Monthly Archives: June 2017

NASA's new compact high-power solar array made its debut on the International Space Station Sunday (June 18), allowing astronauts to test the technology's durability for deep-space missions.

The Roll Out Solar Array(ROSA) is incredibly lightweight and flexible, meaning that it can easily be packed into a rocket for launch. ROSA is a collaboration between NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate and two private companies, including Deployable Space Systems (DSS) of Santa Barbara, California, and Space Systems Loral (SSL) of Palo Alto, California.

ROSA is designed to power missions using solar-electric propulsion spacecraft. The solar array wing technology is expected save on storage space and cut costs for long-distance trips beyond Earth, according to a statement from NASA. [Beaming Solar Power From Space (Video)]

The Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA) experiment is seen deployed on the International Space Station at the end of the outpost's Canadarm 2 robotic arm on June 18, 2017. The flexible solar wing could be used to power future spacecraft.

This past weekend, engineers on the ground remotely rolled out the solar arrayusing the space station's Canadarm2. The array will remain attached to the robotic arm for seven days. This experiment will test the overall effectiveness of the advanced solar wing. ROSA was delivered to the orbiting lab on June 5 aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship.

"We want to show that we can pull the wing back in in a predictable way," Jeremy Banik, the experiment's principal investigator and a senior research engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico,said in a statement. "A practical reason is that we have to pull it back for stowage after this investigation, but it will be good to know it can be done for future applications, potentially for a highly maneuverable spacecraft."

This time-lapse animation shows the novel Roll Out Solar Array experiment in action on the International Space Station on June 18, 2017. The ROSA experiment is aimed at testing new solar wing technology that rolls out an array like a party favor.

If successful, ROSA could help make NASA's robotic and human journeys to Mars and beyond possible. Incorporating the ROSA technology into Martian rovers, for example, would allow space vehicles to travel the planet's rugged surface more efficiently, since the solar arrays could be rolled up and stowed away when not in use, NASA officials have said.

"We get more power by using larger solar arrays. But efficiently packaging them for launch and then deploying those big arrays by a spacecraft has been the challenge," Al Tadros, SSL vice president of Civil and Department of Defense Business,said in a June 8 statement. "What the work on ROSA has done is develop a technique to deploy very large surface areas of flexible solar arrays, doing that efficiently with low risk. It's more power without increasing the mass dramatically."

Not only does the ROSA technology further NASA's deep-space exploration initiatives, it also benefits the commercial communications satellite industry which provides direct-to-home TV, satellite radio, broadband internet and various other services to those on the ground, according to the statement.

An artist's impression of the Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA) technology being used for deep space missions, such as NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission.

Previously, NASA has tested other solar array technology that folds and unfolds like origami to save space. But ROSA is made from lightweight mesh material that can be rolled up around a spindle and stowed in a more compact cylinder form.

ROSA is also scalable, which means it can be configured to work with other ROSAs to produce high-power levels, and can easily be deployed in a simple, yet reliable, two-stage process that takes about 10 minutes, Michael Ragsdale, research and development project manager at SSL, said in the statement from NASA.

"It's very unique and innovative, different than anything that's been done before," said Brian Spence, president of DSS, which is helping SSL incorporate the technology into its SSL 1300series platform of high-power satellites. "However, it's also extremely simple. That aspect of the technology really lends itself well to being accepted by end users, like SSL."

Editor's note: Video produced by Space.com's Steve Spaleta.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom,Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Link:
NASA Tests Flexible Roll-Out Solar Array on Space Station (Video) - Space.com

NEW FILMS

Life

Everybody Loves Somebody

Wilson

Railroad Tigers

Altitude

TELEVISION

Colony: Season Two

Incorporated: Season One

This Beautiful Fantastic

Workaholics: The Final Season

The sci-fi action film Life, directed by Daniel Espinosa (Safe House), is set on the International Space Station. After a probe digs up a sample of Mars for analysis, theres excitement about the possibility that this may be the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

So its no surprise that they do find life there wouldnt be a movie otherwise but this isnt E.T. What ensues takes us into Alien horror territory.

Life has a solid cast, led by Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson, and some nifty special effects. It even has a few interesting ideas involving the freaky possibilities of extraterrestrial life, but ultimately the film looks more familiar than wondrous.

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There are horrors on the space station in 'Life,' now on DVD - LA Daily News

ANCHORAGE AK Alaskan Academy Award winner Ben Grossman, has created a virtual reality tour of the International Space Station.

Grossman, who grew up in Delta Junction and attended UAF before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film-making, created the virtual reality tour in partnership with NASA.

He explained that his company Magnopus went to the Johnson Space Center and proposed to NASA to put a 360 degree camera in the International Space Station.

The idea was to give people the feeling down on earth of floating around in space, said Grossman.

To prepare for the pitch, the team at Magnopus created a virtual reality tour of the ISS instead of making pictures, 3D models or artworks, said Grossman.

NASA approved the pitch and suggested that Magnopus should release the virtual reality tour as a stand-alone thing.

Grossman agreed and with the support of Occulus Rift his company started developing the experience.

Over 6 months, Grossman, his team of artists and a lot of astronauts developed the virtual reality tour that includes participation in tutorials, spacewalks and even docking a Space X ship.

Grossman explained that for many of the astronauts who had been to the ISS, there was an element of homesickness to not being able to return to space.

Grossman then went on to tell KTUU that he had to decide what image would be seen through the famed Cupola window of the ISS.

Being Alaskan, Grossman decided on Anchorage but he was careful to put elements of Denmark, Africa and Italy to hide his hand.

Grossman also confirmed that he is currently working on a major international film that is created in virtual reality and exported to be viewed in cinemas.

He said the production, slated for release in 2019, is the first of its type in the world and that he would be able to give more information later this year.

Grossman could not confirm a set timeline for when the 360 degree camera would be in place in the International Space Station

To view the project visit: Click here to go to the VR Tour

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Alaskan builds virtual reality tour of International Space Station - KTUU.com

A $2 million grant will fund new technology to evaluate the effects of space travel on human brain cells at the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory.

The grant, funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, a center of the National Institute of Health, will go to Emulate Inc., for the Boston-based companys Organs-on-Chips technology.

The company will use their Brain-Chip system and develop a fully automated research platform for experiments on ISS to be conducted under healthy and inflamed states to assess how space travel affects neuronal function, as well better understand how the human brain operates on Earth.

According to an Emulate press release, the ISS provides an environment where researchers can study human health in microgravity, allowing them to decouple the force of gravity from other effects that can impact brain cell function.

Different experiments will be conducted onboard to see how other space travel stressorshypergravity experienced during launch, reduced availability of oxygen known as hypoxia and increased levels of stress hormonesinfluence brain function.

As we make our Human Emulation System available to labs throughout the world, we continue to push new boundaries, Geraldine Hamilton, Ph.D., president and chief scientific officer of Emulate, said in a statement. Its an exciting opportunity for us to collaborate with experts working in the space program so that we can leverage research with Organ-Chips in space and apply the learnings to human health challenges that are experienced on Earth.

The Human Emulation System is an integrated system that provides a high-fidelity window into the inner-workings of the human body by integrating micro-engineering with living human cells to offer a new method to model human biology.

The researchers will also look at the relationship between inflammation and brain functiona very active area of investigation for furthering understanding of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimers and Parkinsons diseases.

The study was particularly focus on the blood-brain-barrier, which protects the brain by preventing unwanted substances from entering the brain and can be altered during inflammation.

The studies will use the Brain-Chip to evaluate the efficacy of anti-inflammatory therapeutic intervention on the blood-brain barrier in space.

Conducting research with Organs-on-Chips technology on the International Space Station is a remarkable opportunity to understand disease and improve human health, NCATS Director Dr. Christopher Austin said in a statement. Physiological functions in the microgravity of the International Space Station will provide insights that will increase translational effectiveness on Earth, including identifying novel targets for drug discovery and development.

Emulate is expected to adapt the instrumentation of their Human Emulation System to achieve the requirements for use of Organs-on-Chips technology on ISS.

They will also develop space-compatible hardware with their two partnersIRPI and SpaceTango.

The adaptation of our Organs-on-Chips technology for research in space advances new frontiers for designing the functionality of our system to be highly-automated, streamlined, and size-efficient, Chris Hinojosa, director of Discovery at Emulate, said in a statement. We are further optimizing our system to meet the requirements for use in space which, in turn, will enable us to improve our system for use by many researchers and companies on Earth.

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Organs-on-Chips Tech to be Tested at International Space Station - R & D Magazine

Artists concept of a pulsar (blue-white disk in center) pulling in matter from a nearby star (red disk at upper right). The stellar material forms a disk around the pulsar (multicolored ring) before falling on to the surface at the magnetic poles. The pulsars intense magnetic field is represented by faint blue outlines surrounding the pulsar. Credit: NASA

A NASA instrument built to help astronomers learn about the structure and behaviour of neutron stars, super-dense stellar skeletons left behind by massive explosions, has been mounted to an observation post outside the International Space Station after delivery aboard a SpaceX supply ship earlier this month.

Since its arrival inside the trunk of SpaceXs Dragon cargo capsule, the X-ray astronomy experiment has been transferred from the spacecrafts unpressurized carrier to a platform on the space-facing side of the space stations starboard truss backbone, powered up and checked to ensure it can point at stellar targets as the research outpost orbits around Earth.

The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is now going through alignment checks and test scans, allowing scientists to fine-tune the instrument. The calibrations should be complete next month, and NICERs ground team has penciled in July 13 as the first day of the instruments 18-month science mission.

NICERs developers at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center crammed 56 individual X-ray mirrors inside the instruments shell, with matching silicon detectors that will register individual photons of X-ray light, measuring their energies and times of arrival.

NASA says NICER is the first mission dedicated to neutron star research. Astronomers discovered neutron stars in 1967, decades after scientists first predicted their existence.

Neutron stars are left behind after lower-mass stars exploded in violent supernovas at the ends of their lives. The material from the star ends up crammed into an object the size of a city, and astronomers say one of the densest stable forms of matter in the universe resides in the deep interiors of neutron stars.

Scientists compare the density of a neutron star to packing the mass Mount Everest into a sugar cube. One teaspoon of neutron star matter would weight a billion tons on Earth, according to NASA.

NICER flew to the space station inside the rear trunk of a SpaceX Dragon supply ship, which launched June 3 from NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida and berthed with the orbiting outpost June 5.

The stations Canadian-built robotic arm extracted the NICER experiment from the Dragon spacecraft June 11, and the instrument rode to its mounting location on an external platform EXPRESS Logistics Carrier-2 on a mobile rail car down the stations truss.

Mission controllers in Houston commanded and monitored the multi-day transfer from the ground, with the help of the stations two-armed Dextre robot.

The space stations robotic arm installed NICER on its mounting plate June 13, and controllers powered up the instruments electronics the next day, verifying all systems were OK. Range of motion tests were completed Friday after engineers needed extra time to release troublesome launch restraint bolts.

NICER rode to the space station with two other experiments in Dragons trunk.

One of the payloads, sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, will test a new solar array design could be used on future commercial satellites, making the power generators 20 percent lighter and able to fit into a launch package four times smaller than conventional fold-out solar panels.

A commercial Earth-imaging platform developed by Teledyne Brown was also stowed in Dragons trunk. TheMultiple User System for Earth Sensing, or MUSES, can host high-definition and hyperspectral cameras for Earth-viewing.

The MUSES payload was robotically moved to its new home on the space station before NICER, and the solar array testbed was unfurled for seven days of testing this week.

The installation of NICER clears the way for nearly a month of calibrations before it can start regular science observations.

Neutron stars are fantastical stars that are extraordinary in many ways, said Zaven Arzoumanian, NICERs deputy principal investigator and science lead at Goddard. They are the densest objects in the universe, they are the fastest-spinning objects known, they are the most strongly magnetic objects known.

The NICER science team wants to know the structure and composition of neutron stars, which are so extreme that normal atoms are pulverized, freeing subatomic particles like neutrons, protons and electrons.

As soon as you go below the surface of a neutron star, the pressures and densities rise extremely rapidly, and soon youre in an environment that you cant produce in any lab on Earth, said Slavko Bogdanov, a research scientist at Columbia University who leads the NICER light curve modeling group.

Unlike black holes, which develop from explosions of stars more than 20 times the mass of the sun, neutron stars can be directly observed.

A partnership between NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory, NICER should give scientists their first measurements of the size of a neutron star.

They emit light all across the spectrum, from radio waves to visible light up to X-rays and gamma rays, primarily in narrow beams from their magnetic poles, Arzoumanian said. Just like the Earth, the magnetic poles on a neutron star are not necessarily aligned with the spin of the star, so you can get narrow beams that sweep as the star spins, just like a lighthouse.

And if we happen to be in the path of the sweep we see a flash everytime one of these beams go by and the stars from a distance appear to be pulsing, so theyre called pulsars, Arzoumanian said.

Scientists will also demonstrate the potential of using the timing of pulses from neutron stars for deep space navigation.

Were going to look at a subset of pulsars in the sky called millisecond pulsars, said Keith Gendreau, NICERs principal investigator at Goddard. In some of these millisecond pulsars, the pulses that we see are so regular that they remind us of atomic clocks.

Atomic clocks are the basis of the Global Positioning System satellites, according to Gendreau.

NASA calls the navigation demonstration the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT.

Jason Mitchell, SEXTANTs project manager at Goddard, said his team aims to use predictable pulsar signals to locate the space station with a precision of 6 miles, or 10 kilometres, without the aid of GPS satellites or on-board navigation solutions.

Thats a small step compared to GPS, but its a giant step for using only pulsar measurements, and that will help us get into deep space, Mitchell said.

Our goal is to turn the G in GPS into galactic, and make it a Galactic Positioning System, he said.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Experiment devoted to neutron star research installed on space ... - Astronomy Now Online

Zytronic has supplied an 84in diagonal touch sensor to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution (NASM) for a recently unveiled exhibit. The museum, which displays the worlds largest collection of aircraft and spacecraft, welcomes 6.7 million visitors annually, making it the fifth most visited museum in the world.

New Mexico-based Ideum was tasked with updating one of the museums most heavily used exhibits a touch-interactive table that enables visitors to design, customise and launch space station modules of their own creation. The exhibits legacy iteration was projection based; and while it was very popular, the table was out-dated and was becoming harder to maintain.

The Smithsonian was looking for an update of this proven exhibit. We made some minor improvements to the interface and improved the software itself, but the biggest upgrade was to move the exhibit from a projection-based, optical touch table to a highly reliable, hardened and responsive touch table, said Ideums founder, Jim Spadaccini. We effectively rebuilt the entire exhibit from the ground-up to withstand the rigours of nearly constant use at what is one of the busiest museums in United States.

Ideum engineered an 84in touch table and chose to use Zytronics touch sensor because it could be built to Ideums specifications, and was able to deliver the multi-touch capabilities required to support simultaneous use by up to six visitors. Zytronic was heavily involved in the design process, and was able to produce the single, bespoke design 84in touch sensor without any of the upcharges that often accompany custom work from other touchscreen manufacturers. The ZyBrid touch sensor was designed using 6mm-thick thermally toughened Anti-Glare etched glass, providing a combination of smooth finger glide interactivity and impact resistance, and the Ideum table was manufactured in powder coated aluminium for additional durability.

To support the new hardware configuration, Ideum also redesigned the software to include key interactive elements. Specifically, once users complete their space station modules, they are able to virtually launch their module, displaying the final product at the centre of the table. Users can then email a rendering of the final product to friends or family.

http://www.zytronic.co.uk

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Zytronic sensor modifies new space station exhibit - Installation International