Category Archives: Space Station

Any astronauts who consumed this product did so with their feet on the ground. Wikimedia Commons/APN MJM/CC BY-SA 3.0

Everything you believed as a child is a lie. Your Furby doesnt know who you are. The Tamagotchi you cherished, then killed with neglect, was never actually alive. Sea monkeys dont look like monkeystheyre cryptobiotic brine shrimp! And astronaut ice cream? The stuff that you made your parents buy in the museum gift shop that comes in foil packets and vanilla, raspberry, and chocolate flavors that more or less taste the same? It never actually went to space.

But there is such a thing as astronaut ice cream. As a group, these intrepid explorers, scientists, and pilots love the stuff. So they were very excited, according to NPR, when earlier this week a shipment of 30 individual Bluebell ice cream cups and some Snickers ice cream bars were shot up to them, 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Lets see Amazon Prime try that. (Patience.)

The frozen treats came as part of a usual resupply mission to the International Space Station. Some 6,400 pounds of lab equipment, supplies, and food arrived in the SpaceX Dragon capsule. The challenge for ice cream in space is storing it once it gets there. Sure, space is very cold, but you cant hang the ice cream outside like a six-pack in a mountain stream. Astronauts have limited freezer and refrigeration space, mostly used for storing blood and urine samplesnot what you want to root through in search of a popsicle. However, the supply capsule, which returns to Earth, has freezers to bring back those samples, leaving a little extra cold storage in the orbiting station.

The catch, if you want to call it that, is that the astronauts are going to need to that freezer space back, so they have to launch into a full-scale ice cream party. They have just a few weeks to empty the freezer. Its a really special treat, but when it gets there, they have no place to put it, Vickie Kloeris, from NASAs Space Food Systems Laboratory, told NPR. Its tough duty, but theyll manage to eat it in the time allowed.

There are other goodies among the supplies: citrus fruits, carrots, even a surprise avocado or two. Astronauts can live at the International Space Station for as long as a year, and when one spends that long in a confined, alien space, the psychological impact of food becomes very important. After an initial phase where astronauts were given free rein on what to eat, Kloeris and her colleagues decided to put together a standardized menu that maximizes variety and minimizes repetition. Now, she said, all the managers in the space station program are aware how important it is to be sure these crew members get coffee the way they like it.

One thing that has little psychological impact in space, however, is freeze-dried ice cream. Given the choice, it turns out, adult humans dont really like it, especially if the real stuff is available, even occasionally. NASA did originally commission the product for one of the Apollo missions, but never made it part of the space program. It wasnt that popular; most of the crew really didnt like it, Kloeris said, in a NASA feature.

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Space Station Astronauts Are High on a Fresh Ice Cream Shipment - Atlas Obscura

Israel Hayom

Sunday August 20, 2017 Israel Hayom SpaceX's Dragon aircraft arrived at the International Space Station last Wednesday after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing 2.5 tons of scientific equipment and supplies, including five experiments proposed by Israeli students for ...

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Sunday August 20, 2017 - Israel Hayom

During a lengthy spacewalk on Thursday, Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy released five mini satellites by hand, including one made almost entirely of 3D-printed materials.

Some new reports are claiming the satellite is the first built from 3D-printed components to be launched into space, but in June, NASA launched a cube satellite made almost entirely of 3D-printed materials.

NASA claimed the satellite was not only the first 3D-printed satellite launched into space, it was the lightest satellite ever launched, weighing just 64 grams.

The latest satellite launch marks the first time the Russian team has launched a 3D-printed satellite. The mini satellite was designed and built at Siberia's Tomsk Polytechnic University.

Tomsk TPU-120 will spend roughly six months in orbit. Scientists are keen to learn how the 3D-printed materials are weathered by space.

Three-dimensional printing has the potential to save aeronautics and satellite manufacturers time and money.

"We have satellites ready for launch that have 50 to 60 printed parts on them," Mark Spiwak, president of Boeing Satellite Systems International, told reporters during a press conference in March. "We are actively working with our suppliers on complex brackets and fittings that used to be machined parts. There is tremendous progress being made."

Four other nano-satellites were also hand-launched by Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy, all weighing between 10 and 24 pounds. One of the nano-satellites was launched in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, the world's first artificial space satellite, as well as the 160th anniversary of the birth of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a pioneer in the fields of astronautics and rocketry.

During Thursday's spacewalk, the cosmonauts installed a series of struts and handrails outside the Russian module. Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy also collected fresh dust samples as part of the ongoing effort to monitor microbial communities living on the space station.

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Cosmonauts launch 3D-printed satellite from space station - Space Daily

Astronauts captured the shadow of the moon moving over the Indian Ocean during a solar eclipse on Dec. 4, 2002.

In one day, we will be treated to a total eclipse of the sun over a large portion of the United States. This has not happened since 1979.

I remember observing part of a total eclipse when I was in grade school, back in 1970. The next day, I saw a newspaper article about a girl who became blind because she watched it for several minutes without any eye protection (when the sun was not totally obscured). Her mother came into her room and caught her, and made her stop.

Her blindness came on gradually, over the next several hours. This made quite an impression on me, and helped me to understand why the ancients came up with all kinds of superstitions and beliefs related to the phenomenon, pretty much all of them bad.

Many cultures believed that an eclipse was the sun being swallowed by a creature, in the form of a dragon, toad, bear or serpent, to name a few. They would encourage people to make noise to scare away the creature, in order to bring back the sun. There are stories of bad omens and ancient sacrifices. Imagine what it was like! Even today, some cultural superstitions and practices persist, but, thankfully,they no longer include human sacrifice.

Of course, humans have understood eclipse now for at least 500 years. But, it doesn't make the experience any less fantastic. During my mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), I shot what I was told was the first astronaut video of a partial eclipse. It was different to observe the eclipse from above. It took the form of a large dark spot on the clouds of the Earth that grew lighter toward the edge.

I imagine what impression the upcoming total eclipse will make on the crew currently aboard ISS. You've heard about the so-called "overview effect" that some astronauts experience while observing our Earth from space. (It's real, I felt it.) The thing is, you don't have to be in space to experience this. An eclipse is one phenomenon that is actually more impressive from the ground. Even though we understand eclipse, it, like other awe-inspiring phenomena in our world and universe, should give us perspective and make us pause and think about what really is important.

Editor's note:Visit Space.comto see the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, with a live webcast from NASA beginning at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT).

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Why an Eclipse Is Better Viewed from Earth: An Astronaut's Perspective - Space.com

NASA has launched another next-generation communications satellite to help beam data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station (ISS) and other orbiting spacecraft down to Earth.

The $408 million TDRS-M satellite lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket today (Aug. 18) at 8:29 a.m. EDT (1229 GMT) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after a half-hour delay due to a technical issue with the booster that was swiftly resolved.

TDRS-M is headed for geosynchronous orbit, about 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometers) above Earth. It will join nine other operational spacecraft in NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation, which together allow the nearly continuous transmission of data from Hubble, the ISS and other near-Earth research and exploration craft to mission controllers on the ground. [How NASA's TDRS Communications Satellites Work]

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launches NASA's TDRS-M communications satellite into orbit from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Aug. 18, 2017.

The TDRS satellites and their associated ground terminals make up NASA's Space Network (not to be confused with the agency's Deep Space Network, a different system that handles data from far-flung spacecraft such as the Cassini Saturn orbiter and the New Horizons probe).

"TDRS-M is going to be critical to our future operation and the future of the Space Network," Badri Younes, NASA's deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation, said during a prelaunch news conference yesterday (Aug. 17).

Indeed, the newly launched satellite should allow the Space Network to continue supporting communications through at least the mid-2020s, NASA officials said.

NASA began planning out the TDRS system in the early 1970s, and the first satellite in the network was launched in 1983. A total of 13 have now taken to the skies, and nine (not counting TDRS-M) are currently operational.

Seven TDRS satellites lifted off between 1983 and 1995 aboard NASA's space shuttles; four of these "first-generation" craft are still operational today. (Two were retired, and one was destroyed in the January 1986 Challenger tragedy.) Three "second-generation" craft launched between 2000 and 2002. The remaining three are "third generation"; they launched in 2013, 2014 and today, respectively. (TDRS-M is a third-generation satellite as well.)

The first-generation TDRS satellites were built by aerospace company TRW (which was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002). The others, including TDRS-M, have been built by Boeing.

It will take a little while for TDRS-M to come online, even after the satellite reaches its final orbit and deploys its solar panels and antennas.

"It takes about three to four months following deployments for us to fully characterize the spacecraft, and to show that it will meet mission requirements and provide the RF [radio frequency] performance that is needed to support our users," said Dave Littmann, TDRS-M project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter@michaeldwallandGoogle+.Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published onSpace.com.

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NASA Launches New Satellite to Beam Back Data from Hubble Telescope, Space Station - Space.com

Audacys constellation is designed to provide high-availability mission critical communications to users anywhere in near Earth space. Credit: Audacy

The nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) awarded a grant Aug. 17 to Audacy that will enable the Silicon Valley startup to demonstrate its high data-rate radio on the International Space Station.

Audacy, a company established in 2015 to create a commercial space-based communications network, plans to send the Audacy Lynq demonstration mission to the space stations NanoRacks External Payload Platform on a NASA commercial cargo fight in late 2018.

We plan to demonstrate the efficacy of Audacys high-rate customer terminal, as well as the utility of Audacys communications services for downloading science and imagery data from customers onboard the ISS, Ellaine Talle, Audacy project lead, said by email.

On Aug. 8, Audacy announced a related project. The firm is working with Scotlands Clyde Space to send a cubesat into orbit in 2018 to demonstrate the performance of terminals customers flying small satellites can use to transmit data to Audacys ground stations.

Talle declined to say the value of the CASIS award but said it was large enough to cover the cost of launching Audacy Lynq on a commercial cargo flight and a six-month test of Audacy K-band antenna and radio on the space station.

In 2019, Audacy plans to launch three large satellites into medium Earth orbit to relay data from spacecraft in low Earth orbit to ground stations. Audacy is establishing a global network of ground stations to communicate with its future relay satellites and to support customers operating missions beyond the relay satellites field of view, Talle said.

While we hope future ISS demonstrations will utilize the relays, this initial mission will only exercise the ground segment, she added.

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CASIS awards Audacy grant to test radio on space station - SpaceNews

A six hour-long spacewalk will take place on the International Space Station (ISS) today and NASA will be livestreaming the whole event.

Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy will be going outside of the space station to launch several nanosatellites, perform structural maintenance and collect research samples. The event will start at 10am ET, with commander Yurchikhin and flight engineer Ryazanskiy exiting through the Pirs airlock at about 10.45am.

Viewers can watch the event through NASA Television or via the livestream below.

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Ryazanskiy will begin the schedule of extravehicular activities with the manual deployment of five nanosatellites from a ladder outside the airlock, the space agency said in a statement. The satellites, each of which has a mass of about 11 pounds, have a variety of purposes.

One of the satellites, with casings made using 3D printing technology, will test the effect of the low-Earth-orbit environment on the composition of 3D printed materials. Another satellite contains recorded greetings to the people of Earth in 11 languages. A third satellite commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Sputnik 1launch and the 160th anniversary of the birth of Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Yurchikhin and Ryazanskiy will also be installing handrails outside the space station to improve future spacewalks, while they will collect samples from various locations outside the Russian part of the ISS.

Expedition 52 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin holds one of the five satellites set to be deployed during the Russian spacewalk. NASA

This will be the seventh spacewalk of 2017 and the 202nd since construction began on the space station in 1998. The longest spacewalk ever to be undertaken was in March, 2001, when NASA astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms spent eight hours and 56 minutes carrying out maintenance and installation work on the station.

Astronauts are well prepared for spacewalks. Clayton C. Anderson, a NASA astronautwho performed six spacewalks during his time on the ISS, recently explained what would happen if an astronaut floated away into space in a Quora question.

He said assuming the astronaut is on an ISS spacewalk and that they have somehow become untethered from their vehicle, they will then resort to using a jet back called SAFER Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue .

These jetpacks, which he says are straight out of a Buck Rogers comic book, allow astronauts to fly back to the ISS where they can reattach themselves and continue going about their business. SAFER gives astronauts basically one-shot to come home, he wrote. Limited in fuel, and governed by the laws of orbital mechanics, it is not simply a leisurely task to fly back to safety.

Anderson explains there are several steps the astronaut must take and that they are extensively trained to do this through virtual reality on Earth. These are as follows:

While untethered spacewalks have taken place in the past, so far no astronaut has ever accidentally come free and floated away.

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Watch NASA Livestream Six Hour Spacewalk from International ... - Newsweek

The Crew of the International Space Station will enjoy multiple views of the Aug. 21 solar eclipse during three successive orbits, giving the astronauts a unique opportunity to take in the celestial show from 250 miles up as the moon's shadow races across from the Pacific Ocean and the continental United States before moving out over the Atlantic.

"Because we're going around the Earth every 90 minutes, about the time it takes the sun to cross the U.S., we'll get to see it three times," Randy Bresnik said Friday during a NASA Facebook session. "The first time will be just off the West Coast, we'll actually cross the path of the sun, and we'll have (a partial) eclipse looking up from the space station."

For the station crew, the first partial eclipse opportunity will begin at 12:33 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) and end 13 minutes later.

Floating in the European Columbus laboratory module, Bresnik showed off a solar filter shipped up to the station earlier, saying "we've got specially equipped cameras that'll have these solar filters on them that allow us to take pictures of the sun. That's going to be pretty neat, we'll have a couple of us shooting that."

Space station astronaut Randy Bresnik shows off a solar filter that will be used by the crew during multiple opportunities to photograph the Aug. 21 solar eclipse from their perch 250 miles up.

NASA TV

One orbit later, the station will cross the path of the eclipse in the extreme northwest following a trajectory that will carry the lab over central Canada on the way to the North Atlantic. From the station's perspective, 44 percent of the sun will be blocked in a partial eclipse. But the crew will be able to see the umbra, where the eclipse is total, near the southern horizon.

"We'll be north of Lake Huron in Canada when we'll be able to see the umbra, or the shadow of the eclipse, actually on the Earth, right around the Tennessee-Kentucky (area), the western side of both those states," Bresnik said. "That'll be an opportunity for us to take video, and take still pictures and kind of show you from the human perspective what that's going to look like."

During the second of three successive orbits, the space station crew, passing just south of Hudson Bay, will have a chance to see and photograph the moon's shadow as it moves across western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee some 1,100 miles away.

NASA

The umbra, defining the 70-mile-wide shadow where the sun's disk will be completely blocked out, will be at its closest to the space station at 2:23 p.m. The moon's shadow will be about 1,100 miles away from the lab complex, but from their perch 250 miles up, the astronauts should be able to photograph the dark patch as they race along in their orbit.

"And then the third pass is actually just off the East Coast," Bresnik said. "We'll come around one more time and from the station side we'll see about an 85 percent eclipse of the sun looking up (at 4:17 p.m.). So we should be able to get really neat photos, with our filters, of the sun being occluded by the moon."

NASA plans to provide four hours of eclipse coverage, starting at noon EDT, on the agency's satellite television channel, in web streams and via social media, including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

"We have a lot of options to share all this," Bresnik told a Facebook questioner. "It's U.S. taxpayer dollars. ... You're paying us to take these pictures, and they go to you. They're free to everybody, and you can access them from the NASA website."

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Space station crew to get 3 chances at solar eclipse - CBS News

This is not the first long-haul trip for Blue Bell.

"Our products have made several trips to space," spokeswomanJenny Van Dorfsaid in an emailed response. "It seems to be an astronaut favorite. We first sent Blue Bell to space in 1995, and it has been on several missions since [then], including the 2006 Space Shuttle Atlantis and in 2012 on SpaceX.

"We did not sell to NASA directly, but we are glad they think our ice cream is out of this world."

Brenham-based Blue Bell is still working on reclaiming turf on Earth that it vacated as part of a nationwide recall. The pullbackwas prompted by findings of Listeria in the company's plant and product.

The Listeria outbreak sickened at least 10 people who had been hospitalized for other medical issues. Three patients died.

All product now is tested and held in cold storage before being released to the public.

Twitter: @krobijake.

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Blue Bell blasts into orbit in trip to International Space Station - Dallas News (blog)

Newsy

NASA Astronauts Set To Get Sweet Treat With Next Delivery To International Space Station NPR This week, a rocket bound for the International Space Station lifted off with 6,400 pounds of supplies. Along with the provisions, medical supplies and experiments, NASA astronauts will be getting a special care package with ice cream. Facebook; Twitter. Astronauts On The International Space Station Just Got A Big DeliveryNewsy Unpiloted Dragon Cargo Ship Lands on International Space StationYahoo News all 20 news articles »

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NASA Astronauts Set To Get Sweet Treat With Next Delivery To International Space Station - NPR