Space Station Crew Participates in First Ladys GimmeFive Challenge – Video

Posted on by


Space Station Crew Participates in First Ladys GimmeFive Challenge
Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Commander Barry Wilmore of NASA responds to a challenge Feb. 27 from First Lady Michelle Obama. As part of the fifth anniversary of Let #39;s...

By: NASA

See the article here:

Space Station Crew Participates in First Ladys GimmeFive Challenge - Video

NASA Television to Air Space Station Change of Commander, Return of Three Crew Members

Posted on by

Three International Space Station crew members are scheduled to leave the orbiting laboratory Wednesday, March 11 after almost six months in space performing scientific research and technology demonstrations.

NASA Television will provide complete coverage of their departure and return to Earth, beginning with the space station change of command ceremony on Tuesday, March 10.

Expedition 42 Commander Barry Wilmore of NASA will hand over command of the station to fellow NASA astronaut Terry Virts. At 6:44 p.m. Wednesday, Wilmore and flight engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) will undock their Soyuz spacecraft from the space station and land in Kazakhstan at 10:08 p.m. (8:08 a.m. March 12 Kazakh time).

NASA Television coverage is as follows:

Tuesday, March 10

10:25 a.m. -- Change of command ceremony in which Wilmore hands over station command to Virts

Wednesday, March 11

3 p.m. -- Farewell and hatch closure coverage (hatch closure scheduled at 3:25 p.m.)

Go here to see the original:

NASA Television to Air Space Station Change of Commander, Return of Three Crew Members

Space smells awful or awesome, depending where you're floating

Posted on by

There's nothing quite like the smell of space in the morning... until you realize there's no real bacon to go with the scent of it.

Not all space smells would make astronauts gag... NASA

We've yet to make contact with E.T., but human space exploration has given us at least a few surprising revelations, like the fact that the smells of space range from delicious to downright nasty.

Last year, the Rosetta mission taught us that the perfume of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a wretch-inducing bouquet of ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and other nasty gases that would smell like an unholy merger of an outhouse and rotten eggs.

But as the video below from Chemical & Engineering News sums up with an unabashedly geeky flair, not every aroma in space will destroy your appetite. In fact, astronauts returning to the International Space Station after a spacewalk reported smelling bacon and other whiffs of meat. And Apollo astronauts reported a scent on the moon like gun powder. Other astronauts have also described space scents similar to a spent fireplace, welding or burning ozone.

Sounds to me like the vacuum of space is just like gathering around one massive campfire, which is sort of what the sun is, when you think about it.

So what's to keep astronauts in orbit from constantly craving a barbecue bacon cheeseburger? Fortunately, NASA has the means to keep the ISS smelling fresh, although it did take a few hours to filter out the fishy smell of seafood gumbo once.

What's being missed here is the obvious opportunity for NASA to save a little cash on shipping breakfast meats to space. If you actually fried up some bacon in the already seared-pork-scented vacuum of space, you might be able to trick astronauts' noses and palates into believing they got double the serving of bacon. Let's keep this little secret just between you, me and the American taxpayers though, NASA. The astronauts don't need to know...

Read the rest here:

Space smells awful or awesome, depending where you're floating

ISS experiment: Why does space change vision?

Posted on by

NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins, Expedition 37 flight engineer, performs ultrasound eye imaging in the Columbus laboratory of the International Space Station. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano, flight engineer, assists Hopkins. (Credit: NASA)

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com @BednarChuck

A new experiment, scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in the spring, plans to take a long look at vision changes often experienced by astronauts during extended spaceflights, NASA officials announced on Tuesday.

The cause of these vision issues is called visual impairment and intracranial pressure syndrome (VIIP), and according to the US space agency, it involves changes not only in the sense of sight but the structure of the eyes and indirect signs of increases pressure on the brain.

A shift in fluids

The human body is roughly 60 percent fluids, and in space, these fluids shift to the upper part of the body, moving across blood vessels and cell membranes in a different way than they do on Earth. The upcoming Fluid Shifts study will test the relationship between this phenomenon and VIIP, which reportedly affects over half of all US astronauts during extended spaceflights.

Learning more about how blood pressure in the brain affects vision and eye shape could also help those on Earth dealing with conditions that increase swelling and pressure in the eye, as well as though who have been placed on extended periods of bed rest.

[STORY: ISS adding more spaceship parking]

Our first aim is to assess the shift in fluids, to see where fluids go and how the shift varies in different individuals, explained Dr. Michael B. Stenger of the Wyle Science Technology and Engineering Group, one of the principal investigators of the Fluid Shifts project.

The second goal, Stenger added, is to correlate fluid movement with changes in vision, the structure of the eye, and other elements of VIIP syndrome. A third objective is to evaluate the application of negative pressure to the lower body, with the intention of preventing or reversing fluid shifts and determining if this can prevent vision changes from occurring.

Here is the original post:

ISS experiment: Why does space change vision?

Dawn: Mission Vesta-Ceres Mission – Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2010 – Video

Posted on by


Dawn: Mission Vesta-Ceres Mission - Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2010
Dawn is a space probe launched by NASA in September 27, 2007 to study the two most-massive protoplanets of the asteroid belt: Vesta and the dwarf planet Cere...

By: Rseferino Orbiter Filmmaker

Continue reading here:

Dawn: Mission Vesta-Ceres Mission - Orbiter Space Flight Simulator 2010 - Video

NASA creates ingredients of life in harsh simulated space conditions

Posted on by

New research might shed light on how we got here by demonstrating that chemical components of our DNA could be produced in the brutal conditions of space.

The machine NASA scientists used to zap out three components of our hereditary material from a chunk of ice. NASA/ Dominic Hart

We know a whole lot about life on our planet, but one mystery persists: how it got here.

NASA scientists working at the Ames Astrochemistry Laboratory in California and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland may have just found a clue to that mystery. They've determined that some of the chemical components of our DNA can be produced in the harsh crucible of space.

To reach their conclusion, they created a chunk of ice in their lab containing molecules known as pyrimidine. These molecules, which consist of carbon and nitrogen, form the core of three chemicals found in DNA and RNA, the genetic composition of all Earth-based life.

Pyrimidine is also found on meteorites, which prompted the researchers to explore how it reacts when frozen in water in space.

So they put their chunk of ice in a machine that reproduces the vacuum of space, along with temperatures around -430F and harsh radiation created by high-energy ultraviolet (UV) photons from a hydrogen lamp.

They found that not only could the pyrimidine molecules survive these brutal conditions, but the radiation actually morphed some of them into three chemical components found in DNA and RNA: uracil, cytosine and thymine.

"We are trying to address the mechanisms in space that are forming these molecules," Christopher Materese, a NASA researcher working on these experiments, said in a statement. "Considering what we produced in the laboratory, the chemistry of ice exposed to ultraviolet radiation may be an important linking step between what goes on in space and what fell to Earth early in its development."

Added Scott Sandford, a space science researcher at Ames, "Our experiments suggest that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed."

Originally posted here:

NASA creates ingredients of life in harsh simulated space conditions