NASA Television to Air Space Station Soyuz Landing

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WASHINGTON -- NASA Television will provide live coverage May 12-14 as three crew members aboard the International Space Station end five months in orbit and return to Earth for a scheduled landing May 13.

Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, Tom Marshburn of NASA and Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will undock their Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft from the station at 7:08 p.m. EDT May 13, heading for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan southeast of Dzhezkazgan at 10:31 p.m. (8:31 a.m. Kazakh time, May 14). They will have spent 146 days in space since their Dec. 19 launch from Kazakhstan.

Undocking will mark the official start of Expedition 36 under the command of Pavel Vinogradov of Roscosmos. Vinogradov and his crewmates, Chris Cassidy of NASA and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, will tend to the station as a three-person crew for two weeks until the arrival of three new crew members, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.

NASA TV coverage will begin Sunday, May 12, with the change of command ceremony between Hadfield and Vinogradov. Coverage will continue May 13 and 14 with Expedition 35 landing and post-landing activities.

NASA TV's full coverage schedule is as follows (all times EDT):

Sunday, May 12: 3:40 p.m. -- Expedition 35/36 change of command ceremony

Monday, May 13: 3:30 p.m. -- Farewells and hatch closure (hatch closure scheduled at 3:50 p.m.) 6:45 p.m. -- Undocking (undocking scheduled at 7:08 p.m.) 9:15 p.m. -- Deorbit burn and landing (deorbit burn scheduled at 9:37 p.m., landing scheduled at 10:31 p.m.) Midnight --Video file of hatch closure, undocking and landing activities

Tuesday, May 14: Noon -- Video file of post-landing activities and interviews

For NASA TV schedule and video streaming information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For information on the International Space Station or the Expedition 35 crew, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

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NASA Television to Air Space Station Soyuz Landing

Space Station Is Big Step Toward Mars, Astronaut Says

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A NASA astronaut sees his work aboard the International Space Station as a means of bringing humanity a little closer to setting foot on Mars.

During a 25-minute webcast Tuesday (May 7), members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportations Subcommittee on Science and Space asked NASA's Tom Marshburn to delve into the science, downtime and other parts of life on the space station.

"I believe I'm living and working in the first Mars vehicle," Marshburn said during the event. "Everything that we've learned here is going to be used, and needs to be used, in the next generation of [space-traveling] vehicles." [The Boldest Mars Missions of All Time]

For example, understanding how to recycle resources efficiently in Earth orbit could lead to life-support systems that help send astronauts to Mars or farther out into the solar system, Marshburn said.

Life in space also changes the perspective of people living on the International Space Station, Marshburn added.

"I wish every head of state around the world could come see our Earth from the cupola," Marshburn said of the Earth-observing glass structure on the bottom of the station. "It's a 360-degree view ... I've found that I've fallen in love with the Earth again. It's almost impossible to pull your eyes away from it."

Although looking out the window is one of Marshburn's favorite pastimes on the station, crewmembers are usually too busy to stare back at Earth during their work hours, he said.

Marshburn told members of the subcommittee that his days in orbit are filled with science. The astronauts are responsible for conducting more than 100 experiments on the orbiting laboratory.

"What surprised me was that how busy and vibrant life and the work here is on the space station," Marshburn said. "The space station is a hard place to go to sleep. There's a lot going on up here. There's so much going on up here that it's hard to stop."

But it isn't all work and no play for the astronauts.

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Space Station Is Big Step Toward Mars, Astronaut Says

Saturn’s North Pole Hurricane – Close Up View | NASA JPL Space Science HD Video – Video

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Saturn #39;s North Pole Hurricane - Close Up View | NASA JPL Space Science HD Video
Visit my website at http://www.junglejoel.com - close up view inside of Saturn #39;s mysterious polar hexagon - showing an enormous hurricane. Please rate and co...

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Saturn's North Pole Hurricane - Close Up View | NASA JPL Space Science HD Video - Video

PICS: Nasa Captures Strange 'Blue Clouds' Above The Marshall Islands

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Nasa photographer John Grant has captured a strange sight above the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

The odd blue clouds look like a unique aurora hanging in the sky - and at first glance it's easy to think it could be evidence of a UFO, or some other strange phenomenon.

Fortunately for our sense of reality, it's neither of those things.

In fact the picture was taken shortly after the launch of two sounding rockets launched from Roi Namur on 7 May.

The rockets are part of an attempt to study how winds and electrical activity works in the upper atmosphere.

The white-blue cloud was made by the release of trimethyl aluminium, while the red cloud above it was made by lithium vapour.

These chemicals were released intentionally to help study how the winds in the ionosphere - known as neutral winds - work.

Universe Today has more details on the experiment - but some of the other best clouds captured by Nasa's cameras are copied below.

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PICS: Nasa Captures Strange 'Blue Clouds' Above The Marshall Islands

NASA and Amateur Radio Operators Piece Together the PhoneSat Picture

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Although the ultimate goal of the PhoneSat mission was to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space, the three miniature satellites (named Alexander, Graham and Bell) also took pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations on Earth. Above photo was taken by the PhoneSat-1 (Bell) nanosatellite and reconstructed by the Ames Phonesat Team and multiple amateur radio operators around the world. Image credit: NASA Ames

For about one week, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to reconstruct an image of Earth sent to them from three smartphones in orbit. The joint effort was part of NASA's nanosatellite mission, called PhoneSat, which launched on Sunday, April 21, 2013 aboard the Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia.

Although the ultimate goal of the PhoneSat mission was to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space, the three miniature satellites used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations. Every packet held a small piece of "the big picture." As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur ham radio operators, who call themselves "hams," pieced together a high-resolution photograph from the tiny data packets.

"During the short time the spacecraft were in orbit, we were able to demonstrate the smartphones' ability to act as satellites in the space environment," said Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA's Small Satellite Technology Program. "The PhoneSat project also provided an opportunity for NASA to collaborate with its space enthusiasts. Amateur radio operators from every continent but Antarctica contributed in capturing the data packets we needed to piece together the smartphones' image of Earth from space."

As part of their preparation for space, the smartphones were outfitted with a low-powered transmitter operating in the amateur radio band. They sent the image information to awaiting hams who worked with the Ames engineers to stitch together multiple, tiny images to restore the complete Earth view.

Piecing together the photo was a very successful collaboration between NASA's PhoneSat team and volunteer amateur ham radio operators around the world. NASA researchers and hams working together was an excellent example of Citizen Science, or crowd-sourced science, which is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. On the second day of the mission, the Ames team had received over 200 packets from amateur radio operators.

"Three days into the mission we already had received more than 300 data packets," said Alberto Guillen Salas, an engineer at Ames and a member of the PhoneSat team. "About 200 of the data packets were contributed by the global community and the remaining packets were received from members of our team with the help of the Ames Amateur Radio Club station, NA6MF."

The mission successfully ended Saturday, April 27, 2013, after predicted atmospheric drag caused the PhoneSats to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up.

"The NASA PhoneSat Team would like to acknowledge how grateful we are to the amateur radio community for contributing to the success of this mission," said Oriol Tintore, an engineer and a member of the PhoneSat Team at Ames who participated in the picture data processing.

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NASA and Amateur Radio Operators Piece Together the PhoneSat Picture

NASA rover studies ice sheet

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WASHINGTON (dpa) - A NASA rover was due to begin roaming the frigid landscape of Greenland next week, collecting data to help scientists better understand changes in the massive ice sheet, an agency spokeswoman said Friday.

The robot carries what NASA described as "ground-penetrating radar" to study how snow accumulates layer by layer to form the ice sheet, the agency said.

For the past six months NASA's Mars rover has made headlines with its exploration of the surface of the Red Planet since landing there in August. The rover on Greenland has been nicknamed GROVER - an acronym that stands for Greenland (or Goddard) Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research.

Scientists expect GROVER to detect the layer of the ice sheet that formed in the aftermath of an extreme melt that took place last summer when higher-than-normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet, NASA said in a news release.

"Robots like GROVER will give us a new tool for glaciology studies," said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and science advisor on the project.

GROVER was developed by teams of students at summer engineering intensive study camps at Goddard. A second robot called Cool Robot and developed at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire will join it in June bringing more instruments to conduct glaciological and atmospheric sampling.

The robot is powered entirely by solar energy panels that collect energy from the sun and sunlight reflected off the ice sheet. Its ground-penetrating radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.

GROVER will start exploring at a spot where the ice sheet is about 3 kilometres thick. From there it will crawl at an average speed of 2 kilometers per hour. The exploration is scheduled to last through June 8.

Research with polar rovers costs less than aircraft or satellites, which are the conventional methods for exploring such environments.

Initially, Koenig's team will communicate with the robot via Wi-Fi. The researchers eventually will switch to satellite communications.

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NASA rover studies ice sheet

NASA satellite snaps spectacular images of volcanic eruption

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Launched in February and now 438 miles above the Earth's surface, NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite took several photos of an erupting Indonesian volcano.

A NASA satellite has demonstrated that the best place to view an erupting volcano is from 438 miles straight up.

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On April 29, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite passed over Indonesia's Flores Sea and snapped several shots of Paluweh island, the scene of a volcanic eruption in progress.

Two of the satellite's instruments imaged the volcano, which awoke last October. The Operational Land Imager, which detects visible light, as well as infrared, and short-wave electromagnetic radiation, snapped a photo of the smoke and ash spewing from the volcano. The Thermal Infrared Sensor captured the heat from the lava.

"Each instrument by itself is magnificent," said Betsy Forsbacka, the thermal sensor's manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a press release. "When you put them together, with the clues that each give you on what you're seeing on Earth's surface, it's greater than either could do by themselves."

NASA said the thermal sensor was able to pick out the actual lava flow from the cooler surrounding areas. It can also tell differences in temperature as slight as one-tenth of a degree Celsius.

"We can image the white, representing the very hot lava, and right next to it we image the gray and black from the cooler surrounding ash," Forsbacka said. "It's exciting that we're imaging such diverse thermal activity so well."

A collaboration between NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS), the satellite launched on Feb. 11, 2013. It joins the Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites, which have been in orbit since 1984 and 1999 respectively, to produce stunning photos of Earths surface along with an abundance of scientific data.

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NASA satellite snaps spectacular images of volcanic eruption