Daily Archives: September 9, 2014

Minecraft Space Station Challenge Pack #1 | A Space Adventure... - Minecraft Mod Pack Survival
LET #39;S GET THAT 6000 LIKES for more SSCP [ SSCP ] Its the challenge of space, The final frontier, You look up there every night you sleep, thinking about your house.. Up there! explore...

By: Minecraft Universe

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Minecraft Space Station Challenge Pack #1 | A Space Adventure... - Minecraft Mod Pack Survival - Video

Astronaut Tour Guides: U.S. and Europe Fly-Over | Video
ISS crew members Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio talk about several European and United States cities while aboard the International Space Station.

By: VideoFromSpace

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Astronaut Tour Guides: U.S. and Europe Fly-Over | Video - Video

The Force of Gravity | Clayton Anderson | TEDxSalford
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. NASA Astronaut Clayton Anderson talks about his unique experiences onboard the International Space...

By: TEDx Talks

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The Force of Gravity | Clayton Anderson | TEDxSalford - Video

NASA Hosts Media Briefing to Announce New Earth Observing Role for International Space Station
NASA announced a new era in its exploration of our home planet with the launch of the first in a series of Earth science instruments to the International Space Station. The first Earth-observing...

By: NASA

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NASA Hosts Media Briefing to Announce New Earth Observing Role for International Space Station - Video

Earth images from Alexander Gerst in 4K
This timelapse video was made from images taken by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst orbiting Earth on the International Space Station. The video is offered in Ultra High Definition, the highest...

By: European Space Agency, ESA

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Earth images from Alexander Gerst in 4K - Video

Janet Anderson and Jessica Eagan, NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center

Keeping a spare on hand simply makes sense. Just as drivers keep spare tires on hand to replace a flat or blowout, NASA routinely maintains spares, too. These flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair. When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.

Researchers at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe. Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASAs Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts. It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.

The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well. The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016. Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload. STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoDs STP.

NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratorys high inclination. This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to look farther towards Earths poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite. Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks. LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.

Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning what we call total lightning during both day and night, said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall. As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics.

LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency and it does this without land-ocean bias.

The sensor consists of an optical imager enhanced to locate and detect lightning from thunderstorms within its 400-by-400-mile field-of-view on the Earths surface. The station travels more than 17,000 mph as it orbits our planet, allowing the LIS to observe a point on the Earth, or a cloud, for almost 90 seconds as it passes overhead. Despite this brief viewing duration, it is long enough to estimate the lightning-flashing rate of most storms.

Since more than 70 percent of lightning occurs during the day, daytime detection drove the technical design of the LIS. From space, lightning appears like a pool of light on the top of a thundercloud. During the day, sunlight reflected from the cloud tops completely masks the lightning signal, making it difficult to detect. However, LIS creates a solution by applying special techniques that take advantage of the differences in the behavior and physical characteristics of lightning and sunlight signals. These allow LIS to extract the strikes from bright background illumination.

As a final step in processing, a real-time event processor inside the LIS electronics unit removes the remaining background signal, enabling the system to detect the lightning signatures and achieve 90-percent detection efficiency.

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Space Station Sensor To Capture 'Striking' Lightning Data

A Russian cosmonaut is poised to make a bit of history this when she launches to the International Space Station this month, even if she considers the mission a routine spaceflight.

When cosmonaut Elena Serova launches to the station on Sept. 25 with two other crewmates, she will become the International Space Station's first-ever female Russian crewmember and only the fourth female cosmonaut to reach space. She'll also be the first female Russian cosmonaut to fly in the 17 years since cosmonaut Yelena Kondakova's STS-84 space shuttle mission in May 1997.

But Serova, 38, said she doesn't see her mission any differently than that of a male cosmonaut.

"I wouldn't say I am doing more ... than what my colleagues are doing," she said in translated remarks during a preflight briefing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston in July. [Women in Space: A Gallery of Firsts]

Serova pointed out that women have gone into space before, and that her focus is on fulfilling her assigned duties as a flight engineer.

"I want to perform my job really well," she said.

In 1963, Russia (then part of the Soviet Union) was the first nation to fly a woman in space, sending Valentina Tereshkova aloft in June of that year on a mission that lasted nearly three days in Earth orbit.

Svetlana Savitskaya was the second Soviet female cosmonaut, making two flights into space in 1982 and 1984 and staying aboard the Salyut 7 space station. She also was the first female to peform a spacewalk.

The United States didn't send its first woman to space until 1983, when Sally Ride blasted off. Dozens of women from the United States and other nations have flown since, but only one other from Russia: Kondakova. She made two trips to the Mir space station, in 1994 (on a Soyuz capsule) and 1997 (on a space shuttle).

Serova has said she's been fascinated by space since childhood, and that she always felt visiting the final frontier was possible. "The door to space was opened to all women by Valentina Tereshkova," she said in a NASA interview.

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Space Station to Get 1st Female Russian Crewmember This Month

September 9, 2014

Image Caption: A view of Earth from one of the High Definition Earth Viewing cameras aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Laura Nilesm International Space Station Program Science Office and Public Affairs Office, NASAs Johnson Space Center

A series of new Earth science instruments launching to the International Space Station over the next year is prompting a new era of Earth observation from the orbiting outpost. These new tools that monitor ocean winds and measure clouds and pollution in the atmosphere, among other climate science phenomena, will help NASA deliver important information to climate researchers.

[ Watch the Video: Space Station Live: High Definition Earth Viewing ]

While these new Earth science instruments collect valuable information on our changing planet, one current Earth observation study continuously streams live views of Earth directly to your desktop or mobile internet device. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) investigation allows anyone with an internet connection to view our world from above. Tune in to the HDEV live stream here.

The HDEV project employs four commercially available cameras to stream the first continuous, high definition video from the space station. During the two-year study period, researchers hope to determine the best types of cameras to use on future missions by subjecting them to the harsh space environment. The cameras are enclosed in a temperature-specific case and mounted outside the Columbus laboratory to monitor how quickly they degrade during exposure to radiation in microgravity.

We know over time that the cameras will begin to degrade, said David Hornyak, engineer and HDEV project manager at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. We will operate the cameras to determine how long it takes and to learn what that degradation characteristic looks like to provide information on the planning and design of future imagery systems. It is expected that the cameras will not just turn off, but they will have some type of image degradation and at some point, that degradation will be bad enough that the image is no longer useful.

With the use of commercially available cameras, the research team also hopes to validate cameras that may be more cost-effective for future missions. If a camera is readily available on Earth and proves to hold up well in space, purchasing this type of camera would likely be cheaper than designing a new product.

By using four different types of cameras, each has a different type of technology to analyze for what works best in space. Once a week, the project team uses an automated software program to compare pixels on night imagery taken by the cameras to assess the deterioration of each camera. The pixels are easier to see and compare in dark images than in those with objects and multiple colors included.

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On Space Station, Earth's Beauty Is In The Eye Of The High Definition Beholder