Daily Archives: February 6, 2013

Space Station Tranquility Test-Blender
This is an updated test for the cupola which shows the protective window covers and the mechanism that is used to move them.

By: FrobeniusEdge

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Space Station Tranquility Test-Blender - Video

WASHINGTON -- NASA Television will provide live coverage of the departure of one Russian cargo spacecraft at the International Space Station and the launch and arrival of another.

The ISS Progress 48 resupply ship, which arrived at the station last August, will depart the Pirs docking compartment, part of the Russian segment, on Saturday, Feb. 9. The Progress will leave orbit three hours later and burn up above the Pacific Ocean. NASA TV coverage of the undocking will begin at 8 a.m. EST. The undocking is scheduled for 8:15 a.m.

That move will clear Pirs for the arrival of the new ISS Progress 50 resupply spacecraft. It is scheduled to launch at 9:41 a.m. (8:41 p.m. Kazakhstan time) Monday, Feb. 11, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA TV coverage of the launch begins at 9:30 a.m. The Progress is loaded with almost 3 tons of food, fuel, supplies and experiment hardware for the six crew members aboard the orbital laboratory.

Like its two predecessors, Progress 50 is scheduled to launch into an accelerated, four-orbit rendezvous with the station, docking only six hours after launch. NASA TV coverage will resume at 3 p.m. for the rendezvous and docking activities, with docking scheduled for 3:40 p.m.

If any technical issues arise, the Russian flight control team can default to a standard two-day rendezvous plan for the Progress that would result in docking on Feb. 13.

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

For more information about the International Space Station and its crew, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

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Space Station Cargo Ship Flights to Be Broadcast on NASA TV

This prototype shows what the tiles made from space waste will look like. The real thing will actually be square. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

Hauling trash off the International Space Station can be an expensive proposition, especially without NASA's Space Shuttle fleet. So NASA has come up with a system to recycle the waste astronauts develop into radiation-protecting tiles for the space station.

Astronauts working in orbit around the Earth generate waste and they have little room to store it.

Shipping it back to earth is costly, too, so NASA is working on a space station recycling program.

The NASA waste handling system crushes waste to a fraction of its original size, and if that brings to mind the trash compactor scene from Star Wars, John Fisher, a scientist with the Bioengineering Branch at NASA, says astronauts have nothing to worry about. The NASA trash compactor is much too small for a person.

Fisher says its designed to take many other things though, like food packaging, food scraps, tape, cans, paper, plastic bags and even what's known as the astronaut diaper. All that waste is collected from around the spacecraft, then placed inside the heat melt compactor an 8-to-10 inch cube-shaped device.

Once it's filled, the device is run to crush the various items and heat them to remove any residual moisture the trash may contain.

"We continue heating and continue compacting it until you compact from maybe something about 10 inches deep to about one-tenth or slightly less than that of its volume," Fisher said. "The temperature eventually goes up to something over 300, 400 Fahrenheit and the plastic that's in there melts and encapsulates the waste. And then we cool it down and we bring it out and what you have is kind of a hard plastic tile with most of the other waste materials embedded inside of it."

But NASA doesn't make them so dense just to take up less space so they can be shipped back to Earth. The space agency is planning to use them as radiation shields inside the space station, Fisher said.

"Radiation protection works best when the substance you're using contains a lot of hydrogen, and plastic contains a lot of hydrogen as well as carbon, which is still a relatively good material for radiation protection," he added.

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NASA develops system to recycle space station waste into radiation-protecting tiles

Mir was a space station that operated for more than 15 years in low Earth orbit. The design was conceived under the Soviet Union, and the station continued work under Russia after the union fell apart in the early 1990s.

The space station served as an important precursor to today's International Space Station. Aboard Mir, crews dealt for the first time with long-duration stays in space of more than 400 days. Health effects and psychological situations were observed and documented.

In later years, NASA used Mir as a testbed for international co-operation. The agency was eager to move forward with ISS, but felt that it required experience working with Russia before continuing. As such, NASA signed an agreement to send its astronauts aboard Mir.

Results from the program were mixed, with some American astronauts comparing about feeling isolated and undersupported when training overseas. Worse, by the time NASA astronauts arrived, Mir was nearing the end of its operational lifetime and experienced frequent power failures and a near-fatal fire.

Astronauts generally, however, got a lot of microgravity research done during the program. Also, the experience aboard Mir gave NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) an education on how to best work together for ISS.

Extending long-term duration experience

According to Enyclopedia Astronautica, Mir was intended as a successor project to the Soviet Union's Salyut series of space stations. While the United States was focused on the moon program in the 1960s and developing the shuttle in the 1970s, Russia went in another direction after the space race.

The country worked on developing expertise in long-duration spaceflight, and felt that a larger space station would allow for more research in that area. Mir was originally authorized in a February 1976, then evolved by 1978 to a station with several ports for crewed Soyuz spacecraft and cargo Progress spaceships.

NPO Energia began work in earnest on the station in 1979, reportedly subcontracting the responsibilities to KB Salyut because Energia was preoccupied with the Salyut, Soyuz, and Progress programs, among others. Work stalled somewhat as Russia developed a Buran space shuttle, but according to the encyclopedia, in 1984 the Soviet Union made it a priority to orbit the station in two years to coincide with the 27th Communist Party Congress in spring 1986.

It took some planning adjustments, but the first module of Mir launched successfully on Feb. 20, 1986. The next step would be bringing it alive for cosmonauts to occupy it.

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Mir Space Station: Testing Long-Term Stays in Space