Category Archives: Transhuman News

Janet Anderson and Jessica Eagan, NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center

Keeping a spare on hand simply makes sense. Just as drivers keep spare tires on hand to replace a flat or blowout, NASA routinely maintains spares, too. These flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair. When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.

Researchers at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe. Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASAs Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts. It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.

The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well. The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016. Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload. STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoDs STP.

NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratorys high inclination. This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to look farther towards Earths poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite. Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks. LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.

Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning what we call total lightning during both day and night, said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall. As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics.

LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency and it does this without land-ocean bias.

The sensor consists of an optical imager enhanced to locate and detect lightning from thunderstorms within its 400-by-400-mile field-of-view on the Earths surface. The station travels more than 17,000 mph as it orbits our planet, allowing the LIS to observe a point on the Earth, or a cloud, for almost 90 seconds as it passes overhead. Despite this brief viewing duration, it is long enough to estimate the lightning-flashing rate of most storms.

Since more than 70 percent of lightning occurs during the day, daytime detection drove the technical design of the LIS. From space, lightning appears like a pool of light on the top of a thundercloud. During the day, sunlight reflected from the cloud tops completely masks the lightning signal, making it difficult to detect. However, LIS creates a solution by applying special techniques that take advantage of the differences in the behavior and physical characteristics of lightning and sunlight signals. These allow LIS to extract the strikes from bright background illumination.

As a final step in processing, a real-time event processor inside the LIS electronics unit removes the remaining background signal, enabling the system to detect the lightning signatures and achieve 90-percent detection efficiency.

Read more from the original source:
Space Station Sensor To Capture 'Striking' Lightning Data

A crewlaunching to the International Space Station in the near future, which includes NASA astronaut Terry Virts, will participate in a news conference and media interviews Thursday, Sept. 18, at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The news conference will air live on NASA Television at 2 p.m. EDT.

Virts, Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, and Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian Federal Space Agency will launch to the space station Nov. 23 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.

Reporters who wish to participate by telephone must call Johnson's newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 1:45 p.m. Those following the briefing on social media may ask questions using the hashtag #askNASA.

Video of the crew training will air before the news conference at 1:30 p.m.

After the news conference, interview opportunities with individual crew members will be available for media participating in person, by phone or online. To request credentials to attend in person, or to reserve an interview opportunity, media must contact Johnson's newsroom at 281-483-5111 by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 16.

Virts, Cristoforetti and Shkaplerov will serve as flight engineers for Expedition 42 until March, at which time Virts will assume command of Expedition 43. The trio is scheduled to return to Earth in May 2015.

A colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Virts grew up in Baltimore. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Harvard Business School. As an Air Force pilot, Virts flew the F-16 aircraft, and served as an experimental test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in Edwards, California. He has accumulated 4,300 flight hours in more than 40 different aircraft.

Virts joined NASA in 2000 and served as pilot for space shuttle Endeavour's STS-130 mission to the space station in February 2010. The flight delivered the Tranquility module and the cupola to the station. Tranquility now is the life-support hub of the space station, containing exercise equipment, and water recycling and environmental control systems, while the cupola provides a panoramic view of our planet and affords crews a direct view of station robotic operations. To date, Virts has logged 13 days and 18 hours of spaceflight.

The Expedition 42 crew members will share their flight experiences on Instagram. Those interested can follow along at:

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Future Space Station Crew to Participate in NASA TV Briefing, Media Interviews

September 9, 2014

Image Caption: A view of Earth from one of the High Definition Earth Viewing cameras aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Laura Nilesm International Space Station Program Science Office and Public Affairs Office, NASAs Johnson Space Center

A series of new Earth science instruments launching to the International Space Station over the next year is prompting a new era of Earth observation from the orbiting outpost. These new tools that monitor ocean winds and measure clouds and pollution in the atmosphere, among other climate science phenomena, will help NASA deliver important information to climate researchers.

[ Watch the Video: Space Station Live: High Definition Earth Viewing ]

While these new Earth science instruments collect valuable information on our changing planet, one current Earth observation study continuously streams live views of Earth directly to your desktop or mobile internet device. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) investigation allows anyone with an internet connection to view our world from above. Tune in to the HDEV live stream here.

The HDEV project employs four commercially available cameras to stream the first continuous, high definition video from the space station. During the two-year study period, researchers hope to determine the best types of cameras to use on future missions by subjecting them to the harsh space environment. The cameras are enclosed in a temperature-specific case and mounted outside the Columbus laboratory to monitor how quickly they degrade during exposure to radiation in microgravity.

We know over time that the cameras will begin to degrade, said David Hornyak, engineer and HDEV project manager at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. We will operate the cameras to determine how long it takes and to learn what that degradation characteristic looks like to provide information on the planning and design of future imagery systems. It is expected that the cameras will not just turn off, but they will have some type of image degradation and at some point, that degradation will be bad enough that the image is no longer useful.

With the use of commercially available cameras, the research team also hopes to validate cameras that may be more cost-effective for future missions. If a camera is readily available on Earth and proves to hold up well in space, purchasing this type of camera would likely be cheaper than designing a new product.

By using four different types of cameras, each has a different type of technology to analyze for what works best in space. Once a week, the project team uses an automated software program to compare pixels on night imagery taken by the cameras to assess the deterioration of each camera. The pixels are easier to see and compare in dark images than in those with objects and multiple colors included.

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On Space Station, Earth's Beauty Is In The Eye Of The High Definition Beholder

Image Caption: In 2010, Icelands Eyjafjallajkull volcano erupted, creating an expansive ash cloud that disrupted air traffic throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. CATS may improve the ability to measure volcanic particles and other aerosols from space. Credit: NASA

Lori Keesey, NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

The Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), a new instrument that will measure the character and worldwide distribution of the tiny particles that make up haze, dust, air pollutants and smoke, will do more than gather data once its deployed on the International Space Station this year.

CATS is a groundbreaking science and technology pathfinder, said Colleen Hartman, deputy center director for science at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Not only will it make critical measurements that will tell us more about the global impact of pollution, smoke and dust on Earths climate, it will demonstrate promising new technology and prove that inexpensive missions can make critical measurements needed by the modelers to predict future climate changes.

A Technological First

Technologically, NASA has never before flown an instrument like CATS.

Developed by a Goddard team led by scientist Matt McGill, the refrigerator-size CATS will demonstrate for the first time three-wavelength laser technology for measuring volcanic particles and other aerosols from space. It is intended to operate for at least six months and up to three years aboard the Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility, augmenting measurements gathered by NASAs CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations) mission.

However, the big difference between the two is that CALIPSO uses two wavelengths the 1,064- and 532-nanometer wavelengths to study the same phenomena.

Thats not the only difference, McGill said. CATS, which was developed with NASA and Goddard research and development funding, also carries extremely sensitive detectors that can count individual photons, delivering better resolution and finer-scale details. It also will fire 5,000 laser pulses per second, using only one millijoule of energy per second. In sharp contrast, CALIPSO delivers 20 laser pulses per second, using a whopping 110 millijoules of energy in each of those pulses.

As a pathfinder mission, what were trying to determine is whether the addition of the third wavelength 355 nanometers, which is in the ultraviolet will produce the results we expect it to generate, McGill said. We believe it will deliver more detailed information revealing whether the particles scientists see in the atmosphere are dust, smoke or pollution. Though it adds an advanced capability, particularly when coupled with the new detectors, engineers believe the ultraviolet wavelength may be particularly susceptible to damage caused by contamination, McGill said.

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New Remote-Sensing Instrument To Blaze A Trail On The International Space Station

The launch of a NASA ocean winds sensor to the International Space Station (ISS) this month inaugurates a new era of Earth observation that will leverage the space station's unique vantage point in space. Before the end of the decade, six NASA Earth science instruments will be mounted to the station to help scientists study our changing planet.

The first NASA Earth-observing instrument to be mounted on the exterior of the space station will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, on the next SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services flight, currently targeted for no earlier than Sept. 19. ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds for climate research, weather predictions and hurricane monitoring from the space station.

The second instrument is the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS), a laser instrument that will measure clouds and the location and distribution of airborne particles such as pollution, mineral dust, smoke, and other particulates in the atmosphere. CATS will follow ISS-RapidScat on the fifth SpaceX space station resupply flight, targeted for December.

"We're seeing the space station come into its own as an Earth-observing platform," said Julie Robinson, chief scientist for the International Space Station Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "It has a different orbit than other Earth remote sensing platforms. Its closer to Earth, and it sees Earth at different times of day with a different schedule. That offers opportunities that complement other Earth-sensing instruments in orbit today."

The space station-based instruments join a fleet of 17 NASA Earth-observing missions currently providing data on the dynamic and complex Earth system. ISS-RapidScat and CATS follow the February launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement Core Observatory, a joint mission with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the July launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, making 2014 one of the busiest periods for new NASA Earth science missions in more than a decade.

Most of the agencys free-flying, Earth-observing satellites orbit the planet over the poles at altitudes higher than 400 miles in order to gather data from all parts of the planet. Although the space station does not pass over Earths polar regions, its 240-mile-high orbit does offer logistical and scientific advantages.

"With the space station we don't have to build a spacecraft to gather new data -- it's already there, said Stephen Volz, associate director of flight programs in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The orbit enables rare, cross-disciplinary observations when the station flies under another sensor on a satellite. Designing instruments for the space station also gives us a chance to do high-risk, high-return instruments in a relatively economical way."

The data provided by ISS-RapidScat will support weather and marine forecasting, including tracking storms and hurricanes. The station's orbit will allow the instrument to make repeated, regular observations over the same locations at different times of day, providing the first near-global measurements of how winds change throughout the day. ISS-RapidScat was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

CATS is a laser remote-sensing instrument, or lidar, that measures clouds and tiny aerosol particles in the atmosphere. These atmospheric components play a critical part in understanding how human activities such as pollution and fossil fuel burning contribute to climate change. CATS was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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NASA Launches New Era of Earth Science from Space Station

The private spaceflight company Boeing has been hard at work designing a capsule that could deliver NASA astronauts to the International Space Station sometime in the next three years. And pretty soon, everyone will find out if all that hard work has paid off.

NASA is expected to announce its pick (or picks) for a contract that will enable a commercial company (or companies) to fly manned missions to the International Space Station by 2017 any day now, and Boeing's astronaut-carrying CST-100 capsule is in the running. People working with the commercial spaceflight company's capsule have been working diligently to make sure that they meet their goals ahead of the commercial crew announcement.

"Obviously, we're very anxious to get to the announcement, but the team has just been outstanding," John Mulholland, Boeing commercial crew program manager, told Space.com. [See images of Boeing's CST-100 space capsule]

Boeing is competing with three other spaceflight companies for the commercial crew contract, technically called the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract (CCtCap). Sierra Nevada Corp., SpaceX and Blue Origin are also still in the running for the chance to fly humans to the International Space Station from the United States for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. At the moment, NASA astronauts fly to space aboard Russian-built Soyuz space capsules.

The upcoming announcement marks the last in a series of awards put in place by NASA in 2010.

If chosen for the contract, Boeing representatives already have a specific plan for how they are will get astronauts flying from American soil aboard a CST-100 spacecraft. Company representatives are planning to launch a pad abort test in 2016, with an uncrewed flight scheduled for early in 2017. The first crewed flight to the station should take place in mid-2017.

The CST-100 program recently completed a major milestone. The spacecraft made it through its critical design review of integrated systems, paving the way for the final design that could fly to space. The company met all of its CCtCap goals on time and on budget ahead of the announcement, Mulholland said.

Boeing is already crafting test materials for the spacecraft, and if all goes according to plan, in October, representatives with the company will start building pieces of the capsule that could fly to space.

"The challenge of a CDR is to ensure all the pieces and sub-systems are working together," Mulholland said in a statement. "Integration of these systems is key. Now we look forward to bringing the CST-100 to life."

The continued development of the CST-100 as it stands now is dependent on winning one of NASA's commercial crew program contracts, according to Mulholland. Without the money provided by NASA for the commercial crew program, Boeing will most likely not be able to finish the development of the capsule on the time scale planned today.

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Boeing's New Spaceship Makes Strides Ahead of NASA Space Taxi Decision