly complex. Earthquakes and tornadoes produce twisted and shattered wreckage, such that any radar signals bouncing back from these piles are tangled and hard to decipher. JPL's expertise in data processing helped with this challenge. Advanced algorithms isolate the tiny signals from a person's moving chest by filtering out other signals, such as those from moving trees and animals.

Similar technology has potential applications in NASA's future human missions to space habitats. The astronauts' vital signs could be monitored without the need for wires.

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NASA and Homeland Security Test Radar for Locating Disaster Victims