Category Archives: Space Station

Aleksandr Misurkin, ROSCOSMOS, Da de la Cosmonutica
Cosmonauta Alexander Misurkin de la agencia ROSCOSMOS, International Space Station ISS Mission 35-36. Da de la Cosmonutica en la UAM, Semana de la Cosmonu...

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SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets will someday be able to land on hydraulic legs, dramatically cutting the cost of sending cargo -- and even human beings -- into space.

When private spaceflight company SpaceX launches its newest mission to the International Space Station it will carry some strange cargo to space.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket on Monday on its third official resupply trip to the space station. Liftoff is set for 4:58 p.m. EDT (2058 GMT). Among the 5,000 lbs. of cargo riding aboard Dragon are a set of legs for a robotic astronaut, an experimental mini-farm for space vegetables and a wealth of other odd items.

Here are the five strange things flying to space with Dragon:

A robotic astronaut's legsNASA's humanoid robot Robonaut 2 designed to eventually help astronauts with menial tasks in space is getting space legs for the first time. The long lower limbs are flying to the station with SpaceX, and they will be attached and initially tested in June.

Once attached, Robonaut 2's leg span will reach about 9 feet, and each leg has seven joints. The legs should allow for enough flexibility to let Robonaut 2 work outside and inside the International Space Station, however, the robot's torso will need some upgrades before it can venture outside of the station, NASA officials have said.

The space station's very own laserThe space station is about to get anew laser communications experiment. Called OPALS, NASA's Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science, the new laser will help scientists test ways of transferring information more quickly than traditional radio transmission. The new form of communication could aid in future missions to more distant deep-space destinations.

Many existing deep-space missions send 200 to 400 kilobits of data per second, however, OPALS will up that data rate to a speed of up to 50 megabits per second. Future optical communication designs could reach rates of a gigabit per second.

Microbes collected by cheerleaders and the publicScience Cheerleader a group of science-minded current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders helped craft an experiment that will take 48 microbe samples swabbed from historical places into space.

Called Project MERCCURI (short for Microbial Ecology Research Combining Citizen and University Researchers), the experiment is designed to help collect more data on how microbes behave in microgravity. Science Cheerleader partnered with SciStarter.com and the University of California, Davis, for the project.

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5 weird things launching into space on SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft Monday

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press

Monday, April 14, 2014 | 9:46 a.m.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The International Space Station is about to get some fresh groceries and material for an urgent repair job.

An unmanned SpaceX rocket was scheduled to blast off at 4:58 p.m. Monday with more than 2 tons of supplies.

NASA spent much of the weekend debating whether to proceed with the launch of the Dragon cargo ship, already a month late. A critical backup computer failed outside the space station Friday; flight controllers were trying to activate it for a routine software load.

Mission managers decided Sunday to stick with the launch plan after making sure everything would be safe. The prime computer has been working fine so far. The plan is to put the solar wings in the proper position for the capsule's arrival soon after the SpaceX launch, in case of additional failures in orbit.

It's the first breakdown ever of one of these so-called space station MDMs, or multiplexer-demultiplexers, used to route computer commands for a wide variety of systems. Forty-five MDMs are scattered around the orbiting lab. The failed one is located outside and therefore will require spacewalking repairs.

The Dragon capsule holds a gasket-like material for next week's computer replacement. This new material was rushed to the launch site over the weekend.

NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steven Swanson will perform the job next Tuesday. It will take several days to get the replacement computer ready for installing, thus the one-week wait before the spacewalk, NASA's Kenny Todd, a station operations manager, said Monday.

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of California is one of two American companies hired by NASA to fill the cargo gap left when the space shuttles retired in 2011. Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia is the other.

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Space station launch scheduled today, despite dead computer

A backup computer failure on the International Space Station will not impact the SpaceX cargo resupply run planned for later today (April 14), NASA has announced. In fact, parts that will be used to replace the failed computer were rushed to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ahead of the launch, scheduled for 4:58 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

NEWS: Cherry Blossom Grown from Space Seeds a Bit Weird

The computer failure was reported on Friday during routine check-ups on the health of the space stations computer systems. The system affected is called a multiplexer/demultiplexer (MDM) backup computer command relay box located on the stations S0 truss. The main MDM continues to operate as designed and the six-member crew are not in any danger. The pair of MDMs control the stations external cooling system.

The backup MDM will need to be replaced and a spacewalk is currently being planned to take care of the situation.

PHOTOS: Chris Hadfields Awesome Space Odyssey

(P)reparations are underway for a contingency spacewalk by two of the Expedition 39 crewmembers no earlier than around April 22 to replace the failed MDM with a spare housed inside the station, said NASA in a statement. A gasket-like material will be delivered by the SpaceX Dragon capsule to make the replacement operation possible.

Todays SpaceX launch is the third resupply mission (called the SpaceX-3 mission) to be carried out by the private company, delivering over 2 tons of supplies. Along with a second private launch company Orbital Sciences Corp. SpaceX is part of a NASA-funded effort for private companies to deliver cargo, experiments and (eventually) astronauts into orbit.

Sources: AP, NASA

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Space Station Computer Fault Won't Halt SpaceX Launch

Monday's scheduled launch of a robotic SpaceX cargo craft to the International Space Station will proceed despite the failure of a backup electronics box for the station's truss system, NASA says.

Mission managers said they would be able to work around the problems caused by the faiure. "We're good to go," Michael Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager, said during a Sunday news conference.

Suffredini said a spacewalk to replace the box is being planned for April 22, after the SpaceX delivery.

SpaceX, a California-based company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver supplies and other payloads to the space station. For the next supply mission, about 4,600 pounds (2,100 kilograms) of cargo has been packed inside a Dragon capsule for launch atop a two-stage SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Liftoff is scheduled for 4:58 p.m. ET Monday, with the chances of acceptable weather set at 80 percent or better. The only concern is the potential for increasing clouds at the launch site.

Redundancy recovered

The electronics box, known as a modulator-demodulator, failed to respond to commands on Friday and NASA determined that it had to be replaced. The box serves as the backup for another modulator-demodulator that's operating normally. Either box can be used to send commands to components on the space station's main truss, including the robotic arm's rail car system, the station's external cooling system and the movable joints for the power-generating solar arrays.

Suffredini said the main concern about going ahead with Monday's launch was to keep the station's solar arrays in the proper position while avoiding a conflict with the Dragon's arrival and berthing. Astronauts will have to use the station's robotic arm to bring the unmanned capsule in for its berthing on Wednesday, and if both boxes were out of commission, that would have affected the ability to move the arrays.

"We're able to essentially get back the redundancy we need."

NASA planners found a way to keep the arrays in a fixed position during the Dragon's visit, Suffredini said.

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SpaceX Cargo Launch Is 'Good to Go' Despite Space Station Glitch

A team of about 20 working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., through the lab's Phaeton early-career-hire program, led the development of the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) investigation, which is preparing for an April 14 launch to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX-3 mission. The goal? NASA's first optical communication experiment on the orbital laboratory.

Scientific instruments used in space missions increasingly require higher communication rates to transmit gathered data back to Earth or to support high-data-rate applications, like high-definition video streams. Optical communications-also referred to as "lasercom"-is an emerging technology where data is sent via laser beams. This offers the promise of much higher data rates than what is achievable with current radio frequency (RF) transmissions and has the advantage that it operates in a frequency band that is currently unregulated by the Federal Communications Commission.

"Optical communications has the potential to be a game-changer," said Mission Manager Matt Abrahamson. "Right now, many of our deep space missions communicate at 200 to 400 kilobits per second." OPALS will demonstrate up to 50 megabits per second, and future deep space optical communication systems will provide over one gigabits per second from Mars.

"It's like upgrading from dial-up to DSL," added the project's systems engineer Bogdan Oaida. "Our ability to generate data has greatly outpaced our ability to downlink it. Imagine trying to download a movie at home over dial-up. It's essentially the same problem in space, whether we're talking about low-Earth orbit or deep space."

OPALS is scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, part of a cargo resupply mission to the space station. The payload will be inside the Dragon cargo spacecraft. Once deployed, OPALS will be conducting transmission tests for a period of nearly three months, with the possibility of a longer mission. After the Dragon capsule docks with the station, OPALS will be robotically extracted from the trunk of the Dragon, and then manipulated by a robotic arm for positioning on the station's exterior. It is the first investigation developed at JPL to launch on SpaceX's Falcon rocket.

The technology demo was conceived, developed, built and tested at JPL by engineers in the early stage of their careers in order to gain experience building space hardware and developing an end-to-end communication system. The system uses primarily commercial off-the-shelf hardware and encloses electronics in a pressurized container. "We were not as constrained by mass, volume or power on this mission as we were by cost," said Abrahamson, and this approach allowed a lower cost development on an efficient schedule.

As the space station orbits Earth, a ground telescope tracks it and transmits a laser beacon to OPALS. While maintaining lock on the uplink beacon, the orbiting instrument's flight system will downlink a modulated laser beam with a formatted video. Each demonstration, or test, will last approximately 100 seconds as the station instrument and ground telescope maintain line of sight. It will be used to study pointing, acquisition and tracking of the very tightly focused laser beams, taking into account the movement of the space station, and to study the characteristics of optical links through Earth's atmosphere. NASA will also use OPALS to educate and train personnel in the operation of optical communication systems.

The success of OPALS will provide increased impetus for operational optical communications in NASA missions. The space station is a prime target for multi-gigabit-per-second optical links. Fast laser communications between Earth and spacecraft like the space station or NASA's Mars Curiosity rover would enhance their connection to engineers and scientists on the ground as well as to the public.

OPALS is a partnership between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; the International Space Station Program based at Johnson Space Center in Houston; Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the Advanced Exploration Systems Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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International Space Station to beam video via laser back to Earth

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