Daily Archives: May 13, 2017

The International Space Station is old. The first pieces of it were sent into orbit almost two decades ago, and its been under near constant construction and remodeling ever since, adding new components and expanding the crafts usefulness. But its still old. We were reminded of that today when amuch-anticipated spacewalk at the ISS was delayed due to an unfortunate malfunction: a water leak.

According to NASA, the leak was discovered just before two US astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer were scheduled to perform the 200th spacewalk at the International Space Station. The leak was found while the astronauts were waiting in the airlock, and was traced to the connection between an umbilical hose attached to Fischers spacesuit and the ISS itself.The umbilical, which acts asthe lifeline between the astronauts as the ISS, providespower to the batteries in their equipment and circulatesoxygen.

Thankfully, NASA has a contingency plan for just such an occurrence: ditching the troublesome hose and just using one, for both astronauts. Now, instead of each astronaut having a functioning connection to the spacecraft, theyll just trade off, handing the connector back and forth and utilizing backup battery power in their suits when not connected. NASA maintained that the actual spacesuits worn by the astronauts are perfectly fine.

Despite its age, the International Space Station still seems to have a lot of life left, and while some reports over the years suggested that the craft would be decommissioned sooner rather than later, NASAs recently penned deal with Boeing includes a commitment to maintain the ISS hardwarethrough at least 2028.

Excerpt from:
The International Space Station has sprung a leak - BGR

NASA astronaut Joe Acaba (left), Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will fly to the International Space Station Sept. 13 Feb. 23.

Some got off easy, while others have been waiting a long time the three space travelers gearing up for a September launch to the International Space Station went through very different training experiences before coming together as a team.

In fact, only first-time NASA flier Mark Vande Hei had the traditional training period for this mission. He's a retired U.S. Army colonel and worked in Mission Control at Johnson Space Center before (and after) undergoing training in the astronaut class of 2009. He had the ordinary 18-24-month training process for the Sept. 13 launch.

FellowNASA astronaut Joe Acaba, who's flown one short-duration and one long-duration flight before this, will have only six months of training; he's already been through three of them. [Life in Space: An Astronaut's Video Guide to Orbital Living]

Acaba's ride to the space station comes from a contract NASA signed in March with Boeing, which had acquired seats on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft through a deal with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

"I got pretty lucky with a six-month training program," Abaca said during a news briefing yesterday (May 10). He added that NASA and its international partners got together to choose the most important things to include in his training in the limited time available.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, on the other hand, was originally scheduled to fly in March, but was moved later after Russia decided to switch from three to two cosmonauts on the station. Misurkin, who is on his second long-duration spaceflight, is slated to command the Soyuz capsule bringing the trio up in September.

"I knew that for Mark and for Joe, now, it's been a pretty tough schedule, and they are very, very busy," Misurkin said during the briefing. "But for me, it's like you have a distance, you know where is your final line, you start to run, run, run, and [then they say] you know what? We've decided to add some more." Misurkin said he's looking forward to finally getting to fly, and to working with Acaba and Vande Hei.

For now, the three are training together for the Sept. 13 launch, when they will join Expedition 53 on the station. They will remain in space until Feb. 23, during Expedition 54.

"During that time, the primary objective for us is doing lots of science, both to help further NASA's exploration goals and to serve the needs of the country now, to help people on the ground as a national laboratory," Vande Hei said. "We're going to have several visiting vehicles there's a possibility of an EVA [spacewalk], but really, because we're going to be up there so long, we're just ready for whatever the planners give us."

Indeed, flexibility is crucial for long-duration flights as well as for training processes that range from a couple years to a couple months, as the space fliers said.

"It's always good to go back," Acaba said. "What's really interesting about the long-duration flights is you don't know what's going to happen every day. Every day's a challenge, [and] you don't know what's going to break, so I'm looking forward to seeing what the next increment brings up."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Odd Timing Brings Three New Space Station Fliers Together - Space.com

Brook Haven School sent 19 of its best science students into orbit recently when they got the chance to interview astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

By making the trek to Santa Rosa Junior College, students were able to establish an 11-minute contact via radio from the SRJCs ground up-link station. The activity was part of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) project, which promotes learning opportunities as part of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) initiative.

Sebastopols Brook Haven was selected as one of 12 schools to participate in this venture.

We were beyond excited to be chosen by ARISS, said Brook Haven Principal Debbie Hanks. Our team of teachers, volunteers and students worked hard to prepare for this remarkable experience.

Math teacher Jim Mclelland said students, all fifth through eighth graders, were involved in learning about the space station prior to the April 19 event. Students submitted more than 200 questions, and teachers narrowed it down to about 20.

The hard part was picking the best ones, Mclelland said. As the International Space Station traveled at 17,500 miles per hour, our students were able to ask 19 questions and get answers, as well as offer a group appreciation to Thomas Pesquet before we lost contact, when the ISS went over the horizon.

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Space station link-up sends students into orbit | News | sonomawest ... - Sonoma West

International Space Station mock-up training module wikimedia.org/NASA/Carla Cioffi

MOSCOW, May 12. /TASS/. Russias Nauka multi-functional lab module plagued by the contamination problem in its fuel tanks will be delivered to the International Space Station no sooner than August next year, a source in the rocket and space industry told TASS on Friday.

"Today, specialists of the Khrunichev Space Center and the Energiya Rocket and Space Corporation will hold a meeting to approve a new schedule for eliminating faults and preparing the module for the launch. According to the most optimistic forecasts, the module can be launched no sooner than August next year," the source said.

However, late 2018 - 2019 is the real timeframe for the launch, he added.

The Khrunichev Space Center told TASS that "work is under way in compliance with the schedule to rectify faults revealed earlier."

"The launch date will be determined following the results of the joint work by the Khrunichev Center and the Energiya Rocket and Space Corporation," the Khrunichev Space Center said.

A source in the Russian rocket and space industry told TASS in early April that specialists planned to cut the modules fuel tanks in half after finding contamination inside them for their subsequent cleaning.

In other media

See original here:
Russia may deliver research module to space station in 2018 - TASS

It's very early days, but two papers published today have detected hints of elusive dark matter within data collected at the International Space Station (ISS).

Dark matter is the hypothetical substance that makes up 26.8 percent of the known Universe, and explains why our Universe holds together. For decades, scientists have struggled to detect it, and now they might have a new lead - the two separate studies have shown that the number of antiprotons streaming down on the ISS make more sense if dark matter exists.

No one's claiming they've actually detected dark matter here, so don't freak out just yet. But with the hunt for dark matter getting so dire that scientists are now actively looking for ways the Universe makes sense without it, any evidence that validates its existence is a big deal.

Researchers first came up with the concept of dark matter - a mysterious kind of matter that doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation and therefore is invisible to us - to explain the imbalance between the amount of matter in the Universe and the amount of gravity that holds together our galaxies.

The imbalance lies in the fact that if you add up all the matter in the stars, planets, and cosmic gas within the Universe, it still doesn't explain how we have so much gravity - unless you factor in dark matter.

Despite finding evidence of its hypothesised effects, anything more solid has remained frustratingly elusive. And scientists are now looking for alternative explanations for all the extra gravity in our Universe.

But these latest studies offer up some new hope.

Two separate teams, one from Germany and the other from China and Taiwan, have analysed the amount of antiprotons detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) - an experiment set up on the ISS to count how many antiprotons stream down on the station.

Antiprotons are the antimatter partners of protons, and they make up a small part of the cosmic rays that are constantly streaming through space.

These antiprotons are usually produced through collision between high-energy cosmic rays and interstellar gas (we've been able to create them at the Large Hadron Collider), but they're also predicted to be produced by the hypothetical collision of dark matter - when two dark matter particles annihilate one another.

To get an idea of whether or not this was the case, the two teams independently came up with predictions for how many antiprotons they'd expect the AMS experiment to detect in two scenarios - with or without the presence of dark matter.

The German team found that the data far more accurately matched a model where dark matter annihilation was taking place. More specifically, a model where a dark matter particle existed with a mass of 80 GeV/c2.

The Chinese team used a different set of assumptions but came to the same conclusion - the AMS data made more sense if you assume that dark matter exists. Their model predicted a similar dark matter particle with mass between 40 and 60 GeV/c2.

Most importantly, both teams independently showed that the data better matched models assuming the presence of dark matter than those that assumed dark matter didn't exist.

The fact that two separate teams came up with the same answer is promising, but we're still a long way off confirming dark matter's existence.

However, the research does correspond with a previous dark matter hint discovered using AMS data - an overabundance of positrons, or antimatter electrons, flowing down from space.

Some physicists think these could also be evidence of dark matter, while others think the excess can be explained by other astronomical phenomena, such as pulsars.

Researchers back in 2016 also found a glut of high-energy radiation in the centre of the Milky Way, which some physicists linked to dark matter (although this has been thoroughly debated since).

"That could just be a coincidence," theoretical astrophysicist Dan Hooper from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new studies, told Emily Conover from Science News.

But "it does look pretty encouraging to me for that reason," he added.

The research has been published here and here in Physical Review Letters, and you can also read them here and here on arXiv.org.

See the rest here:
Two Independent Teams Find Hints of Dark Matter in Space Station Data - ScienceAlert

By Adam Stewart

Staff writer

This spring, U.S. Air Force Col. Nick Hague got the news he had been waiting on for two years: He will join the ranks of Steve Hawley, Joe Engle and Ronald Evans as a Kansan to travel into outer space.

Hague, who was selected by NASA as an astronaut in 2013 and completed training in 2015, is assigned to travel to the International Space Station in September 2018, NASA announced March 28.

Its a six-month mission to the I.S.S., Hague said in a phone interview May 4.

He will be a flight engineer for Expedition 57/58, which will launch from Russia aboard Soyuz 56S, according to a NASA biography.

It was really hard to believe, he said of getting the news. You wait for something, you work hard for something. I still have those Pinch me moments now.

Background

Hague was born in 1975 in Belleville and grew up in Hoxie, where he graduated from Hoxie High School in 1994. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1998 with a bachelors degree in astronautical engineering, and he later received a masters degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hague said he always found the idea of space travel intriguing, and many experiences in his youth, including a field trip to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, got him interested in becoming an astronaut.

The ultimate dream was to go explore space, he said.

He said the Apollo astronauts who made the moon landings were an inspiration, but added that his family and parents were crucial inspirations as well, teaching him the importance of persistence. And now he counts on his wife, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Catie Hague, and his two sons for support.

He applied to become an astronaut for the first time in 2003. On his third application, in 2013, he was accepted.

Required skills and training

Hague said it is obvious that anyone who wants to become an astronaut needs to have considerable technical knowledge, but he said people might not realize how important the ability to work well with others and to handle stress is. The success of a mission is a whole-team effort, he said.

Competing in athletics and participating in other group activities in his youth helped develop those teamwork skills, Hague said, and his Air Force career helped him take the next step.

Hague said learning Russian Russian Soyuz spacecraft are the only vehicles to send crew to the I.S.S. since the U.S. space shuttle program ended in 2011 has been one of the more challenging parts of training for the assignment.

In the meantime, Hague has been assisting NASAs mission from the ground in the Space Station Operations branch supporting resource planning and operations. Hague said that involves lending an astronauts perspective in planning missions.

As a flight engineer, Hague will conduct scientific experiments aboard the I.S.S. and help maintain the station.

Lessons learned

Hague said achieving his goals has been a step-by-step process, with failure along the way. The important thing has been picking himself back up and working again to reach his goals.

He said the world can seem a long way from small-town Kansas, but he is proof that big dreams arent out of reach. He said achieving big dreams starts with knowing it wont be easy and not letting that stop you.

Dont give up, he said. Dream big and work hard.

More here:
Kansan's going up: International Space Station is astronaut's ... - Hutchinson News

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has measured cosmic rays streaming toward Earth since 2011, searching for evidence of distant dark matter.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. After six years in space, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a sensitive particle detector aboard the International Space Station, is being prepared for a cooling system retrofit to keep the instrument operational until the station's retirement in 2024 or beyond.

Station commander Peggy Whitson and newly arrived rookie flight-engineer Jack Fischer, both with NASA, will kick off preliminary work on the $2 billion, 8.5-ton (77 metric tons) science instrument on a spacewalk tomorrow (May 12).

During their spacewalk, which is scheduled to last 6.5 hours, the astronauts plan to install a cable so engineers can test a data circuit in the AMS. The instrument was installed outside the station during the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour, in May 2011. [Photos: AMS Hunts Exotic Particles in Space]

AMS is designed to study cosmic rays for signs of dark matter being annihilated in space.

Unlike regular matter, which emits or interacts with electromagnetic radiation, dark matter has never been observed directly. The existence of dark matter is inferred through its gravitational effects on visible matter.

Current theories suggest dark matter may account for 85 percent of all the matter in the universe.

So far, AMS has tracked more than 100 billion cosmic ray hits in its detectors, AMS lead scientist Samuel Ting, a Nobel laureate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an interview with Space.com.

"We have measured an excess of positrons [the antimatter counterpart to an electron], and this excess can come from dark matter. But at this moment, we still need more data to make sure it is from dark matter and not from some strange astrophysics sources," Ting said. "That will require us to run a few more years."

AMS has also been measuring energy spectrums of helium, lithium, boron, carbon and other elements that fly toward Earth as cosmic rays.

"None of the energy distributions agree with theoretical predictions by a huge amount," Ting said. "Not a single one agrees. That's how little we know."

To keep AMS operational through the lifetime of the station, NASA plans to replace the device's cooling pumps next year, Ting said.

Two of AMS' four cooling pumps have failed, Ting said, though the particle detector needs just one pump to operate.

"In talking with NASA, we decided that since we will be there for the lifetime of the station, it would be prudent to replace with new pumps," Ting said. "This will be done sometime next year."

The pumps are part of a liquid carbon-dioxide cooling system that dissipates heat from the AMS as the station orbits in and out of sunlight.

The cable being installed during Friday's spacewalk will test a system that reads out engineering data from the device.

"We want to check if the readout system is still there. It's more or less an assurance check [to] make sure the communications will be there," Ting said.

Friday's spacewalk, which is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), will be the 200th devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction of the outpost began in 1998.

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Dark Matter Probe on Space Station to Be Revitalized - Space.com