Category Archives: Transhuman News

A video of a GoPro camera inside a free-floating bubble of water in outer space looks as cool as it sounds. And exploring the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity is actually more fun than it sounds.

In a video postedon NASA's YouTube account this week,astronauts aboard the International Space Station during this summer submerged a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water roughly the size of a volleyball and recorded the activity .

It gets better:They uploaded the video again, in 3D.

The video alternates shots from a camera filming the submerging process with those from the GoPro once it's inside the bubble.

NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman, and European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, appear just as thrilled as their Earthbound audience practically squealing as the camera floats around in the globulous H2 O.

"That's wild," one observes before they all wave to the GoPro staring out from the bubble at them.

When one astronaut's hand gets stuck in the bubble it appears to move like an amoeba (or silly putty?) up his hand another exclaims: "You're being assimilated!"

Without Earth's gravity to pull water down into the shape of whatever container it's in, surface tension will shape water into spheres. Magnetic-like molecules on waters surface make like an elastic skin as each molecule is pulled with equal tension by its neighbors.

The video is part of NASA's effort to bring a realistic representation of living and working on the International Space Station "and other fascinating images from the nation's space program" to the home computer, says a NASA statement.

"Delivering images from these new and exciting locations is how we share our accomplishments with the world," said Rodney Grubbs, program manager for NASA's Imagery Experts Program at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "As the industry made advances in technology, from film to digital cameras and then cameras with better resolutions, we all benefited by seeing sharper and cleaner images from space."

See the original post here:
What happens when you submerge GoPro in water...while in orbit?

The International Space Station (ISS) has been forced to fire the thrusters of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) in order to maneuver the station and its crew out of the way of potentially harmful debris. Such instances are rare, making a catastrophic scenario highly unlikely. However, with each passing year, the amount of orbital debris increases, heightening the risks of a collision for mankind's only manned outpost among the stars.

There is currently estimated to be around 21,000 pieces of debris exceeding 10 cm (3.9 in) in size currently existing in low-Earth orbit (within 2,000 km or 1,243 miles of the Earth's surface). Whilst the majority of the debris is very small, some pieces travel at velocities of up to 15 km per second (9.32 miles p/s), meaning that despite their diminutive size, any impact with the ISS would impart a devastating amount of kinetic force.

Because of the potentially disastrous ramifications of an impact, orbital debris is constantly monitored from ground stations spread across the globe, and whilst potential impact events are very rare, collisions do happen. This is evidenced by the event that created the debris prompting the emergency maneuver of Oct. 27.

ATV Georges Lematre, photographed on its approach to the ISS (Photo: ESA/NASA)

The debris emanated from a 2009 collision between Russian satellite Cosmos-2251 and the US-made Iridium 33. The impact resulted in a vast cloud of debris, which included the roughly hand-sized object that would pass within 4 km (2.5 miles) of the ISS, threatening both the station and her crew of six.

A mere six hours prior to the potential impact, the five space agencies tasked with administering the station agreed to undertake an emergency burn to lift the ISS out of danger. Ordinarily, in a scenario where there is less than 24 hours warning prior to a possible impact, the station would be shunted out of harm's way by the thrusters of a Russian progress spaceship used to bring supplies and science to the station, docked to the Zvezda service module. However at the time of the emergency, no such spaceship was present.

Therefore the task fell to the European-made ATV Georges Lematre. At 18:42 CET the ATV executed a four-minute burn, successfully raising the orbit of the 420-tonne (463-ton) station by 1 km (0.6 miles). Having rescued the ISS and her crew, the spacecraft is due to be released from the station in February, burning up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere a short time later.

Source: ESA

See the article here:
ISS executes emergency maneuver as orbital debris threatens station crew

Space is hard. It's a refrain we're hearing quite a bit in the wake of a pair of accidents involving private space firms.

Space is hard. It's a refrain we're hearing quite a bit in the wake of a terrible week for private spaceflight.

Just days after an Orbital Sciences rocket carrying supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) exploded above a launch pad in eastern Virginia, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight above California's Mojave Desert, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other.

Is spaceflight so hard, so inherently risky that we can't do it more safely and without accidents like those of the past weekor at least in such a way that catastrophic failures and loss of life happen much less frequently?

As news of the Orbital and Virgin Galactic accidents spread, many in the space community defaulted to the familiar, resigned reaction to such events. Space exploration isdespite all of the science and expertise behind it, despite all of our wonderful accomplishments over the past six decadesstill ultimately about pushing the envelope to pretty much the furthest extremes we humans have ever dared.

There's a natural instinct to forgive those involved in spacefaring attempts that go wrong. It stems in part from a desire to push back fast against the blowback from a high-profile accident. A Challenger disaster, to cite perhaps the most prominent example, can depress the public's willingness to keep challenging space, potentially setting back humanity's desire to keep building, innovating, and dreaming in our efforts to throw off the shackles of our Earthly home.

Who Is to Blame? But not everybody has been so accepting of the perils of space flight in the days following these latest incidents. That's been especially true with regards to the SpaceShipTwo test flight conducted by Virgin Galactic partner Scaled Composites, which cost the life of co-pilot Michael Alsbury.

The journalist Joel Glenn Brenner, who is writing a book about the development of SpaceShipOne, the Ansari X Prize-winning predecessor to the vehicle that crashed last week, spoke of "technical difficulties" with SpaceShipTwo that were allegedly known and discussed "behind closed doors" by an outwardly optimistic Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites.

International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) rocket propulsion scientist Carolynne Campbell-Knight went on record with the U.K.'s Daily Mail saying she'd warned Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson that using nitrous oxide in the fuel mix for the company's suborbital vehicle was like playing "Russian Roulette [as to] which test flight blew up."

Three Scaled Composites employees died in a 2007 explosion while testing a new rocket fuel mix using nitrous oxide, so these aren't exactly the ravings of mindless critics.

Continue reading here:
What Went Wrong With Space Travel Last Week?