International Space Station Astronauts Celebrate New Year's Eve 16 Times

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Washington: The crew of Expedition 42 orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station or ISS celebrated New Year's eve as many as 16 times as the it circles the globe at 28,163 km per hour, American space NASA said.

Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew spent New Year's eve working on a variety of experiments, ranging from those directed at understanding changes that occur in the human eye during long-duration spaceflights, and with the Earth observations aimed at helping with disaster aid on the Earth's surface.

The crew also continued preparations for the arrival of the next cargo supply ship, the commercial resupply mission of SpaceX-5 and the Dragon spacecraft.

The launch of Dragon on a Space-X Falcon 9 booster is planned for January 6 and it will rendezvous with the space station after two days.

Dragon is loaded with more than 3,700 pounds of scientific experiments, technology demonstrations and supplies, including critical materials to support 256 science and research investigations that will take place on the space station during ISS Expeditions 42 and 43.

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International Space Station Astronauts Celebrate New Year's Eve 16 Times

Space Station Crew Celebrates New Year's Eve 16 Times

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Recovering from one New Year's Eve can be bad enough. Imagine experiencing 16 of them all in one day. Such is the case for the crew on the International Space Station, which is in orbit about 220 miles above Earth. In one orbital day, as the space station zooms around the globe at 17,500 miles an hour, the crew will pass 16 times over a part of the planet where the clock is striking midnight. No need for a designated driver, however: Cmdr. Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his crew, which includes NASA's Terry Virts, Russian cosmonauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov, and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, plan to celebrate with fruit juice toasts, NASA says. The new year starts officially for the crew at 7 p.m. EST Jan. 31, which is midnight by the Universal Time Clock (UTC), also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). In a prerecorded video greeting from space, Wilmore and Virts sent best wishes from space. "Happy New Year's and a safe New Year's down there, and we'll enjoy our 16 New Year's Eve celebrations here on board the space station," Virts said.

It's not all fun and games. The crew spent much of New Year's Eve day working on a variety of experiments and preparing for the arrival of the next cargo supply ship. Launch of the Dragon resupply vehicle on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is schedule for 6:20 a.m. EST Tuesday.

First published December 31 2014, 12:26 PM

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Space Station Crew Celebrates New Year's Eve 16 Times

Are You Healthy Enough to Fly to Space?

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Good news for all you couch potatoes out there: You don't have to be in peak physical condition to make it to space.

The vast majority of people who want to fly to suborbital space and back are medically fit to do so, according to researchers at Virgin Galactic, which is developing the commercial spaceliner SpaceShipTwo.

"We have encountered only one or two [customers] for whom we have recommended that they do not take a flight with us," Virgin Galactic Chief Medical Officer James Vanderploeg said during a talk at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS), which was held in October in Las Cruces, New Mexico. [Rise of SpaceShipTwo: The Test Flight Photos]

Vanderploeg's ISPCS talk came before the tragiccrash of SpaceShipTwoduring an Oct. 31 test flight, which killed co-pilot Mike Alsbury and injured pilot Peter Siebold. But in an email exchange following the accident, Vanderploeg told Space.com that he did not have anything to add or change from his earlier comments.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to be lofted to an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. At that point, the two-pilot, six-passenger spaceliner will be released and will fire its onboard rocket motor for about 1 minute to zoom up to an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers).

SpaceShipTwo will accelerate to approximately 3.5 times the speed of sound, producing moderate G-forces on pilots and passengers. As the vehicle coasts up into space, passengers can leave their seats to experience weightlessness and view the Earth and the blackness of space for several minutes from the space plane's 12 large cabin windows.

The passengers will then strap back into their seats for the ride home, which will end with an airplane-style tarmac touchdown.

Virgin Galactic isn't the only company selling seats on suborbital flights. XCOR Aerospace is developing a one-passenger space plane called Lynx; tickets currently go for around $100,000.

The price of a ticket for a ride aboard SpaceShipTwo is currently $250,000. Hundreds of people have put down a deposit to reserve a seat.

Vanderploeg and his team have been researching the health requirements for these customers. For example, Virgin Galactic has collected data from a number of future passengers during centrifuge training runs, which began with 77 participants in 2007 to 2008 at the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center in Southampton, Pennsylvania.

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Are You Healthy Enough to Fly to Space?

Images From The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA – Video

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Images From The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency that is responsible for the civilian space program as well as for aeronautics and aerospace research ...

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Images From The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA - Video

”MORE SHOCKING IMAGES”’- Christmas comet lovejoy…More NASA bullshit – Video

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#39; #39;MORE SHOCKING IMAGES #39; #39; #39;- Christmas comet lovejoy...More NASA bullshit
Question -When is a comet NOT a comet?... Answer-When its a Spaceship!... Serious looking spaceship with lots of aliens ... I mentioned the Gods on my walk...here we begin... MUSIC :http://sound...

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''MORE SHOCKING IMAGES'''- Christmas comet lovejoy...More NASA bullshit - Video

VolcaRock and The Phantoms Guest AMBIENT SPACE jam MS-20 mini NASA Samples – Video

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VolcaRock and The Phantoms Guest AMBIENT SPACE jam MS-20 mini NASA Samples
Thanks to Rob for letting me play on this awesome track he created, enjoy the ray gun lol please subscribe to Rob, link below! 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/user/getshotde.

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VolcaRock and The Phantoms Guest AMBIENT SPACE jam MS-20 mini NASA Samples - Video

NASA team hacks Opportunity to treat Mars rover's amnesia

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NASAs Mars rover Opportunity has been working well into its golden years after nearly 11 years roaming the Red Planet, it has survived more than 40 times past its warranty. But now, this trusty veteran explorer is experiencing some worrisome memory loss.

The long-lived rover has been having some senior moments, according to John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission (as Opportunity and its defunct twin Spirit are formally known). The episodes of amnesia stem from faulty flash memory the kind of memory in your digital camera that allows your pictures to stay saved even after your device is turned off.

But flash memory doesnt last forever and the seventh, final bank in the flash memory appears to be malfunctioning.

Flash memory has a limited lifetime, Callas said. It only allows so many read-write cycles before it starts to wear out some of the cells. And after 11 years of operation on Mars, we now suspect were seeing a wear-out of some of those cells.

This leads to a pair of problems. Since the rover cant use the seventh memory bank, it uses its random-access memory or RAM, the kind of memory your computer uses when its on for temporary data storage. The problem is, as soon as the rover (or your computer) is switched off, the information stored in RAM is lost. So if the rover turns off before sending all of its at-risk data back to its handlers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, then those data are lost forever.

Thats an annoying, but manageable, issue, Callas said. The second snag is that the flash memory issue also causes the rover to reboot and when it reboots, it stops the long-term activities the team had planned for the rover and simply waits for further instructions on the ground. On weekends and over the holiday season, when people are out of the office, these unexpected hang-ups can put the team days behind schedule, Callas said.

Its like youre taking a family trip and your car stalls, and every time your car stalls you have to call triple-A but now its stalling every 20 miles, Callas said. Youre not going to make much progress.

The researchers do have a clever little fix, Callas added. They plan on modifying the software so that the rover thinks it only has six banks worth of flash memory which should make it skip faulty bank No. 7, since thats at the very end. (Theyre lucky the faulty segment wasnt right in the middle of the flash memory module, Callas added that would make a fix much more complicated.)

You have a piece of lettuce you want to put on your sandwich and the edge of the lettuce is a little bit brown, and you just cut it off and you put the rest in your sandwich and you go, Callas said by way of analogy. Maybe you have a little less lettuce, but it doesnt have any brown on it.

Opportunity, which along with its twin Spirit arrived at the Red Planet in early 2004, set out to find signs of past water on Earths dry, dusty next-door neighbor. It did that and more, even finding evidence of past habitable environments in its later years that complemented the findings from its descendant, NASAs 2012 rover Curiosity.

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NASA team hacks Opportunity to treat Mars rover's amnesia

NASA developing cure for Mars rover 'amnesia'

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NASA scientists are preparing to hack into the Mars Exploration rover Opportunitys software in hopes of curing a troubling case of amnesia.

Opportunity started experiencing memory problems after software engineers reformatted the robots flash memory in early December.Its a problem many smart phone and home computer users have likely experienced after downloading a new operating system, only to find that something has gone kerflooey with existing applications.

Opportunity already has far exceeded NASAs original expectations, but with a price of roughly $400 million, the space agency is keen to keep the rover going as long as possible. As NASA budgets have dwindled in recent years, agency engineers have focused efforts on repairing equipment and extending missions rather than putting costly projects out to pasture.

The Kepler spacecraft got a new lease on life earlier this year after suffering a seemingly catastrophic malfunction in 2013. NASA astronomers and engineers managed to resurrect the craft by harnessing pressure from sunlight to control the spacecraft following a reaction wheel failure. The newly-dubbed K2 mission has already discovered a new Earth-like planet.

Astronauts have serviced and enhanced the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope five times since its initial launch in 1990. Likewise, the Cassini Orbiters mission has been extended three times since it first launch into the Saturn System in 2008. The space agencys Chandra X-ray Observatory, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) all have had their lifespans successfully extended.

Opportunity's memory troubles have not affected normal operations of gathering scientific observational data and, well, roving the Red Planet. However, without the flash memory, the rover cannot retain information overnight during sleep mode. Instead, the rover has had to upload all data from its random-access memory, or RAM, to NASAs Mars Odyssey satellite before powering down for the day.

That solution works fine, as long as Odyssey is in range to receive the data and relay it back to Earth. But Odyssey isnt just hanging out in the Martian atmosphere hovering above the rover. The satellite is in constant motion orbiting around the planet. If Odyssey is out of range when the rover needs to power down, then the data is lost.

In recent weeks, the problem has become even more complicated. The rover is continually attempting to back up to the faulty flash memory, and when it is repeatedly unsuccessful, the software reboots, NASA project manager John Callas explained in an interview with Discovery News. In some instances, the malfunction has resulted in total loss of communication with the rover.

Software engineers at the NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., think they have come up with a workaround, but it will probably take several weeks to implement. It seems the problem is really centered on just one of the rovers seven flash memory banks. Engineers are attempting to hack into the system and instruct the software to bypass the troublesome memory bank entirely, Callas said.

Opportunity first landed on Mars in January 2004 along with its rover-twin Spirit. The 384-pound rovers were originally expected to spend just three months on the Red Planet, but kept chugging on for years. Spirit prowled the surface of the Red Planet for six years before its communication system petered out in 2010.

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NASA developing cure for Mars rover 'amnesia'

Mars rover Opportunity suffering from 'amnesia' says NASA

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WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- Researchers at NASA are working to improve the memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity after a series of glitches in recent weeks led to what officials are describing as "amnesia" within the its memory banks.

The rover relies on orbital passes from the Mars Odyssey satellite to relay communications and commands to and from NASA, but when a pass does not occur between the rover's power cycles -- a relatively frequent occurrence -- the rover fails to transfer information from its temporary RAM to its permanent flash memory. The rover's repeated attempts and fails to save data to the flash memory cause it to it reboot, essentially erasing its last set of commands received.

"Volatile memory is like the traditional RAM you have in your computer; non-volatile memory uses flash memory technology," Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

"So now we're having these events we call 'amnesia,' which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn't able to, so instead it uses the RAM ... it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all (the data) is gone. So that's why we call it amnesia -- it forgets what it has done."

Opportunity has been working without flash memory since earlier in December, when NASA first reported the memory problems.

"While we're operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again," Callas said at the time.

"We will be sure to give this approach exhaustive reviews before implementing those changes on the rover."

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Mars rover Opportunity suffering from 'amnesia' says NASA