Posts tagged space station
Space Oddity: Astronaut Ends Mission With Music Video
Wonderful tribute to a Bowie classic. Have a safe trip home, Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko!
Space Station Crew Prepare for Emergency Spacewalk
After the discovery of a leak of ammonia coolant supplying one of the International Space Station solar arrays on Thursday, NASA managers have decided to plan for an unscheduled spacewalk on Saturday to repair the problem. The final decision about whether to go ahead with the extravehicular activity will be made late on Friday. Read more.
NASA has also released a video showing the ammonia flakes drifting into space.
Dark Matter Found? Orbital Experiment Detects Hints
Around 400,000 positron detections have been confirmed in this first batch of data — positrons that are of energies consistent with the signature of dark matter annihilation.
I have nothing much to add except to say… this is pure squeezed awesomejuice!
Space Station Berths a Dragon, Again
At 5:31 am EST Sunday morning, International Space Station astronauts guided the Canadarm2 robotic arm to an earlier-than-scheduled grappling maneuver with the SpaceX Dragon capsule. The grapple was scheduled for 6:31 am ET. At 8:56 am EST, the robotic arm guided the capsule for installation onto the Earth-facing port of the space station’s Harmony module. Read more
Awesome news!
SpaceX Aims for March 1 Dragon Launch
Like the company’s two previous flights, the rocket will carry a Dragon cargo capsule loaded with food, supplies and science experiments for the International Space Station, a permanently staffed research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above Earth. Read more…
SpaceX is getting stuff DONE!
Astronaut, Cosmonaut to Spend Year in Space: NASA and its partners in the International Space Station are interested in learning more about how the human body fares during long-duration stays in space. Typically, crews spend four- to six months living aboard the station, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth.
Would you spend a year on the space station? Might need a good book… Read more
mm, chocolate-vanilla swirlice cream!
what, no peanut butter?!
Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX for short, launched a rocket with a capsule carrying supplies for the International Space Station on Sunday, officially beginning a new era in which NASA will count on private companies to carry cargo and, eventually, people into orbit. The unmanned Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, the billionaire PayPal founder, declared the liftoff a success. Despite a problem with one of the rocket’s nine engines, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is expected to dock with the space station on schedule Wednesday. SpaceX completed a test mission in May, but this is its first paid supply run to the space station. What will this trip mean for the future of space flight? Here, a brief guide:
What is SpaceX delivering to the space station?
It’s taking 1,000 pounds of supplies, including food, clothing, gear, and science experiments. The scientific projects include 23 built by students, including one designed by California middle school students to see how Silly Putty works in zero-gravity. The equipment includes a freezer to store laboratory samples at temperatures as low as 300 degrees below zero. The ship is also carrying a treat for the three people on board the space station — chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream.
Granted, fish aren’t *swimming* in space yet, but their high-tech microgravity marine habitat has just been delivered to the space station by the Japanese cargo spacecraft HTV-3:
Yes, it’s the moment we’ve all (secretly) been waiting for: Fish In Space!
Let’s just hope they do better than the Space Butterflies.
From Discovery News space blogger Jason Major:
The image above, captured by Expedition 31 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), shows an enigmatic atmospheric phenomenon known as a red sprite hovering just above a bright flash of lightning in a thunderstorm over Myanmar.
Space Station Crew to Return to Earth Sunday
Three astronauts on the ISS will return home to Earth after more than six months in orbit.
Image: Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko (center), along with NASA astronaut Don Pettit (left) and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers. Credit: NASA
Dragon Capsule Berthed at Space Station
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station tucked the newly arrived Dragon cargo capsule into a berthing port on the Harmony connecting node just after noon on Friday, capping a key test flight for NASA’s new commercial space initiative.
The capsule, owned by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is the first privately owned vessel to reach the orbital outpost, which flies about 240 miles above Earth.
A Squashed Space Station Supermoon
On Monday, Discovery News asked for our readers’ photographs of the weekend’s “supermoon.” Unfortunately, we totally overlooked a photographer who was orbiting 250 miles over our heads who had a front row seat for the bright lunar event. European astronaut André Kuipers watched the perigee moon set over the Earth’s atmosphere on May 5 from the International Space Station, but it looked remarkably different from how the supermoon looked for most of us on the ground.
As seen from Kuipers’ vantage point, the reflected light from the bottom of the lunar disk had to travel through more atmospheric gases than light from the top of the disk. The light from the bottom of the lunar disk was therefore strongly refracted, causing the light to bend upward, giving the moon a squashed appearance (above). An earlier photograph by Kuipers (below) shows the supermoon in all its glory, completely free from any atmospheric distortions — but the “squashed supermoon” is beautiful in its own right.
Our Tumblr and Twitter follower photos here
