Monthly Archives: August 2017

The International Space Station's crew will enjoy views of the Aug. 21 solar eclipse during three successive orbits, giving the astronauts a unique opportunity to take in the celestial show from 250 miles up as the moon's shadow races across from the Pacific Ocean and the continental United States before moving out over the Atlantic.

"Because we're going around the Earth every 90 minutes, about the time it takes the sun to cross the U.S., we'll get to see it three times," Randy Bresnik said Friday during a NASA Facebook session. "The first time will be just off the West Coast, we'll actually cross the path of the sun, and we'll have (a partial) eclipse looking up from the space station."

For the station crew, the first partial eclipse opportunity will begin at 12:33 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) and end 13 minutes later.

Floating in the European Columbus laboratory module, Bresnik showed off a solar filter shipped up to the station earlier, saying "we've got specially equipped cameras that'll have these solar filters on them that allow us to take pictures of the sun. That's going to be pretty neat, we'll have a couple of us shooting that."

Space station astronaut Randy Bresnik shows off a solar filter that will be used by the crew during multiple opportunities to photograph the Aug. 21 solar eclipse from their perch 250 miles up.

NASA TV

One orbit later, the station will cross the path of the eclipse in the extreme northwest following a trajectory that will carry the lab over central Canada on the way to the North Atlantic. From the station's perspective, 44 percent of the sun will be blocked in a partial eclipse. But the crew will be able to see the umbra, where the eclipse is total, near the southern horizon.

"We'll be north of Lake Huron in Canada when we'll be able to see the umbra, or the shadow of the eclipse, actually on the Earth, right around the Tennessee-Kentucky (area), the western side of both those states," Bresnik said. "That'll be an opportunity for us to take video, and take still pictures and kind of show you from the human perspective what that's going to look like."

During the second of three successive orbits, the space station crew, passing just south of Hudson Bay, will have a chance to see and photograph the moon's shadow as it moves across western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee some 1,100 miles away.

NASA

The umbra, defining the 70-mile-wide shadow where the sun's disk will be completely blocked out, will be at its closest to the space station at 2:23 p.m. The moon's shadow will be about 1,100 miles away from the lab complex, but from their perch 250 miles up, the astronauts should be able to photograph the dark patch as they race along in their orbit.

"And then the third pass is actually just off the East Coast," Bresnik said. "We'll come around one more time and from the station side we'll see about an 85 percent eclipse of the sun looking up (at 4:17 p.m.). So we should be able to get really neat photos, with our filters, of the sun being occluded by the moon."

NASA plans to provide four hours of eclipse coverage, starting at noon EDT, on the agency's satellite television channel, in web streams and via social media, including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

"We have a lot of options to share all this," Bresnik told a Facebook questioner. "It's U.S. taxpayer dollars. ... You're paying us to take these pictures, and they go to you. They're free to everybody, and you can access them from the NASA website."

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Enlarge / Karen Nyberg, of Expedition 37, works with a plant experiment in the Destiny laboratory of the space station.

As it nears the end of its second decade, the International Space Station is starting to hit its stride. The large orbital laboratory offers private companies a chance to test business ideas in microgravity, serves as a testbed for astronaut health, and allows NASA to prove technologies for future missions into deep space.

One of the critical technologies NASA will need if it really does send humans beyond the Earth-Moon system within the next few decades is more powerful computers capable of operating in the deep space environment. Presently, the main command computers that operate the space station use Intel i386 processors. However, thatis fine for the station because all of its critical systems are monitored around the clock by ground-based flight controllers who can work in real time with the crew to fix any problems that arise.

If humans do travel to Mars, they will face increasingly long communications delaysstretching out to more than half an hourbetween Earth and their spacecraft. In that situation, the astronauts are likely to become more reliant on more powerful computers and artificial intelligence to make critical course corrections or decisions within seconds or minutes.

A "smart" spacecraft, however, will require a considerably more powerful and robust computer. So NASA andHewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) are taking the first step toward that by launching a "supercomputer" to the International Space Station. It will ride into space as early as Monday aboard SpaceX's next supply mission to the station.

"This goes along with the space station's mission to facilitate exploration beyond low Earth orbit,"Mark Fernandez, HPE's leading payload engineer for the project, told Ars. "If this experiment works, it opens up a universe of possibility for high performance computing in space."

For the year-long experiment, astronauts will install the computer inside a rack in the Destiny module of the space station. It is about the size of two pizza boxes stuck together. And while the device is not exactly a state-of-the-art supercomputerit has a computing speed of about 1 teraflopit is the most powerful computer sent into space. Unlike most computers, it has not been hardened for the radiation environment aboard the space station. The goal is to better understand how the space environment will degrade the performance of an off-the-shelf computer.

During the next year, the spaceborne computer will continuously run through a set of computing benchmarks to determine its performance over time. Meanwhile, on the ground, an identical copy of the computer will run in a lab as a control.

If the test is successful, it will open the door to the use of even more powerful computers aboard the space station and other spacecraft NASA is developing to send humans farther into space. Fernandez said HPE also envisions that scientists could eventually use an on-board supercomputer for data processing of their experiments on the station, rather than clogging the limited bandwidth between space and ground with raw data.

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The NASA podcast, "Houston, We Have a Podcast," conducted a Facebook Live interview with astronaut Jack Fischer. Here, Fischer is seen upside down, as he changed his pose after every question.

How's it going in space? Awesome, just like every day, said NASA astronaut Jack Fischer, speaking live from the International Space Station redefining the meaning of long-distance conversation.

Fischer joined the first live taping of NASA's "Houston, We Have a Podcast" on Thursday afternoon (Aug. 10). The spaceman spoke with two hosts, Gary Jordan and Dan Huot, and answered questions from the people who tuned in to the Facebook Live event, such as, "Do you get insomnia in space?"

The session appeared to be a natural extension for Fischer, who has a strong following on Twitter, at 88,000 followers. A reason he is such a favorite for so many is his unabashed way of expressing the wonders he sees aboard the ISS. Fischer was formerly an Air Force test pilot, and he said he was "lucky" to be selected from out among such a talented applicant pool to launch to the space station in April 2017 as a flight engineer for Expedition 51. This is Fischer's first trip to space. [Southern Lights Dazzle in Spectacular Time-Lapse Video from Space (Video)]

Expedition 51 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of NASA is seen inside the International Space Station in his spacesuit during a fit check, in preparation for the 200th spacewalk at the station. It was also Fischer's first spacewalk, and occurred on May 12, 2017.

Although Fischer is living the astronaut experience for the first time, he is not shy about using funny phrases like "boats of yum" for floating space station meals, or "biggest slice of awesome pie I've ever seen" to describe the landmark 200th space station spacewalk that he had the honor of performing.

During the show, it seemed the hosts of the podcast were just as enthusiastic as the astronaut, and got quite animated about their chance to speak to a space station resident.

"Wrap your mind around it we are talking to somebody in space," NASA spokesperson Dan Huot said during the program's introduction. Two weeks ago, Huot witnessed a colleague in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, get a phone call from the space station, and shared during the live session that it is "so incredible [that] we live in this time."

Jordan's first question to Fischer was, "How's today in space?" and the astronaut, brimming with energy, replied, "It's awesome! Like it is every day!" After every question, Fischer floated into different positions, perhaps showing off his new mastery of moving in microgravity. He did add, "Don't ask Peggy [Whitson] how many things I've knocked over."

Fischer also revealed that in order to adjust to his new home in the best way, he studies which mannerisms the space crew have adopted, asking himself questions like, "How is Peggy cutting her food packet?"

Viewers also learned some less humorous, more personal details about Fischer. He said he's excited about the cancer-combating research the space crew is conducting because his own daughter battled the disease. The newbie astronaut also likes sleeping in microgravity ("like sleeping in an air bed") because on Earth he suffered from back pain as a result of his previous work as an Air Force pilot.

Previous episodes of "Houston, We Have a Podcast" are available on the NASA website.

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin.Follow us@Spacedotcom,FacebookandGoogle+. Original article onSpace.com.

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Space Station 'Air Bed': Astronaut Jack Fisher Gives Some Wild Answers in Live Interview - Space.com

SpaceX is set to embark on its 12th mission to resupply the International Space Station on Monday from Kennedy Space Center.

The launch is scheduled for 12:31 p.m. from the centers historic pad 39A, which was the site of the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket launch that took humans to the moon in 1969. It also saw the first and last space shuttle missions during the 30-year shuttle program.

Check The Palm Beach Post radar map.

Mondays mission will use a Falcon 9 rocket to launch the Dragon vehicle to the space station loaded with more than 6,000-pounds of supplies and experiments.

The Falcon 9s reusable first stage will attempt a controlled landing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

The missions are broadcast live on SpaceXs website, and usually also available on NASA TV.

SpaceXs Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Launch Pad 39A on Feb. 19, 2017

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August 11, 2017 by Francis Reddy From its new vantage point on the International Space Station's Japanese Experiment Module - Exposed Facility, the Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass (ISS-CREAM) mission, shown in the inset illustration, will study cosmic rays to determine their sources and acceleration mechanisms. Credit: NASA

A new experiment set for an Aug. 14 launch to the International Space Station will provide an unprecedented look at a rain of particles from deep space, called cosmic rays, that constantly showers our planet. The Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass mission destined for the International Space Station (ISS-CREAM) is designed to measure the highest-energy particles of any detector yet flown in space.

CREAM was originally developed as a part of NASA's Balloon Program, during which it returned measurements from around 120,000 feet in seven flights between 2004 and 2016.

"The CREAM balloon experiment achieved a total sky exposure of 191 days, a record for any balloon-borne astronomical experiment," said Eun-Suk Seo, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland in College Park and the experiment's principal investigator. "Operating on the space station will increase our exposure by over 10 times, taking us well beyond the traditional energy limits of direct measurements."

Sporting new instruments, as well as refurbished versions of detectors originally used on balloon flights over Antarctica, the refrigerator-sized, 1.4-ton (1,300 kilogram) ISS-CREAM experiment will be delivered to the space station as part of the 12th SpaceX commercial resupply service mission. Once there, ISS-CREAM will be moved to the Exposed Facility platform extending from Kibo, the Japanese Experiment Module.

From this orbital perch, ISS-CREAM is expected to study the "cosmic rain" for three yearstime needed to provide unparalleled direct measurements of rare high-energy cosmic rays.

At energies above about 1 billion electron volts, most cosmic rays come to us from beyond our solar system. Various lines of evidence, including observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, support the idea that shock waves from the expanding debris of stars that exploded as supernovas accelerate cosmic rays up to energies of 1,000 trillion electron volts (PeV). That's 10 million times the energy of medical proton beams used to treat cancer. ISS-CREAM data will allow scientists to examine how sources other than supernova remnants contribute to the population of cosmic rays.

Protons are the most common cosmic ray particles, but electrons, helium nuclei and the nuclei of heavier elements make up a small percentage. All are direct samples of matter from interstellar space. But because the particles are electrically charged, they interact with galactic magnetic fields, causing them to wander in their journey to Earth. This scrambles their paths and makes it impossible to trace cosmic ray particles back to their sources.

"An additional challenge is that the flux of particles striking any detector decreases steadily with higher energies," said ISS-CREAM co-investigator Jason Link, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "So to better explore higher energies, we either need a much bigger detector or much more observing time. Operating on the space station provides us with this extra time."

Large ground-based systems study cosmic rays at energies greater than 1 PeV by making Earth's atmosphere the detector. When a cosmic ray strikes the nucleus of a gas molecule in the atmosphere, both explode in a shower of subatomic shrapnel that triggers a wider cascade of particle collisions. Some of these secondary particles reach detectors on the ground, providing information scientists can use to infer the properties of the original cosmic ray.

These secondaries also produce an interfering background that limited the effectiveness of CREAM's balloon operations. Removing that background is another advantage of relocating to orbit.

With decreasing numbers of particles at increasing energies, the cosmic ray spectrum vaguely resembles the profile of a human leg. At PeV energies, this decline abruptly steepens, forming a detail scientists call the "knee." ISS-CREAM is the first space mission capable of measuring the low flux of cosmic rays at energies approaching the knee.

"The origin of the knee and other features remain longstanding mysteries," Seo said. "Many scenarios have been proposed to explain them, but we don't know which is correct."

Astronomers don't think supernova remnants are capable of powering cosmic rays beyond the PeV range, so the knee may be shaped in part by the drop-off of their cosmic rays in this region.

"High-energy cosmic rays carry a great deal of information about our interstellar neighborhood and our galaxy, but we haven't been able to read these messages very clearly," said co-investigator John Mitchell at Goddard. "ISS-CREAM represents one significant step in this direction."

ISS-CREAM detects cosmic ray particles when they slam into the matter making up its instruments. First, a silicon charge detector measures the electrical charge of incoming particles, then layers of carbon provide targets that encourage impacts, producing cascades of particles that stream into electrical and optical detectors below while a calorimeter determines their energy. Two scintillator-based detector systems provide the ability to discern between singly charged electrons and protons. All told, ISS-CREAM can distinguish electrons, protons and atomic nuclei as massive as iron as they crash through the instruments.

ISS-CREAM will join two other cosmic ray experiments already working on the space station. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), led by an international collaboration sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, is mapping cosmic rays up to a trillion electron volts, and the Japan-led Calorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), also located on the Kibo Exposed Facility, is dedicated to studying cosmic ray electrons.

Overall management of ISS-CREAM and integration for its space station application was provided by NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore. ISS-CREAM was developed as part of an international collaboration led by the University of Maryland at College Park, which includes teams from NASA Goddard, Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, and Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, as well as collaborating institutions in the Republic of Korea, Mexico and France.

Explore further: NASA's scientific balloon program reaches new heights

For decades, NASA has released enormous scientific balloons into Earth's atmosphere, miles above the altitude of commercial flights. The Balloon Program is currently preparing new missions bearing sensitive instruments, including ...

A combined analysis of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), a ground-based observatory in Namibia, suggests the center of our Milky Way contains a "trap" that ...

The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is targeted for launch August 14 from Kennedy Space Center for its twelfth commercial resupply (CRS-12) mission to the International Space Station.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In May a University of Maryland-led team of scientists reported some previously unknown features in the energy spectra of cosmic ray nuclei, which have been studied for almost 100 years. Cosmic rays were ...

Working in the harsh conditions of Antarctica, Maryland researchers are creating new ways of detecting cosmic rays, high energy particles that bombard the Earth from beyond our solar system.

Roughly once a year, the smallest Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment, LHC-forward (LHCf), is taken out of its dedicated storage on the site near the ATLAS experiment, reinstalled in the LHC tunnel, and put to use investigating ...

On Sept. 30, 2014, multiple NASA observatories watched what appeared to be the beginnings of a solar eruption. A filamenta serpentine structure consisting of dense solar material and often associated with solar eruptionsrose ...

The world's smallest space probe, conceived at Menlo Park's visionary Breakthrough Starshot, has phoned home.

A new experiment set for an Aug. 14 launch to the International Space Station will provide an unprecedented look at a rain of particles from deep space, called cosmic rays, that constantly showers our planet. The Cosmic Ray ...

The universe is incomprehensibly vast, with billions of other planets circling billions of other stars. The potential for intelligent life to exist somewhere out there should be enormous.

Scientists have helped solve the mystery of what lies beneath the surface of Neptune the most distant planet in our solar system. A new study sheds light on the chemical make-up of the planet, which lies around 4.5 billion ...

In 1887, American astronomer Lewis Swift discovered a glowing cloud, or nebula, that turned out to be a small galaxy about 2.2 billion light years from Earth. Today, it is known as the "starburst" galaxy IC 10, referring ...

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WASHINGTON, Aug. 11, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two Russian cosmonauts will venture outside the International Space Station Thursday, Aug. 17, to deploy several nanosatellites, collect research samples and perform structural maintenance. Coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 10 a.m. EDT on NASA Television and the agency's website.

Expedition 52 Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will don their spacesuits and exit the station's Pirs airlock at approximately 10:45 a.m.

Ryazanskiy will begin the schedule of extravehicular activities with the manual deployment of five nanosatellites from a ladder outside the airlock. The satellites, each of which has a mass of about 11 pounds, have a variety of purposes.

One of the satellites, with casings made using 3-D printing technology, will test the effect of the low-Earth-orbit environment on the composition of 3-D printed materials. Another satellite contains recorded greetings to the people of Earth in 11 languages. A third satellite commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch and the 160th anniversary of the birth of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

The spacewalkers also will collect residue samples from various locations outside the Russian segment of the station and install handrails and struts to facilitate future excursions.

Yurchikhin will be designated extravehicular crew member 1 (EV1) for this spacewalk, the ninth of his career. Ryazanskiy, embarking on his fourth spacewalk, will be extravehicular crew member 2 (EV2). Both will wear Russian Orlan spacesuits bearing blue stripes. The spacewalk will be the 202nd in support of space station assembly and maintenance and the seventh spacewalk this year.

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Ready For Launch: Deerfield Student Experiment Headed To Space Station Patch.com It's made up of five Deerfield High School students who won the top division at the inaugural Go For Launch! program last year, and the team is set to witness the launch of its student-designed experiment up to the International Space Station (ISS) on ...

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After Sept. 13, you'll want to take a closer look at the International Space Station as it passes by in the night sky, because a Chanhassen NASA astronaut will be aboard.

Well, OK. Mark Vande Hei doesn't live in Chanhassen. But his parents Tom and Mary Vande Hei do.

Last Saturday, they proudly hosted a bon voyage party. He heads to the space station on Sept. 13, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He'll be in space for five and a half months.

Before guests arrived, Vande Hei, 50, sat down to talk about his upcoming mission.

He flies to Russia on Saturday, Aug. 12, to prepare. Then Sept. 13, he and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, and cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will launch to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft.

Once there, they'll participate in scientific projects and experiments, and help with the operation and maintenance of the space station. He'll be living in zero gravity, bunking in a cubby about the size of a shower stall, and enjoying the greatest view of Earth from the cupola of the space station.

Vande Hei grew up in Plymouth, and is a Benilde-St. Margaret's School graduate. As a kid, he thought that being an astronaut "was cool," Vande Hei said. "You think of astronauts being super heroes, like Superman."

He graduated from St. John's University and was commissioned in the U.S. Army through ROTC. He was assigned to Italy, and later Iraq, as a combat engineer.

The Army sent him to Stanford University for a master's of science degree. In 1999, he became an assistant professor of physics at the United States Military Academy in West Point. It was there that Vande Hei switched his focus to space operations.

After a tour of duty in Iraq, he became a space operations officer. In 2006, he reported to Johnson Space Center as a capsule communicator in the Mission Control Center Houston. In 2008, NASA started asking for astronaut applicants with military backgrounds. His boss passed him an application.

"I thought that would be amazing, but the competition is so tough."

He credits his wife, Julie, for encouraging him.

"Mark, youve got to do it, otherwise youll never know," he recalled. "Without Julie, I may never have ever gotten off couch."

He passed NASA's thorough physical and a series of interviews and psychological testing, a process that winnows applicants down to 40 or 50 individuals.

Applicants undergo a round of interviews with a panel of up to 12 or 15 engineers, astronauts, flight directors and high-level managers from both Johnson and Kennedy space centers; if you're called back, the next round of interviews takes a week.

"The first interview " Vande Hei shook his head at the memory. "They said, 'Tell us about yourself.' Fifty-nine minutes later, I realized I had talked the whole time." But he made the cut, and paced himself. "I made the second interview more conversational."

Like any competitive situation, he and the other applicants would gather during their free time, comparing notes. "What questions did they askyou? You hear all the horror stories," Vande Hei said. "You don't know what questions they'll ask."

"By convincing myself I wouldnt get the job," Vande Hei said. "I looked at it as having a deluxe tourist pass into areas of NASA no other person would have an opportunity to see. I approached it with curiosity as opposed to 'My whole life rests on this entire hour,' especially if your dream was to become an astronaut."

He sees himself as enormously fortunate. When speaking to school kids, he's a little embarrassed admitting being an astronaut wasn't his No. 1 career goal.

"I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up," Vande Hei said. "But I kept saying yes to any opportunities that let me keep learning more."

Vande Hei was assigned to a mission in 2015, and has been in training for it ever since. He spends half his time in Russia and half in the U.S.

Training for his first flight into space has less to do with the physical effects of flight, but learning the instrument panel and controls that get you to the space station. Astronauts train in a space craft mock-up with full-scale models of the interior. Space walks are practiced underwater.

Astronauts conduct all types of science experiments during their time aboard the space station, using themselves as subjects for blood draws, muscle and bone density tests, and other physiological studies.

And they are trained as medics, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and any other skill set necessary to ensure a well-run and maintained workshop and living quarters in the isolation of space. Vande Hei said they even learn dental procedures in the event an astronaut has a dental emergency.

It's a multi-team effort as all the training drills include the ground control team. "The space station is really flown by the ground crew," Vande Hei said, "and they become more and more important the farther we get from earth." Drills test not only the astronauts but even more crucially, mission control.

Earlier this year, Vande Hei had a raffle at his alma mater Benilde-St. Margaret's. He'll take the two winners' high school ID badges up to the space station with him, giving them bragging rights when he returns them in 2018. He plans on taking family photos with him that he'll shoot selfies with. And, of course, he'll have his wedding ring.

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To infinity and beyond: Chan couple's son heads to space station - SW News Media