Daily Archives: January 26, 2020

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are taking their third spacewalk outside the International Space Station today (Jan. 20) to replace the orbiting laboratories aging batteries and you can catch the epic action live online.

The spacewalk began at 6:35 a.m. EST (1335 GMT) today, marking the third time an all-woman team has worked together outside the station. You can watch the spacewalk live here and on Space.com's homepage, courtesy of NASA TV.

Meir and Koch are wrapping up work that began in October 2019, to upgrade the batteries that store power generated by the space station's solar array. Their first spacewalk (which was the first all-woman spacewalk ever) took place Oct. 18. A second spacewalk successfully wrapped up Jan. 15.

Related: The amazing spacewalks of Expedition 61 in photos

Astronauts use power in space for everything from lighting rooms to conducting experiments. The upgraded batteries are lithium-ion batteries, which are expected to last longer and to generate more power than the previous generation nickel-hydrogen batteries that were installed several years ago.

If Koch and Meir finish the last battery spacewalk as expected, there's another spacewalk by other astronauts coming shortly. NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Italian ISS commander Luca Parmitano are expected to exit the ISS Saturday (Jan. 25), but for a different task.

Parmitano and Morgan spent much of the end of 2019 working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which is an aging dark matter experiment on the ISS. The astronauts, in concert with teams on the ground, are doing a complex repair that NASA says is the toughest work the agency has done in space since the last Hubble Space Telescope upgrade in 2009.

The duo completed three of four planned AMS spacewalks in 2019. In December, NASA warned that the battery spacewalks (which are more urgent than the AMS spacewalks) and a busy schedule of visiting space vehicles could delay the last AMS spacewalk.

As of this week, however, NASA is projecting all spacewalks will be finished before half of the six-person Expedition 61 crew returns to Earth in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Three astronauts will remain in space as NASA works out the sequence of future missions, which is under discussion as final tests are being run for American commercial crew vehicles to fly astronauts. (Currently, all astronauts fly to the ISS using the Soyuz, but NASA is seeking to shift most of their astronauts to commercial crew vehicles.)

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Spacewalking astronauts are upgrading the space station today. Here's how to watch it live. - Space.com

Does this have anything to do with cars? Not at all, but we like Lego, space is cool, and what the heck, it's Sunday. Lego is celebrating 10 years since it launched Lego Ideas, a platform for fans to concoct new creations that otherwise didn't already exist. To mark the occasion, Lego took one of the community's ideas, a small-scale model of the International Space Station and turned it into a real, for-sale product. The design comes from Christophe Ruge, and it will be available to buy on February 1, 2020.

Lego already offers numerous space-themed kits and toys. There's a lunar space station, a deep space rocket with a launch control building, a NASA Apollo 11 lunar lander, a shuttle transporter, a Mars research shuttle, a space research and development people pack, and many more. This is the first time, however, a replica of the International Space Station will be available.

The new kit includes a 148-page instruction booklet that explains how to put together 864 pieces. When assembled, it measures 7 inches high, 12 inches long, and 19 inches wide. It sits on a black pedestal stand and also comes with its own space shuttle (unlike the real I.S.S.). Several detailed features make the kit as realistic as possible, including a dock for the space shuttle, a poseable Canadarm2, two rotating joints, and eight adjustable solar panels.

Technically, the idea is not new. Ruge, a 42-year-old Germany native, submitted the kit, along with several other space kits, roughly three years ago. It gained thousands of votes of support from the Lego Ideas family, but it never made it to home base.

"We decided to dive into the archives of Lego Ideas projects that had gathered 10,000 supporters but hadnt quite made it into production," the Lego Group Engagement Manager Hasan Jensen said in an online announcement. "We decided that one of these great ideas should have a second chance, so we thought we would turn the Lego Ideas process upside down. This time we started the internal review and came up with four exciting projects that we thought showed the greatest potential and then it was up to the Lego Ideas community to decide which of the four would be made into Lego Ideas set number 29."

The initial project was built on a larger scale and took Ruge, a computer engineer who works for a company that builds trains, more than three years to design. This time around, however, the kit was much smaller, so it only took him about four days to create (Read more about Ruge and his process at Lego Ideas).

The official kit will be available online and at Lego retailers on February 1 for $69.99, plus tax. Or, if technology, global collaboration, and the search for the meaning of the universe is of no interest to you, Lego is also selling a Flintstones kit with the Flintstones car for $59.99.

See original here:
A Lego International Space Station kit is on the way - Autoblog

Riding high but not that high the International Space Station will pass over and within sight of Central Virginians on Wednesday from 6:35 to 6:40 p.m. (It will do so again Thursday night, but the weather is likelier to be cloudy, so Wednesday is the night to get your view.) The space station will be 260 miles above Earth, traveling from southwest to northeast.

The ISS looks like a very bright star moving slowly across the sky, University of Virginia astronomy professor Ed Murphy said Friday in a newsletter to members of the Friends of the McCormick Observatory. It is visible when the sun has set for us on the ground, but the sun is still shining at the altitude of the ISS.

What viewers will see is sunlight reflecting off the solar panels of the space station.

Murphy said the space stations orbit is oriented in a way that makes it visible to Central Virginians every few months as the craft travels southwest to northeast, with six astronauts currently aboard. A few weeks later, it passes over again, traveling northwest to southeast. Those next passes will occur in early February.

Murphy recommends that space station-gazers go outside this evening a few minutes before the pass to allow time for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Face the southwest. Then, a minute or two after 6:35, if the sky is reasonably clear of clouds, you will see the space station appear like a particularly bright star moving fairly slowly upward across the sky. After a few minutes, as it glides toward the northeast, it will pass into the shadow of the Earth and quickly fade from view. The craft is traveling at 17,100 miles per hour, but appears to move slowly because of its distance from Earth.

Aboard the space station are NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch, who on Monday Martin Luther King Jr. Day replaced some batteries on the craft, and thereby completed historys third-ever all-woman spacewalk. (They accomplished the first all-female spacewalk last October.)

This has really been an amazing experience, Meir is quoted by media as having said after Mondays expedition outside the ship. Today is also Martin Luther King Day, a personal hero for both me and Christina. I will borrow his wise words for this moment: We may have all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now. When one has as spectacular a view as we had today looking down on our one common home, planet Earth, his words resonate loudly.

Tonight, Central Virginians have an opportunity to look up to the astronauts, as they sail overhead looking at us.

For more information about ISS tracking, click here. For information about the Friends of the McCormick Observatory, click here.

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International Space Station to Pass Within View Wednesday Evening - UVA Today

It turns out that, even in space, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookiessmell incredible.

Recently, a batch of chocolate chip cookies the first food ever baked in space returned to Earth aboard aSpaceX Dragon capsule (three of the five cookies, which were baked one at a time, were returned to Earth). The cookies started out from the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel chain as Earth-made dough, which launched to the International Space Station along with the Zero G oven (the first oven designed to work in space) on Nov. 2, 2019.

Now, following the cookies' return, we have the final results from this delicious experiment.

Related:Space Food Evolution: How Astronaut Chow Has Changed (Photos)

So, first things first, the astronauts aboard the space station were able to smell the second, third, fourth and fifth cookies they baked, a press representative said in an email statement (the first cookie turned out underbaked and didn't cook long enough to emit an aroma). In space, even without gravity, smells travel via individual aroma molecules. In the microgravity environment aboard the space station, these molecules travel in whatever direction they are moved. (On Earth, the aroma molecules move in all directions due to random collisions with air molecules.)

Now, smelling the chocolate-chip cookies on the space station, where astronauts can eat only "space foods," you might assume that the spacefliers wouldn't be able to resist sneaking a bite of a freshly baked cookie. However, "while the brand's chocolate chip cookies were likely fit for consumption after they were baked on the ISS, additional testing is required before any food can be considered officially 'edible,'" the representative told Space.com in an email.

"But don't worry," the representative added, "astronauts aboard the ISS enjoyed special pre-baked DoubleTree chocolate-chip cookies that were sent up on Nov. 2, 2019!"

Related:DoubleTree Offers Limited Edition 'Cookies in Space' Tin

Before the cookie dough headed to the space station, there was speculation about how the dough would bake in microgravity. Would it puff up and bake into a sphere? Would it look like a regular cookie? Would the cookie take longer to bake? Would it take less time?

On Earth, the average cookie made with this DoubleTree chocolate-chip cookie dough took 16-18 minutes to bake in a convection oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degrees Celsius). The astronauts, who baked the first four cookies at 300 F and the fifth cookie at 325 F (165 C), were instructed to figure out exactly how long it would take to properly bake a cookie in space.

In baking the first cookie, they found that after 25 minutes it was underbaked. The second cookie only started to fill the station with its delicious aroma after a whopping 75 minutes in the oven.

The cookies that seemed to bake the best were the fourth and fifth cookies, which baked for 120 and 130 minutes, respectively, and were then left to cool outside the oven for 25 and 10 minutes, respectively.

So, were they spherical? Weird looking? Apparently not. The cookies looked just like cookies baked on Earth, according to a DoubleTree statement.

"Perfecting the baking process for our DoubleTree cookies took time, even on Earth, so we were excited to learn that our cookies appear to look and smell the same on the ISS as they do in our hotels," Shawn McAteer, the senior vice president and global head of DoubleTree by Hilton, said in the statement. "The innovation displayed throughout this experiment and emphasis on making long-duration space travel more hospitable underscores our ongoing commitment to ensuring guests always have a comfortable stay, wherever they may travel."

Want to see the cookies for yourself? First, the cookies will undergo more testing, informing our understanding of how food bakes in microgravity so that future crewed missions might be more comfortable, according to the statement.

Then, after testing, the cookies are to be preserved and put on display. One of the cookies has also been offered as a donation to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where it is being considered for display in the collection.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Read more here:
Houston, we have a bake-off! We finally know what happens when you bake cookies in space - Space.com

Cape Town-based Xinabox R&D, a developer of modular electronics and IoT kits for rapid prototyping and STEM education, is partnering with U.S-based Quest for Space to launch experiments to the International Space Station (ISS).

The XinaBox experiment alongside 17 other experiments affiliated with the Quest for Space Program will be launched to the ISS on 7 February 2020, onboard a Northrop Grumman NG-13 Launch Vehicle on a resupply mission from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia. Fourteen of these experiment modules are being developed by Partner Schools as part of the Quest for Space Program, one by Texas A & M University, and two Quest Improved Design Qualification Units.

San Jose-based Valley Christian High School, started the Space Lab Program in 2009 to enable students to research, design and build unique science experiments that operate aboard the ISS for a minimum of 30 days. Quest for Space is a non-profit focused on making these and other programs available to schools globally.

In an email chat with Space in Africa, Dan Saldana, Director of ISS and Satellite Programs at Valley Christian Schools, notes that the Space Lab Program was developed to help students identify and enhance their passion by applying their technical and managerial skills in the development of their unique science experiment. The goal is for the students to develop, launch and perform a post-flight analysis on their experiment within the school year.

Since the first launch to the ISS in January 2010 onboard a Japanese HIV-3 ISS Service Vehicle carrying a student plant growth experiment, Quest for Space has expanded its program beyond the shores of the United States, to include partner schools from Finland, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia. As of today, Quest for Space and its Partner Schools have launched a total of 138 student experiments to the ISS.

The launch in February will include the XinaBox experiment as a pilot to demonstrate cutting-edge technology of the XK92 xChips Xinaboxs latest kit developed for the ISS mission. Schools across the globe will be engaged to concurrently collect data, with their XK92 kit, for data analysis and interpretation on Earth. Student teams will compare their data with that recovered from the ISS XK92, upon its return to Earth on the SpaceX 20 mission.

While onboard the ISS, the XinaBox payload will collect various datasets ranging from temperature to humidity, pressure, volatile organic compounds, g-force and acceleration. The datasets will be stored on a SD card to be assessed once the experiments return to Earth after some weeks.

The XinaBox payload, just as other Quest for Space experiments, will independently carry out its research after it is unpacked, without requiring assistance from the astronauts on the ISS.

During the mission, schools and engineering clubs within the XinaBox ecosystem will develop and run mirror experiments using the XK92 xChips to collect and analyze data to be compared with the dataset on the SD card from the ISS.

Schools can record more data at the same time, which means that they are not only able to record their data and compare it with the data from the International Space Station, but they can also look at the data from other institutions that have conducted the experiment anywhere in the world, Bjarke Gotfredsen, the inventor and co-founder of XinaBox told Space in Africa.

The idea is to have students in a classroom mirror science experiments conducted on the International Space Station and experience the dream of collecting space data for scientific research, Judi Sandrock, co-founder of XinaBox, said, pointing out that they intend making available the ISS mission payload as a learning kit for schools to build upon.

We would like the students to come up with different ideas of what they could learn from the large selection of valuable data sets collected on the SD card while onboard the ISS. We are looking at the mission from a scientific inquiry perspective. This will spur students curiosity and enable schools to expand the outcomes of the research.

Commenting on how the mission aligns with the goals of the Quest for Space Program, Saldana said the program takes the student from the concept of their idea to the shipping of their final product through analyzing the experimental results upon its return. Students have hands-on experience specifying, designing, and building their one of a kind experiment by meeting defined milestones and presenting their design to NASA Safety for review.

Three things make the XinaBox xChips viable for many more schools around the world. One is that they dont need a lab to put it together. Two, the kit itself is not expensive compared to what people normally send to the International Space Station. Three, because it takes up so little space, it can be easily packaged together with the Quest for Space program. These three factors help to expand or open up space for many more schools, Gotfredsen said.

While the launch in February 2020 is a proof of concept for what Judi Sandrock believes is the first of many in the companys partnership with Quest for Space, it is important to point out that this is not XinaBoxs first orbit experience.

On 17 April 2019, the ThinSat Programme launched a constellation of 55 student picosatellites into space, using XinaBox as the payload to study weather conditions and carry out scientific experiments in Extreme Low Earth Orbits. XinaBox supplied the kits and content for building the picosatellites and supported sixteen schools in the Western Cape of South Africa that collectively developed one of the picosatellites.

Xinabox co-founders believe the new partnership between Quest for Space and XinaBox will broaden opportunities for schools in emerging regions, particularly in Africa, to send experiments to the ISS through the Quest for Space Program.

Judi said the Quest for Space Program is comparatively attractive to schools across the world, adding that the introduction of Xinabox will further lower the cost considerably because the XinaBox xChips take less space and energy.

We look forward to having Partner Schools from Africa and other parts of the world join our Quest for Space Programs, Saldana said.

All of the Quest for Space Lab Partner Schools are invited to attend and compete in the annual American Society for Gravitational and Space Research (ASGSR) Conference student poster competition. The students prepare and present a poster on their experiment to the NASA Research Scientists, and the winners get cash prizes and an opportunity to present to and network with NASAs top research scientists.

The Quest for Space Lab educational research flight opportunity was made available to Valley Christian High School of San Jose, California, via a partnership with the Quest Institute for Quality Education, and by Space Tango who provides both the payload architecture and in-flight operations on the International Space Station.

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XinaBox, Quest for Space To Send Experiments To The International Space Station - Space in Africa

ESA and Airbus have signed a contract for the Bartolomeo platform on the International Space Station.

The Bartolomeo platform from Airbus opens new opportunities for research on the International Space Station (ISS). The European Space Agency ESA has now booked a payload slot for a Norwegian instrument to monitor plasma density in the Earths atmosphere.

The Bartolomeo platform named after Christopher Columbus younger brother is currently in the final stage of launch preparation at Airbus in Bremen, Germany, and is scheduled for launch to the ISS in March 2020. Bartolomeo is developed on a commercial basis by Airbus using its own investment funds and will be operated in cooperation with ESA.

The platform can accommodate up to 12 different experiment modules, supplying them with power and providing data transmission to Earth. Bartolomeo is suitable for many different experiments. Due to the unique position of the platform with a direct view of Earth from 400 kilometres, Earth observation including trace gas measurements or CO2 monitoring of the atmosphere are possible, with data useful for climate protection or for use by private data service providers.

The Multi-Needle Langmuir Probe (m-NLP) is an instrument from the University of Oslo and the Norwegian company Eidsvoll Electronics to measure ionospheric plasma densities. With its relatively low orbit, the ISS passes near the peak plasma density of the ionosphere. The m-NLP is currently the only instrument in the world capable of resolving ionospheric plasma density variations at spatial scales below one metre. It will gather valuable data from the equatorial and mid-latitude ionosphere, enabling study of the dynamic processes in this region in unprecedented detail. The Langmuir Probe will map plasma characteristics around the globe.

The mission is financed through the ESA PRODEX programme and supported by ESAs Directorate Human & Robotic Exploration. The payload is scheduled to launch on ISS resupply flight NG-14 in October 2020 and will be the first payload to be installed on the Bartolomeo Platform outside the European Columbus Module.

Together with UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), Airbus is currently inviting tenders for further research opportunities on the platform, in particular to enable research institutions from developing countries to participate in scientific space research.

Originally posted here:
ESA, Airbus join forces on the Space Station - Spatial Source

SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets on Sunday, only to watch it erupt in a ball of fire.

But the explosion was intentional and went exactly as planned. It was the final step in a long process of testing the company's Crew Dragon capsule a spaceship designed to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Boeing has designed a similar spacecraft, and the two companies are racing to fly NASA astronauts on US-made spacecraft for the first time in nearly a decade.

Since NASA ended its space-shuttle program in 2011, the agency has relied exclusively on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from orbit in Soyuz spacecraft. But those seats have gotten increasingly expensive: A single round-trip seat now costs NASA about $85 million. So the space agency launched its Commercial Crew program to spur the development of new American-made spacecraft.

The program put private companies in competition for billions of dollars' worth of government contracts. SpaceX and Boeing came out on top.

SpaceX's latest test has teed Elon Musk's rocket company up to launch its first-ever human passengers this spring.

"This critical test puts us on the cusp of once again launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil," Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, tweeted shortly after the mission.

Here's how SpaceX and Boeing became NASA's best shot at resurrecting American spaceflight.

See the article here:
How SpaceX and Boeing became NASA's best shot to revive US spaceflight - Business Insider

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The French national space agency National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which is collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in the Gaganyaan project, will also partner with the latter in the development of Indias planned space station.

A CNES official, speaking on behalf of the president of CNES, Jean-Yves Le Gall, told The New Indian Express that the French agency and its industry partners have gained vast experience from the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and its spin-offs such as rendezvous operations with the International Space Station (ISS). French and European partners can bring the skills they have acquired in developing and operating systems and dedicated infrastructure for long-term six-month flights of European astronauts on the ISS, he said.

While reiterating support for the Gaganyaan missions, he termed it as "the first step towards future collaboration on the development of Indias planned space station". "We want cooperation between France and India in human spaceflight to evolve into a long-term partnership along the same lines as our 15-year collaboration on climate-monitoring satellites and 50 years of working together on launchers," Le Gall said.

We have confidence in ISROs ability to partner in human space exploration and we are ready to provide all the support we can to develop the space station. This also means India should be closely involved in the future international space station programmes that will succeed ISS, commensurate with its place in the world, he said at an event organised by ISRO in the city recently.

French experts may train Indian astronauts

Meanwhile, teams of CNES and ISRO have finalised drafting the agreement between the two space agencies in which French experts are likely to provide training to Indian astronauts. They are likely to be trained by Novespace, a CNES subsidiary, on parabolic flights aboard the Air Zero Gravity, which is a modified version of an Airbus A310, a CNES official said. This will provide the astronauts a zero-gravity environment on Earth.

Expert services will be provided at CADMOS (the control centre in charge of operating the science and physiological experiments on the ISS) at MEDES space medicine research facility and hospital, in collaboration with ESAs European Astronaut Centre (EAC). The CADMOS conceives and prepares the instruments and equipment that Europes astronauts use on the ISS, the official said.

The four Indian astronauts are set to go to Russias Star City for training, ISRO Chairman K Sivan had told TNIE. The training is said to last for a year (2021) before they return to India for another round of training.The CNES will also provide India equipment for life support that astronauts will wear during Gaganyaan, scheduled for 2022. They will be using several French devices for health monitoring eyewear device featuring a bluetooth connected garment which is equipped with biomedical sensors, aquapad cotton for quick and easy testing of water, specific equipment for waste management, or even food packaging.

They may even use other devices such as the ECHO, an ultrasound system tele-operated by doctors on the ground, or the Cardiomed to measure cardiovascular activity. CNES expert Dr Brigitte Godard has already spent time during July and August in Bengaluru to train physicians and personnel, said the official.

The Indian physicians and engineers involved in Gaganyaan will also be trained in France in the coming months. Training sessions will be for two weeks each, with teams coming and going. The training will be given at MEDES space medicine and physiology institute in Toulouse and by the teams at ESAs astronaut training centre in Cologne.

Excerpt from:
French agency CNES to aid ISROs space station project - The New Indian Express