1. Space Station

Category Archives: Space Station

Geoflow – "Mini-Earth" to Produce New Findings Concerning Earths Convection Currents on ISS

Posted on by

Geoflow, the geophysical experimental system built by Airbus Defence and Space on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), is once again being used on board the International Space Station (ISS).

The photo shows German astronaut Alexander Gerst starting to reinstall the system. In the coming weeks, the laboratorys scientific instruments and the operational readiness of the systems ground segment will first be checked before a new series of experiments can be started.

The purpose of Geoflow research, led by the Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU) in Cottbus, Germany, is to learn more about convection currents beneath the Earths surface like magma movement. The Cottbus experiment recreates a kind of miniature Earth. Thanks to zero gravity conditions, its currents can be studied in the space laboratory under force fields that can be modified. This is achieved by using a viscous fluid to fill the space between two concentric spheres of varying temperature, which rotate when a high voltage is applied (to simulate an artificial gravity field). A laser-based camera system is inserted into the fluid to photograph the pattern of the magma currents.

Since 2012, the module built in Friedrichshafen, Germany, already has proven in two series of experiments that it can successfully simulate currents in the Earths mantle.

About Airbus Defence and Space Airbus Defence and Space is a division of Airbus Group formed by combining the business activities of Cassidian, Astrium and Airbus Military. The new division is Europes number one defence and space enterprise, the second largest space business worldwide and among the top ten global defence enterprises. It employs some 40,000 employees generating revenues of approximately 14 billion per year.

Press Contacts: Ralph Heinrich + 49 89 607 33971 ralph.heinrich@astrium.eads.net Astrid Emerit + 33 1 39 06 89 43 astrid.emerit@astrium.eads.net Mathias Pikelj + 49 7545 8 9123 mathias.pikelj@astrium.eads.net

Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.

Read more:

Geoflow - "Mini-Earth" to Produce New Findings Concerning Earths Convection Currents on ISS

Episode 1: A Space Station in Ruins… | Let’s Play: Alien: Isolation – Nostromo Edition – Video

Posted on by


Episode 1: A Space Station in Ruins... | Let #39;s Play: Alien: Isolation - Nostromo Edition
Fifteen years after Ellen Ripley disappeared following the destruction of the commercial starfreighter Nostromo, her daughter Amanda may be one step closer to finding out what happened. But...

By: finegamingconnoisseur

Go here to read the rest:

Episode 1: A Space Station in Ruins... | Let's Play: Alien: Isolation - Nostromo Edition - Video

The real space oddity, Chris Hadfield, is down-to-Earth

Posted on by

NEW YORKWhat do you do after youve achieved the ultimate goal of your avocationnot once, but three times?Thats the question facing Chris Hadfield, who capped 25 years of NASA service by commanding both the International Space Station and an audience of millions on YouTube and Twitter. Hadfield gave a partial answer recentlyduring a public talk at the American Museum of Natural History: get as many people as possible to understand the experience and try to use that to keep the public supporting a program of space exploration.

Hadfield may be an unassuming looking manhes got nothing like the imposing build of astronaut and former football playerLeland Melvinbut you dont get sent to space three times without having an imposing set of talents. He saidthat, in addition to the expected job skills, he spent time in a Texas emergency room, stitching up and intubating people as part of the preparations to handle anything that might come up while in space. And millionssaw his musical and photographic skills on display since.

Hadfield took the audience on a single trip to space, stitched together from the three he took. He switched back and forth among them to find the most compelling story (the Shuttle starred for liftoff, Soyuz for landing). As part of this theatrical trip, he brought astronauts back down to Earth and off the pedestal we sometimes place them on. When discussing what meal should start a day that would end with him either floating weightless or dead, he said he was told eat something creamy, because youre going to be seeing it again the same day. And you might as well make it colorful. The additional advice? Add some catsup.

The first items of NASA-issued launch clothing Hadfieldhad to put on were a pair of black socks and what he called a big boy diaper. The less-than-imposing image was made complete by the fact that Johnson & Johnson used to put pink and blue astronauts on them at the time.

By the time he was ready to be put into his flight suit, however, he was in the same room where some of his heroes, Armstrong and Aldrin, sat in the same chairs. And as Hadfieldwas driven out to the Shuttle, he watched everyone else driving away, fleeing the impending explosion that would hopefully end up controlled and pointed in the same direction.

Hadfield provided a great description of getting to orbit, noting that going up isnt good enough, because youd simply fall down the way you came. Instead, you have to also move sideways fast enough that you perpetually fall down over the horizon. That means reaching a speed of five miles a secondfast enough to make it from New York to LA in nine minutes.

In the Shuttles case, that means having access to something like 80 million horsepower, burning 12 tons of fuel a second. Some of that came from the solid rocket boosters, which he said you cant shut off and cant throttle. When they get lit, youre going somewhere, thats for sure. The main engines, in contrast, are very smooth. Once they're above the atmosphere, they can generate so much acceleration that they have to be throttled down to avoid tearing the Shuttle apart.

Its amazing, but Hadfield wasnt impressed. Its a stupid way to get to space. Were going to look back 100 years from now and think what a stupid thing.

Weightlessness also had its prosand cons. This talk would be way more fun if we were all weightless, Hadfield said before describing its liberating effects, including its tendency to liberate your lunch. Youd do a thousand summersaults and then everyone would throw up. Weightlessness even adds an interesting twist to that. NASA provides standard-issue barf bags, but without gravity to hold the contents in them, the barf actually hits the bottom and rebounds right back out. So the bags come equipped with a cloth to clean your face off afterwards.

Hadfield talked about the packed schedule of scientific experiments that astronauts run through on the International Space Station, showing pictures of experiments in progress. As an example, he shared how a flame burns in low gravity (hot air cant rise, so theres no convection, and flames end up oxygen starved). Hadfieldalso discussedhis two space walks, showing video of his first exit from the station. That clearly shows him stopping to soak in the sight of it all while halfway out the airlock. The world on one side, the bottomlessness of the Universe on the otheryoure in the Universe with the world.

See the article here:

The real space oddity, Chris Hadfield, is down-to-Earth

Russia May Ditch ISS for Moon Program

Posted on by

By Matthew Bodner

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: October 16, 2014 (Issue # 1833)

According to Denis Lyskov, Russia's reluctance to commit to an ISS extension has more to do with resource allocation than politics. Photo: Pixabay

Russia may favor putting boots on the moon over financing for the International Space Station (ISS) program, Denis Lyskov, deputy director of federal space agency Roscosmos told news agency TASS on Wednesday.

"We have obligations [to the ISS] until 2020, which we will carry out," Lyskov said. "Concerning the future of the ISS, this decision is not for today. Some analysis needs to be carried out in connection with our lunar program, there needs to be a decision made on how long we need [the ISS]."

The ISS has found itself at the center of Ukraine's crisis, with Russian officials hinting that, in response to U.S. sanctions, Roscosmos may reject a NASA-backed proposal to extend the life of the space station beyond its current 2020 end date.

According to Lyskov, however, Russia's reluctance to commit to an ISS extension has more to do with resource allocation than politics.

Russia receives a relatively low scientific return on its investment in the space station, despite allocating about half of its annual civil space budget on it. Moreover, Roscosmos is now looking to land men on the moon after 2030 a goal the Soviets abandoned after losing the moon race to NASA in the late 1960s and early '70s.

With this in mind, Lyskov said Roscosmos has developed a special program for developing deep-space exploration, which envisions a manned flight to the moon after 2030, and a robot mission to Mars at some unspecified time.

Read the original here:

Russia May Ditch ISS for Moon Program

The Space Station will soon have a same-day delivery service

Posted on by

The International Space Station will soon be equipped with its very own same-day delivery service, for returning critical scientific samples back to Earth. The service will be provided by the Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV), a small, wingless capsule that can be loaded up with samples andejected from the airlock, guaranteeing delivery back to Earth in under 24 hours. A number of these TRVs will be shipped up to the ISS as part of a normal cargo run (via the SpaceX Dragon capsule, perhaps), and then the astronauts aboard the space station will be able to send samples back down to Earth whenever they want a bit like a gravity-powered courier service (and coincidentally, probably the most reliable courier service in the world).

As you probably know, getting to the International Space Station is a rather arduous and expensive task: Generally, it involves loading up a fairly big capsule with a few tons of cargo, and then burning millions of gallons of fuel (and hundreds of millions of dollars) to lift it a few hundred miles into space. Technically it should be a lot easier to get stuff back to Earth from the ISS you can always trust gravity to take care of everything but for some reason, theISSs only return capability is provided by the very same cargo capsules. In other words, to send something back from the ISS, we first have to spend a few hundred million dollars getting a return vehicle up there.

Getting a TRV from the Space Station back to Earth

The Terrestrial Return Vehicle, made by Intuitive Machines, will change all that. The TRV is a small, wingless capsule that looks a lot like the Space Shuttle or Boeing X-37B space plane, but without the stubby little wings. Theres no word on the TRVs actual dimensions, but I think its probably no more than a meter long. The concept art suggests its about the size of a small child. (But no, amusingly enough, the first version of the TRV wont be able to carry living things.) The TRV will be loaded up with scientific samples, pushed into an airlock, and then shunted out into space by the Space Stations Japanese-made robot arm. It will then return to Earth much like any other spacecraft, descending through the atmosphere, eventually deploying a drogue parachute to slow it down from supersonic speeds, and then a larger parachute to bring it safely down to a landing site in Utah.

Read:SpaceX carries the first ever zero-g 3D printer to the Space Station

The return to Earth will take about six hours. Because the ISS orbits the Earth about 15 times per day, the total delivery time should always be under 24 hours. This is significant because the International Space Station is home to many scientific experiments and the samples produced by those experiments would much prefer it if they could be sent straight back to Earth, rather than waiting weeks for the next cargo ship. As Popular Science points out, the ISS is actually a very important location for research because of its zero-gravity environment some things, like bioprinting organs or developing new pharmaceuticals, are much more effective when cells can freely grow in three dimensions, rather thanon Earth where gravity crushes everything.

The ISSs new Rodent Research Facility

Intuitive Machines TRVs are being developed in coordination with NASA and CASIS the non-profitCenter for the Advancement of Science in Space, which was recently endowed with the responsibility of making sure that we make good use of the US laboratory aboard the ISS. The first batch of TRVs is scheduled to be sent up to the ISS in 2016. At first, the TRVs will just be used to return scientific samples but apparently theyre working on a version thats capable of returning live rodents, too.

(NASA is currently preparing to send mice up to the ISS, but the current plan is to butcher them up there, and send their frozen organs back to Earth courieringlive rodents in a TRV would be a little more humane, I guess.)

Now read:60,000 miles up: Space elevator could be built by 2035, says new study

View post:

The Space Station will soon have a same-day delivery service

Hurricane Delays Launch of Space Station Cargo Ship

Posted on by

Hurricane Gonzalo, seen here from aboard the International Space Station, is delaying launch of NASAs next cargo ship to the orbital outpost.

NEWS: Antares Rocket Aces First Test Flight

Orbital Sciences Corp., one of two companies hired by NASA to fly supplies to the space station, had planned to launch its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Oct. 24.

The rockets tracking station, however, is located in Bermuda, which was bracing for the Category 3 storm on Friday.

Orbital Sciences now expects it wont be able to fly until Oct. 27 at the earliest.

NEWS: Belated Christmas: Orbital Rocket Launches ISS Cargo

Once the hurricane has passed Bermuda, a team from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility Range will return to the tracking site to assess the situation and begin the process of re-enabling the sites functionality to support the launch, Orbital Sciences wrote in a statement posted on its website.

The capsule had been expected to linger in orbit, with docking at the station slated for Nov. 2. Orbital Sciences said it can still make that date with a launch on Oct. 27.

Read the rest here:

Hurricane Delays Launch of Space Station Cargo Ship


  1. Space Station