Category Archives: Space Station

A new, nearly self-sufficient plant growth system by NASA is headed to the International Space Station soon and will help researchers better understand how plants grow in space. The Advanced Plant Habitat will be used to conduct plant bioscience research on the space station, and help NASA prepare crew to grow their own food in space during deep-space exploration missions.

Some of the components of this new system have arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and are being prepared for delivery to the station on Orbital ATK's seventh commercial resupply mission to the station. The new plant system will join Veggie - NASA's first fresh food growth system already active on station.

Dr. Howard Levine, the project scientist overseeing the development of the advanced system, along with Dr. Gioia Massa, a life science project scientist and deputy project scientist, were two of the researchers who helped design the science requirements for the hardware and the test plan to validate it when it was tested at ORBITEC in Madison, Wisconsin.

"A team of scientists here at Kennedy Space Center have been developing the procedures for the first experiment using a prototype, or engineering development unit, of the plant habitat in the Space Station Processing Facility," Levine said.

Arabidopsis seeds, small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard, have been growing in the prototype habitat, and will be the first plant experiment, called PH-01, grown in the chamber aboard the space station.

Bryan Onate is the NASA APH project manager in the Exploration Research and Technology Directorate at Kennedy. He described the new plant habitat as a fully enclosed, closed-loop system with an environmentally controlled growth chamber. It uses red, blue and green LED lights, and broad spectrum white LED lights. The system's more than 180 sensors will relay real-time information, including temperature, oxygen content and moisture levels (in the air and soil, near the plant roots, and at the stem and leaf level), back to the team at Kennedy.

"A big difference in this system, compared to Veggie, is that it requires minimal crew involvement to install the science, add water, and perform other maintenance activities," Onate said. "We are learning how plants grow in space and what levels of commodities, such as light and water, are required so we can maximize our growth with the least resources."

The large, enclosed chamber measures 18 inches square, with two inches for the root system and 16 inches available for growth height. It is designed to support commercial and fundamental plant research or other bioscience research aboard the space station for up to a 135-day science investigation, and for at least one year of continuous operation without maintenance.

"I think that the new plant growth habitat will provide tremendous capabilities to do high quality plant physiology research with a variety of plant types on the space station," Massa said. "The plant habitat will enable much more controlled and detailed studies of plant growth in spaceflight."

The advanced system will be activated by astronauts aboard the space station but controlled by the team at Kennedy, minimizing the amount of crew time needed to grow the plants. The space station crew will still perform plant thinning and harvesting.

"Before PH-01 is initiated, there will be a short grow out of Dwarf Wheat and Arabidopsis as part of the post-installation checkout on the space station," Onate said.

The system's Plant Habitat Avionics Real-Time Manager in EXPRESS Rack, or PHARMER, will provide real-time data telemetry, remote commanding and photo downlink to the Kennedy team. An active watering system with sensors will detect when the plants need water and keep water flowing as needed.

Massa said having Veggie and the advanced system on the station will allow studies of food production in space, from the very simple to the complex and controlled.

When all parts are delivered to the station, the habitat will be installed in a standard EXpedite the PRocessing of Experiments to Space Station (EXPRESS) rack in the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo.

Read more about the APH here

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New Plant Habitat Will Increase Harvest on International Space Station - Space Daily

The International Space Station (ISS) will soon host the coldest spot in the entire universe, if everything goes according to plan.

This August, NASA plans to launch to the ISS an experiment that will freeze atoms to only 1 billionth of a degree above absolute zero more than 100 million times colder than the far reaches of deep space, agency officials said.

The instrument suite, which is about the size of an ice chest, is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). It consists of lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic "knife" that together will slow down gas particles until they are almost motionless. (Remember that temperature is just a measurement of how fast atoms and molecules are moving.) [Watch a video about the CAL]

If successful, CAL could help unlock some of the universe's deepest mysteries, project leaders said.

"Studying these hypercold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," Robert Thompson, a CAL project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy some of the most pervasive forces in the universe."

Artist's illustration of an atom chip for use by NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), which will use lasers to cool atoms to ultracold temperatures. CAL is scheduled to launch to the space station in August 2017.

Attempts to create Bose-Einstein condensates on Earth have been only partially successful to date. Because everything on Earth is subject to the pull of gravity, atoms and molecules tend to move toward the ground. This means the effects can only be seen for fractions of a second. In space, where the ISS is in perpetual freefall, CAL could preserve these structures for 5 to 10 seconds, NASA officials said. (Future versions of CAL may be able to hold on for hundreds of seconds, if technology improves as expected, officials added.)

The researchers hope CAL observations will lead to the improvement of several technologies, such as quantum computers, atomic clocks for spacecraft navigation and sensors of various types including some that could help detect dark energy. The current model of the universe suggests we can only see about 5 percent of what's out there. The remainder is split between dark matter (27 percent) and dark energy (68 percent).

"This means that even with all of our current technologies, we are still blind to 95 percent of the universe," JPL's Kamal Oudrhiri, CAL deputy project manager, said in the same statement. "Like a new lens in Galileo's first telescope, the ultra-sensitive cold atoms in the Cold Atom Lab have the potential to unlock many mysteries beyond the frontiers of known physics."

CAL, which was developed at JPL, is scheduled to fly to the ISS this August aboard SpaceX's robotic Dragon cargo capsule. Final testing is underway ahead of CAL's shipment to the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA officials said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Coldest Spot in Universe Should Soon Be Aboard International Space Station - Space.com

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Steven Powell, research engineer in the department of electrical and computer engineering, is pictured with the Cornell GPS antenna array in a clean room at the NASA/Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The array is currently mounted on the truss structure of the International Space Station.

The weather here on Earth has been a little strange this winter 60-degree days, followed by blinding snow, only to be followed by 50s and rain but for Steven Powell, the weather hes interested in cant be felt by humans or measured by barometric pressure.

Powell, research support specialist in electrical and computer engineering, is concerned with space weather charged particles in the plasma of space, on the edge of the Earths atmosphere. These particles affect the performance of communications and navigation satellites.

To study conditions in the ionosphere, a band between 50 and 600 miles above the Earth, Powell and others in the College of Engineering have developed the FOTON (Fast Orbital TEC for Orbit and Navigation) GPS receiver, which was built in a Rhodes Hall lab. Last month, the FOTON hitched a ride aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to begin a long-term project at the International Space Station.

The project, which could last two years, is called GROUP-C (GPS Radio Occultation and Ultraviolet Photometry-Colocated), and is headed by Scott Budzien of the Naval Research Laboratory. Powell is the Cornell principal investigator for the project; other Cornell contributors include Mark L. Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering (retired); David Hysell, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences; Todd Humphreys, Ph.D. 08; and Brady OHanlon, Ph.D. 16.

Also contributing was the late electrical and computer engineering professor Paul Kintner, who died in November 2010. Kintner was responsible for the original ionospheric research that formed the scientific basis for GROUP-C, Powell said.

The FOTON is a highly sensitive GPS receiver, designed to withstand the rigors of spaceflight while detecting subtle fluctuations in the signals from GPS satellites.

These fluctuations help us learn about the ionosphere in which the signals travel, said Powell, who returned to Ithaca in early March after spending six weeks in Alaska on a project to send two sounding rockets into the aurora borealis, also to study the ionosphere.

These fluctuations are typically filtered out by standard GPS receivers, he said, but they are the scientific gold nuggets in the data analysis process.

NASA Johnson Spaceflight Center/Provided

The STP-H5 palette of instruments being maneuvered by the robotic arm on the International Space Station. The Cornell antenna array is visible just to the right of the "Canada" logo. This photo was taken during the installation process.

Powells experiment is one of a number of projects studying the Earths atmosphere and ionosphere. It shares a mounting palette on the outside of the ISS, receives power from large solar arrays, and uses the data communications system onboard the station to quickly distribute data back to Earth.

Powell and Hysell will collect data from the GROUP-C experiment.

GROUP-Cs position onboard the ISS will allow it to study the ionosphere at an edge-on perspective, Powell said, to measure variations in electron density. The Cornell teams GPS receiver and antenna actually a suite of three antennas, configured to maximize GPS signals and minimize unwanted reflections from the large metal portions of the ISS will focus on GPS satellites as they move across the sky and set behind the Earth.

As they set, Powell said, the radio signals travel through the ionosphere and are subtly delayed by the denser regions of the ionosphere. From that, we obtain a vertical profile of the electron density, he said.

This experiment builds on a short-duration NASA sounding-rocket mission Powell led in 2012, which was sent into the aurora to study the ionosphere at high latitudes, near the North Pole.

This experiment will allow us to study different, but equally interesting, effects in the ionosphere closer to the equator, where most of the worlds population lives, Powell said.

The Feb. 19 liftoff of the SpaceX rocket, and docking with the ISS four days later, was the culmination of a nearly four-year effort to get GROUP-C built.

It was extremely exciting and satisfying to see the GROUP-C experiment [launch], Powell said. Ive been involved in more than 50 space-based research efforts over a 30-year period, but most have been using suborbital NASA sounding rockets, with mission durations of just 10 to 30 minutes.

The GROUP-C experiment duration will last up to two years, he said, so the quantity of data and the potential for meaningful scientific discovery is huge.

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Experiment aboard space station studies 'space weather' - Cornell Chronicle

You can always count on an out-of-this-world runway set at Chanel but today, Karl Lagerfeld quite literally took things out of this world at Paris Fashion Week. For its Fall 2017 show, Chanel created its own space station inside Paris's iconic Grand Palais and it was nothing short of epic.

The show was heralded by a life-size Chanel rocket ship stationed at the center of the runway, which made for the perfect backdrop to Lagerfeld's futuristic, galactic-inspired set.

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Below, here's what to know from the #ChanelGroundControl show:

1) For the finale, the Chanel rocket actually blasted offsmoke includedfollowing a dramatic 10-second countdown. Models lined up and Elton John's "Rocket Man" played (which I imagine is the only song NASA uses for takeoff as well) as the Chanel branded rocket took off.

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2) Chanel ambassadors Pharrell Williams, Cara Delevingne and Lily-Rose Depp sat next to each other front row.

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Chanel Space Station Fall 2017 Show Paris Fashion Week - Chanel ... - HarpersBAZAAR.com

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From December 1963 to June 1969, the US Air Force spent upwards of $1.5billion on a project known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) which was eventually cancelled.

Due to the sensitive and classified nature of the project in the height of the Cold War, it is difficult to understand exactly what the US was trying to achieve at the time.

One of the declassified documents, which were released by the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), goes so far as to ask: "Is the MOL a laboratory? Or is it an operational reconnaissance spacecraft? (Or a bomber?)"

However, other documents show that one of the goals was to spy on the Soviet Union.

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NRO

Michael Yarymovych, who was at the time technical director of the MOL project, said: "We were doing something that was exciting and important.

"We're going to also do something very important for national security. We are going to go look behind the Iron Curtain defend the nation while doing the exciting things of manned spaceflight.

NRO

Despite spending over six years and the best part of $2billion on the project, the MOL never actually came to fruition as it was plagued by overspending on perpetual delays.

GETTY

However, there were positives that came out of it, such as the remodelling of NASA's two-seat Gemini spacecraft and the development of the Titan-3C launch vehicle.

The research that went into it also helped America become the first nation to land people on the moon in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Michael Collins piloting the module, stepping foot on the lunar satellite.

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REVEALED: US made secret Cold War manned space station to SPY on Russia - Express.co.uk

In a unique opportunity this coming spring, Cache Valley public school students will be able to speak a U.S. astronaut currently aboard the International Space Station.

On May 19 at Utah State University, public school students interested in science, technology, engineering and math will be able to ask questions for approximately 20 minutes via video conference with NASA Astronaut Jack Fischer.

The event was announced in a news release by U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatchs office. The senior Republican senator worked with the Space Dynamics Lab and Utah State University to develop a proposal for the event and NASA approved it, the release states.

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NASA conducts no more than three In-flight Education Downlinks each year, so this is indeed a rare opportunity for students throughout Utah, wrote Hatch spokesman Matt Whitlock in an email to The Herald Journal. Senator Hatch hopes that, through this event and other pre-event activities, students will be excited about STEM education and STEM careers.

Eric Packenham is director and principal investigator of USU STARS! GEAR UP, a program designed to help students prepare for college.

Packenham talked about what he hopes students get out of participating in the space station downlink event.

Who knows? These students could be the ones leading us to missions on Mars or other explorations in the future, he said. We want to make sure the students have their curiosity piqued and have the opportunity to ask those burning questions about things they want to know more about.

Whitlock said NASA TV will livestream the event, so it will be available for viewing by anyone who has access to the internet or NASA TV.

The spokesman for Hatch also said there will be coordination with schools and stakeholders so that high school and middle school students across the state will also be able to view the event.

More details about this event will be announced closer to the scheduled date of the downlink.

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Hatch to host space station downlink chat for valley schools - The Herald Journal

In the Space Station Processing Facility high bay at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a crane is used to lower a protective covering around the Cygnus pressurized cargo module on Feb. 21.

The private spaceflight company Orbital ATKis targeting March 19 for its seventh cargo flight, dubbed OA-7, to the International Space Station.

Packed with supplies and science gear, the Cygnus cargo craft is scheduled to blast off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocketfrom Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during a 30-minute launch window beginning at 10:56 p.m. EDT (0256 GMT on March 20).

Along with more than 7,500 lbs. (3,400 kilograms) of cargo and supplies for the astronauts aboard the space station, Cygnus will carry several science experiments, including dozens of cubesats, a new habitat for growing plants and targeted cancer therapies.

Tehcnicians and engineers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida load supplies and scientific research materials onto the Cygnus spacecraft's pressurized cargo module for the Orbital ATK CRS-7 mission to the International Space Station.

During a prelaunch teleconference Monday (March 6), Henry Martin, small-satellites mission coordinator for NanoRacks in Houston, noted that 38 cubesats, or microsatellites, will hitch a ride to space on the Cygnus cargo craft. Four of the 38 satellites will deploy directly from the Cygnus craft during the flight, and the rest will be deployed from the space station. A group of 28 cubesats from around the world will fly on OA-7 before being deployed from the space station for the QB50 mission, which seeks to investigate Earth's lower thermosphere, the part of the atmosphere that starts at about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the planet's surface and extends into outer space.

A new plant-growing habitat will also fly to the space station with OA-7. The Advanced Plant Habitatwill be the largest plant-growth system ever launched to the orbiting laboratory and will allow astronauts to grow larger crops than they could previously, Howard Levine, project scientist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said during the teleconference. [Plants in Space: Photos by Gardening Astronauts]

Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo craft, covered in a protective shroud, arrives at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Feb. 23.

One of the experiments flying to the space station on OA-7 will test how new cancer-fighting drugs work in microgravity. By sending this experiment to space, researchers can see how the cancer drug works in 3D as opposed to 2D tests done on a petri dish in a laboratory on Earth, principal project investigator Sourav Sinha CEO of Oncolinx LLC, which develops antibody-drug conjugates said during the teleconference. The project, titled "Efficacy and Metabolism of Azonafide Antibody-Drug Conjugates in Microgravity," seeks to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs while reducing side effects.

Another biology experiment will use magnets to study cell cultures as they grow into 3D shapes in microgravity. During the teleconference, Glauco Souza, principal investigator of the biotechnology startup Nano3D Biosciences in Houston, discussed how magnetized cells and tools will make it easier to study and handle cell cultures in space and make experiments with cell cultures easier to reproduce. This will be the first time that magnets are used for biological studies in space, Souza said. The first cells that astronauts aboard the space station will study using this experiment are lung cancer cells. [How Space Station Tech Is Helping the Fight Against Cancer]

Another experiment, called Red-Data 2, from Terminal Velocity Aerospace in Atlanta, will send along a new type of data-recording device that will ride inside the Cygnus cargo craft as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere while stuffed with nonrecyclable waste from the space station. Both Cygnus and the experiment will burn up upon re-entry, but Red-Data 2 will provide data about the conditions the spacecraft encounters along the way. This experiment may come in handy for testing new heat shields for NASA, John Dec, an engineer at Terminal Velocity Aerospace and principal investigator for the project, said during the teleconference.

For its last cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station, Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo craft carried a flame experiment and several other science projects. Find out more about the science aboard the last Cygnus mission here.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Private Cygnus Spacecraft to Launch NASA Cargo to Space Station Soon - Space.com

A bizarre 'megaship' has allegedly been captured by an International Space Station (ISS) camera before Nasa reportedly dims the feed.

Conspiracy theorists are claiming that the footage could have been altered by the independent space agency to make the objects 'disappear'.

In the clip, a long 'cigar-shaped' UFO is seen hovering above the Earth's horizon with two bright reflective-objects sitting just below.

The video was uploaded to YouTube by Streetcap1.

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In a caption, he writes: "I thought I was seeing things. I had to be quick.

"The dimming at the end was sudden and my guess is they [Nasa] turned down the brightness a little."

Speaking about the clip, fellow UFO hunter Tyler Glockner, who runs conspiracy site Secure Team 10, said: "We definitely see some anomalous objects, we have this very long cigar-shaped UFO. It's unidentified, we don't know what it is.

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"And then below it, we have these two reflective-looking orbs or objects that are obviously under very low resolution because Nasa likes to give us low res videos and keep the high resolution stuff to themselves.

"I have monitored hundreds, likely thousands, of hours of ISS live feed footage and I've seen UFOs, I've seen ice crystals, I've seen space debris and I've seen light reflections.

'What we're seeing here looks like none of those. And it would appear that shortly after these objects come into view, Nasa - either purposely - or the UFOs do it on their own, but the objects quickly dim out.

"So we may have had Nasa dimming the feed, messing with the contrast or the exposure to make these objects disappear from view."

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Bizarre 'megaship' captured by International Space Station camera before Nasa 'dims the feed' - Mirror.co.uk

United Launch Alliance this year will begin assembling the Atlas V rocket that will boost two astronauts to the International Space Station, a spokeswoman said last week.

The project, to be handled at ULA's Decatur manufacturing plant, is part of NASAs commercial crew program, a plan to end American reliance on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from the space station 249 miles above the Earth. Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, all astronauts have been delivered via Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

We are bridging history as we prepare to launch American astronauts again, ULA spokeswoman Lyn Chassagne said. John Glenn became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth after being launched on a heritage Atlas LV-3B rocket.

From raw material to launch, construction of an Atlas V typically takes about 18 months, according to Chassagne.

When the rocket finally flies, it will be the first to carry Boeings new CST 100 Starliner Capsule, which is still in development.

The capsule is slightly larger than an Apollo command module and will be able to carry crews of up to seven to the ISS as well as to private space stations once in service.

After a test flight in June 2018, the capsule is slated to take two astronauts to the ISS in December 2018, launched into space by the Atlas V assembled in Decatur.

ULA marked the successful launch of a National Reconnaissance Office satellite on Wednesday via an Atlas V from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was ULAs second launch of the year. Two more ULA launches are planned this month, both from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Work on the commercial crew program is not ULAs only current endeavor into manned space flight. ULA is slated to deliver to Cape Canaveral this month the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS, for NASAs new Space Launch System.

Constructed in Decatur, the ICPS will serve as the second stage for the maiden flight of the Space Launch System, or SLS, slated for November 2018. That flight was intended to be an unmanned test mission around the moon using the Orion spacecraft that eventually will carry astronauts to Mars.

But NASA announced last month it is studying options for adding crew to that mission, which will require certifying the ICPS for human flight. The ICPS is a converted upper stage from a ULA Delta IV, which was not designed for manned space flight.

James Muncy, founder of the space policy consultancy PoliSpace, said last week that adding crew would likely delay that launch until after the Starliner launch, noting the life-support system for the Orion capsule wasnt slated for completion until 2021.

He anticipated few problems rating the ICPS of the Atlas V for human flight, which mainly involves analysis and very few changes to its hardware or software.

Neither Atlas V nor Delta IV are intrinsically human rated, but the Atlas V is easy to human rate, and ULA has been working on modifications to it since 2010 as part of the commercial crew program. But both vehicles are very reliable, he said.

A scaled-up version of the SLS with 143 tons of lift capacity is expected to be the launch system that eventually takes astronauts to Mars.

A ULA competitor could still be the first domestic rocket to take Americans to space since the retirement of the shuttle.

California-based SpaceX is slated to fly its new Dragon 2 capsule in May 2018 after an unmanned test flight in November of this year. That capsule is also part of NASAs commercial crew program to serve the ISS.

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This Decatur company is taking humans to space - The Decatur Daily

China has announced plans to launch the core module for their own space station next year, with additional modules intended to follow soon thereafter. Once completed, Chinas space station will be smaller than the current International Space Station, but with the ISS slated for retirement in 2024, China may be the only nation with a permanent address in Earths orbit in the very near future.

The core module, named Tianhe-1, will be launched on a new rocket platform designed by the Chinese to carry extremely heavy loads into space. The March-5 heavyweight carrier rocket will also be used to deliver additional modules to the space station, including two laboratories that will dock to the sides of the primary module. The two-stage rocket is said to have a payload capacity of 25 tons for low-Earth orbit, and 14 tons for much higher missions to geostationary transfer orbit. The Chinese space agency intends to have their space station completed by 2022, two years before the International Space Station is expected to conclude its tour of duty.

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Alex Hollings Alex Hollings served as an active duty Marine for six and a half years before being medically retired. A college rugby player, Marine Corps football player, and avid shooter, he has competed in multiple mixed martial arts tournaments, raced exotic cars across the country and wrestled alligators in pursuit of a story to tell. His novel, "A Secondhand Hero" is currently seeking publication.

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China to launch space station in 2018and secure orbital dominance by 2024 - SOFREP (press release) (subscription)