Category Archives: Transhuman News

2013 Astronaut Class Talks STEM at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
NASA #39;s 2013 astronaut candidate class joined Washington-area students and the public on Jan. 30 for an educational event at the Smithsonian #39;s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. ...

By: Beng alr

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2013 Astronaut Class Talks STEM at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum - Video

Expedition 41/42 Crew Conducts News Conference and Traditional Ceremonies in Russia
Expedition 41/42 Soyuz Commander Alexander Samokutyaev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA Flight Engineer Barry Wilmore and Flight Engineer Elena Serova of Roscosmos and...

By: NASA

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Expedition 41/42 Crew Conducts News Conference and Traditional Ceremonies in Russia - Video

There is something that the Chinatown community desires more, and has less of, than housing.

Open space.

While San Francisco stakeholders years ago debated the Central Subway extending the Muni T-Third Street line north on Fourth Street with a Chinatown station as the terminus, community activists coalesced on what would become of the area above it.

Fast-forward to today, construction crews at Washington and Stockton streets in the heart of the neighborhood are erecting walls 85 feet below surface level for the approved, multilevel Central Subway station scheduled to open by 2019. The design plans for a 5,400-square-foot rooftop plaza at the site have yet to be grounded, but are shaping up to be what the Chinatown community wants, said Norman Fong, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center.

"I dreamed about that a long time ago with a lot of people in the community, but we figured maybe The City would go for income-generating things like housing," he said. "So I had low expectations. I can't believe that The City listened to the community and the community needs for open space."

The design for the Chinatown station itself was approved with a transit-oriented development to complement it in mind. In determining what to build above the station, The City opened the process to community groups that conducted surveys and various meetings.

"We looked at housing and business, but at the end of the day, what the community wanted -- and they were probably right -- was to have a park and enjoy the sunshine," said John Funghi, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's Central Subway program director.

San Francisco's Chinatown is the densest neighborhood in the country outside of New York's Chinatown, with only four open-space places -- heavily trafficked Portsmouth Square, the Willie "Woo Woo" Wong and Woh Hei Yuen playgrounds, and St. Mary's Square, which is slated to get a rooftop park extension in exchange for two new office towers on the rise.

The Chinatown station plaza is an opportunity to create a fifth spot, Recreation and Park Commissioner Allan Low said.

"Open space is being elevated, which is really the only way you can create new open space," he said, praising the "creativity and collaboration" on the project thus far.

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Open space is a key feature of future Central Subway station

NEW YORK, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- On Thursday, the International Space Station decided to launch some satellites on its own. CubeSats are tiny satellites (about the size of a few bricks), weighing less than 1.33 kilograms, and they're supposed to do a range of missions from communicating with sea vessels to monitoring earthquakes.

The station commander, Steve Swanson, was putting blood samples in a freezer when he noticed the CubeSat launcher's doors were open, according to reports. "No crew members or ground controllers saw the deployment. They reviewed all the camera footage and there was no views of it there either," according to NASA Mission Commentator Pat Ryan. Those working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston realized that the CubeSats had somehow been released without anyone initiating a launch.

According to Pat Ryan, the crew had been trying to repair the launcher recently, which explains why their may have been such an error. The space station received the 32 CubeSats in July to take images of Earth. So far, four of the 12 released were released on accident, and the fate of the mission remains unclear.

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

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International Space Station accidentally launches satellites on its own

NASA's ISS-RapidScat wind-watching scatterometer, which is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station no earlier than Sept. 19, will be the first science payload to be robotically assembled in space since the space station itself.

This image shows the instrument assembly on the left, shrouded in white. On the right is Rapid-Scat's nadir adapter, a very sophisticated bracket that points the scatterometer toward Earth so that it can record the direction and speed of ocean winds. The two pieces are stowed in the unpressurized trunk of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Howard Eisen, the ISS-RapidScat project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said, "Another mission had the idea of a two-piece payload first, but we beat them to the punch."

The RapidScat team designed and built both parts of the science payload in an 18-month-long sprint so as to take advantage of an available berthing space on the space station and a free ride on a resupply mission. The other two-piece payload is still a year and a half from launch.

Each piece of the ISS-RapidScat payload is attached to the space station by a standardized interface called a Flight Releasable Attachment Mechanism, or FRAM. JPL's Stacey Boland, an engineer on the ISS-RapidScat team, explained,

"The space station is almost like a Lego system, and a FRAM is a particular type of Lego block. We had to build on two separate Lego blocks because each block can only hold a certain amount of cargo."

Eisen noted, "We are not only robotically assembled, we are robotically installed." When the Dragon spacecraft reaches the station, a robotic arm will grapple it and bring it to its docking port.

Using a different end effector -- a mechanical hand -- the arm will first extract the nadir adapter from the trunk and install it on an external site on the Columbus module of the space station. The arm will then pluck the RapidScat instrument assembly from the trunk and attach it to the nadir adapter, completing the installation. Each of the two operations will take about six hours.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing.

The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

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NASA's RapidScat: Some Assembly Required - in Space