The solar panels on the MAVEN spacecraft are deployed as part of environmental testing procedures at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado, before shipment to Florida 0on Aug. 2 and blastoff for Mars on Nov. 18, 213. Credit: Lockheed Martin
The solar panels on NASA’s MAVEN Mars orbiter are deployed as part of environmental testing procedures at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado, before shipment to Florida on Aug. 2 and blastoff for Mars on Nov. 18, 2013. Credit: Lockheed Martin Watch cool testing videos below![/caption]
MAVEN is NASA’s next mission to Mars and in less than three days time the spacecraft ships out on a cross country trek for the first step on the long sojourn to the Red Planet.
But before all that, technicians took MAVEN for a final spin test, flexed her solar arrays and bombarded her with sound and a whole lot more.
On Aug. 2, MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission) journeys half a continent from its assembly facility at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado to the Kennedy Space Center and the Florida Space Coast aboard a USAF C-17.
Unlike Curiosity, which is roving across a crater floor on the Red Planet at this very moment, MAVEN is an orbiter with a first of its kind mission.
MAVEN is the first spacecraft from Earth devoted to investigating and understanding the upper atmosphere of Mars.
The goal is determining how and why Mars lost virtually all of its atmosphere billions of years ago, what effect that had on the climate and where did the atmosphere and water go?
To ensure that MAVEN is ready for launch, technicians have been busy this year with final tests of the integrated spacecraft.
Check out this video of MAVEN’s Dry Spin Balance Test
The spin balance test was conducted on the unfueled spacecraft on July 9, 2013 at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado.
NASA says the purpose of the test “is to ensure that the fully integrated spacecraft is correctly balanced and to determine the current center of gravity. It allows the engineering team to fine-tune any necessary weight adjustments to precisely fix the center of gravity where they want it, so that it will perform as expected during the cruise to Mars.”
It was the last test to be completed on the integrated spacecraft before its shipment to Florida later this week.
This next video shows deployment tests of the two “gull-wing” solar panels at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
Wingtip to wingtip, MAVEN measures 11.43 m (37.5 feet) in length.
In mid May, MAVEN was moved into a Thermal Vacuum Chamber at Lockheed Martin for 19 days of testing.
The TVAC test exposed MAVEN to the utterly harsh temperatures and rigors of space similar to those it will experience during its launch, cruise, and mission at Mars.
MAVEN is slated to blast off atop an Atlas V-401 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida on Nov. 18, 2013. The 2000 pound (900 kg) spacecraft will be housed inside a 4 meter payload fairing.
After a 10 month interplanetary voyage it will join NASA’s armada of four robotic spacecraft when it arrives in Mars orbit in September 2014.
Scientists hope that measurements from MAVEN will help answer critical questions like whether, when and how long the Martian atmosphere was once substantial enough to sustain liquid water on its surface and support life.
“What we’re doing is measuring the composition of the atmosphere as a measure of latitude, longitude, time of day and solar activities,” said Paul Mahaffy, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, and the principal investigator for MAVEN’s mass spectrometer instrument.
“We’re trying to understand over billions of years how the atmosphere has been lost.”
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Learn more about MAVEN, Cygnus, Antares, LADEE, Mars rovers and more at Ken’s upcoming lecture presentations
Aug 12: “RockSat-X Suborbital Launch, LADEE Lunar & Antares Rocket Launches from Virginia”; Rodeway Inn, Chincoteague, VA, 8 PM
Oct 3: “Curiosity and the Search for Life on Mars – (3-D)”, STAR Astronomy Club, Brookdale Community College & Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, NJ, 8 PM
NASA’s MAVEN orbiter is due to blast off for Mars on Nov. 18, 2013 atop an Atlas V rocket similar to this which launched Curiosity from Cape Canaveral on Nov. 26, 2011. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Comet ISON was used in a search for time travelers. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provides a close-up look of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1), as photographed on April 10. Credit: NASA, ESA, J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute), and the Hubble Comet ISON Imaging Science Team.
A press release out yesterday about a recent paper on Comet ISON has caused a mild uproar across the astronomy-minded social media outlets and some websites. The article issued from the Physics & Astrophysics Computation Group (FACOM) at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia is titled “Comet Of The Century? Not Yet! Comet C/2012 S1 ISON Has Fizzled Completely And May Disintegrate At Or Before Reaching Perihelion.”
The article had professional astronomers and comet enthusiasts alike shaking their heads in disbelief.
For one, any current determination of ISON’s ultimate fate when it gets close to the Sun later this year is speculation at best, (as is the case with almost any other sun-grazing comet) and since no one on planet Earth has seen ISON since it entered the Sun’s glare in June, there is absolutely no way to determine the comet’s current state, either. The almost unanimous shout from the astronomy internets was “Please! We just have to wait and see what happens with ISON.”
But the press release also had this journalist (and others) wondering if Ferrin’s views were taken out of context for the sake of a dramatic press release.
For example, nowhere in his paper does Ferrin say that Comet ISON has “fizzled,” (nor is there a direct quote in the press release with that word) and he does make it clear in his paper that his information about the comet is preliminary. However, the press release seemingly infers there was new data and that the comet is nothing short of dead.
But in an email from Ferrin, in response to an inquiry from Universe Today, Ferrin stands by the press release, as well as his opinion that Comet ISON “does not have a bright future.”
“The term ‘fizzled completely’ is not a scientific term so it should not go into a scientific paper,” Ferrin said. “However it reflects reality with the information we have.”
His paper (a full 51-pages) was posted to arXiv on June 20, 2013, and has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, still undergoing peer review. The paper is based on data available up to the last good observing date in late-May, 2013, and Ferrin said in his email to Universe Today that up to that point “there is no evidence of brightening whatsoever. I doubt that anybody has seen that brightening.”
Ferrin, a well-known cometary scientist, concurred that the comet’s current state is unknown because it has entered the Sun’s glare but when last seen it had not brightened at all, adding in his email that “the fact that the comet was in a standstill situation makes it very improbable of becoming as bright as the Moon.”
As astronomer Karl Battams said, that last statement is hardly breaking news. Battams is an astrophysicist and computational scientist based at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, and he has operated the NASA-funded Sungrazing Comets Project since 2003. He’s also part of the Comet ISON Observing Campaign a massive, global observing campaign for ISON for both professional and amateur astronomers.
“Few serious astronomers and cometary scientists have ever felt ISON would be ‘brighter than the full Moon,’ Battams told Universe Today. “That’s entirely the media’s term, and we’ve been saying this for months, that none of us in the CIOC foresee ISON getting that bright, and never have done so. So we’re side-by-side with Ferrin in that respect.”
But Battams has some issues with both the paper and the press release.
“The paper is a mixture of reporting facts, and performing extrapolations and modeling based on certain theories and models, some of which are more developed than others,” Battams told Universe Today via email. “Ferrin’s analysis is based on data taken up until around the end of May, but the article misleads by implying that Ferrin has used recent data, which he hasn’t, as there is none. He has simply applied his own methods, model and analysis to the same data that we all have.”
Battams said he can’t comment on the quality of those models, but said Ferrin’s conclusions are broad enough that they don’t seem entirely out of line with what everyone else is saying about the comet – that there is a range of possible outcomes: Comet ISON might fizzle before it gets here or it might disintegrate before, or at perihelion, but it also might still brighten up.
“There’s really no new conclusion here — just a different methods that leads to the same conclusion,” Battams said.
In the paper, Ferrin reaches some of his conclusions comparing ISON to Comet Honig (2002 O4), the brightness of which he says “was in a standstill for 52 days after which it disintegrated.”
Battams said astronomers have to be cautious in comparing ISON to another comet – especially comparing it to Honig, which was not a sungrazer and shared little in common with ISON other than also being a comet.
“ISON is both a Sungrazer, and dynamically new from the Oort Cloud,” he said. “We have no modern record of such an object (see this article about ISON’s uniqueness) so we must exercise a little more caution than usual when comparing it to other comets. The last “major” sungrazer we had was Lovejoy in 2011, and for an object likely much smaller than ISON, it put on a pretty good show.”
“Comparing ISON to 2002 O4 Honig ignores the fact that they were in very different places in the solar system,” Knight said via email, replying to an inquiry from Universe Today regarding Ferrin’s paper. “Honig began flattening out at 1.26 AU as it approached perihelion… ISON being flat at 4-5 AU is a completely different physical realm, since water and other volatiles are not expected to be very active yet.”
Knight also differed with Ferrin’s opinion that ISON’s peculiar non-brightening behavior when last seen “could possibly be explained if the comet were water deficient, or if a surface layer of rock or non-volatile silicate dust were quenching the sublimation to space.”
“This ignores the fact that water isn’t expected to be driving activity from January through June because ISON was still beyond the “frost line” (somewhere between 2.5 and 3 AU) beyond which water doesn’t sublimate efficiently because it is too cold,” Knight said. “It is only when a comet passes inside the frost line that water-driven activity is expected to ramp up…. I fully expect that once it passes inside the frost line, activity will pick up again. We should know as soon as it reemerges from behind the Sun in late August/early September.”
These images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope of C/2012 S1 (Comet ISON) were taken on June 13, when ISON was 310 million miles (about 500 million kilometers) from the sun. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/UCF
As to whether ISON has ‘fizzled’ both Battams and Knight noted that the recently released Spitzer observations from June 13 (and released on July 24 – well after Ferrin’s paper was published) showed the comet was ‘fizzy,’ not fizzled, as it was actively spewing out carbon dioxide and dust.
In the end, no matter what any current paper or press release says about Comet ISON, nothing will be known for sure until we see ISON again, and until it gets closer to the Sun. It will pass about 1.2 million km (724,000 miles) from the Sun at closest approach on November 28, 2013.
For now, everyone needs to wait and watch what happens and end the speculation.
However, as noted by Daniel Fischer on Twitter, the reaction caused by the press release related to Ferrin’s paper has been, unfortunately, “dramatic.”
@SungrazerComets Dramatic is the *reaction* … did a Twitter "ISON" search -> within one hour 'mood' switched from "super comet" to "pfft".
Any hype either way — whether it is calling this the Comet of the Century or a comet that has fizzled — only does a disservice to astronomy, and gives the general public the wrong impression of both the comet and science’s ability to study and predict astronomical phenomenon.
The Milky Way Over Death Valley. Image Credit:
Jeff Moreau
High School Physics teacher and photographer Jeff Moreau took this incredible photo of the Milky Way over Death Valley. Jeff planned his photo on a night where the Moon had already set, arriving in Badwater Basin at Death Valley around 3:30 am.
Regarding his image, Jeff says, “As a high school physics teacher, I love astronomy. I frequently am showing my students current astronomy news and images as there is so much that is so easily fascinating going on out in space.”
The image shown above is comprised of 7 photos, which do an incredible job of covering the extent of the Milky Way. According to Jeff, if he were to do this image again, he would take more images, possibly some shot horizontally, so that there would be a little less visible star trails on the top of the image.
One interesting detail about the image is that Jeff had never been to Death Valley before. Upon entering the park, the temperature (around 3AM), was around 99 degrees fahrenheit. Jeff had no idea of what the landscape looked like. As the Milky Way faded and the first hints of dawn began to emerge Jeff was treated to an incredible scene that he describes over on Google+ at: https://plus.google.com/114435675631396141366/posts/jcTSsetG9hZ
Jeff has been teaching high school physics for the past six years, and has been taking photographs for the last year and a half. Last summer Jeff took images of the Milky Way from atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park.
Jeff also maintained a picture-of-the-day website from 2003-2007 before taking his hobby to social media. Impressed by the huge community of photographers on Google+. Jeff was motivated to get a new camera and dive deeper into his hobby.
Comparison of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy offered by SpaceX. Credit: SpaceX
Just the fact’s ma’am. This week SpaceX rolled out the new updated look for their website and put out this fact-filled 2-minute drill on the Falcon 9: what it has achieved and the tests for future vertical landings. Enjoy the imagery and the music to get you pumped up.
The K10 Black planetary rover during a Surface Telerobotics Operational Readiness Test at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Credit: NASA/Dominic Hart
Astronauts, start your rover engines. Two astronauts recently remote-controlled a rover vehicle in California from their perch on the International Space Station — about 250 miles (400 kilometers) overhead.
The concept is cool in itself, but NASA has loftier aims. It’s thinking about those moon and asteroid and Mars human missions that the agency would really like to conduct one day, if it receives the money and authorization.
Potentially, say, you could have a Mars crew using rovers to explore as much of the surface as possible in a limited time.
Mars Curiosity and its predecessor rovers have found amazing things on Mars, but the challenge is the average 20-minute delay in communications between Mars and Earth. NASA deftly accounts for this problem through techniques such as hazard avoidance software so that Curiosity, say, wouldn’t crash into a big Martian boulder. (More techniques from NASA at this link.) But having astronauts above the surface would cut down on the time delay and potentially change Mars rover driving forever.
Luca Parmitano controlled the K10 rover from space on July 26, 2013. Credit: NASA Television (screencap)
So about that test: two astronauts so far have run the K10 planetary vehicle prototype around a “Roverscape” at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. NASA calls these runs the “first fully-interactive remote operation of a planetary rover by an astronaut in space.”
Expedition 36’s Chris Cassidy was first up on June 15, spending three hours moving the machine around in the rock-strewn area, which is about the size of two football fields. Then his crewmate Luca Parmitano took a turn on July 26, going so far as to deploy a simulated radio antenna. Another test session should take place in August.
“Whereas it is common practice in undersea exploration to use a joystick and have direct control of remote submarines, the K10 robots are more intelligent,” stated Terry Fong, human exploration telerobotics project manager at Ames.
“Astronauts interact with the robots at a higher level, telling them where to go, and then the robot itself independently and intelligently figures out how to safely get there,” added Fong, who is also director of Ames’ intelligent robotics group.
The tests simulated a mission to the moon’s L2 Lagrangian point, a spot where the combined gravity of the moon and Earth allow a spacecraft to remain virtually steady above the surface. One possibility for such a mission would be to deploy a radio telescope on the lunar side opposite from Earth, far from Earth’s radio noise, NASA said.
These tests also showcase a couple of technical firsts:
NASA is testing a Robot Application Programming Interface Delegate (RAPID) robot data messaging system to control the robot from space, essentially working to strip down the information to the bare essentials to make communication as easy as possible. (RAPID has been tested before, but never in this way.)
The agency is also using its Ensemble software in space for telerobotics for the first time. It describes this as “open architecture for the development, integration and deployment of mission operations software.”
Delta Aquarid Meteors seen from Dayton, Ohio on July 30, 2013. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.
Did those of you in the northern hemisphere have a chance to look for the Delta Aquarid meteors? Ever-faithful astronomer and astrophotographer John Chumack captured this view overnight from his observatory near Dayton, Ohio. Can you see the two meteors in this frame?
Below is another shot from John taken on July 29 using his Meteor Video Camera Network, and he captured about half a dozen bright ones, including one meteor through the clouds.
A Delta Aquarid meteor shows up through the clouds on July 29, 2013. Credit and copyright: John Chumack.
As our own David Dickenson said in his recent “how to” post on observing the Delta Aquarids, this meteor shower “can serve as a great “dry run” for the Perseids in a few weeks. You don’t need any specialized gear, simply find a dark site, block the Moon behind a building or hill, and watch.”
And as far as photographing them, David says that technique is “similar to doing long exposures of star trails.”
Simply aim your tripod mounted DSLR camera at a section of sky and take a series of time exposures about 1-3 minutes long to reveal meteor streaks. Images of Delta Aquarids seem elusive, almost to the point of being mythical. An internet search turns up more blurry pictures of guys in ape suits purporting to be Bigfoot than Delta Aquarid images… perhaps we can document the “legendary Delta Aquarids” this year?
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano during a spacesuit fit check before his mission. Credit: NASA
As NASA investigates how astronaut Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit filled with water during a spacewalk two weeks ago, a new video by fellow Expedition 36 astronaut Chris Cassidy demonstrated the path the pool took inside Parmitano’s helmet.
Cassidy described the situation as leaking “cooling water” that got “somehow into his ventilation system” and spread into Parmitano’s helmet. The cause is still being investigated.
From a ventilation port at the back of the helmet, “the water bubbles started to build up behind this white plastic piece,” Cassidy said in the video, pointing at a support that was behind Parmitano’s head.
Update: There’s now part 2 of Cassidy’s description of the leak, below:
“Once the water got big enough that it went all the way around and started coming outside the edge of the white plastic, then it saturated his communication cap and the … flow brought the water all around his head. And he had water filled up in his ear hubs, and it started to creep into his eyes, and cover his nose.”
Calling it a “scary situation”, Cassidy said that if the leak had continued, “it would have been very serious.” NASA, however, aborted the spacewalk quickly after Parmitano reported the problem. Parmitano and Cassidy, who were outside together, were back in the International Space Station in minutes.
Parmitano, for his part, has repeatedly said that he is doing all right. “Guys, I am doing fine and thanks for all the support. I am really okay and ready to move on,” he said, as reported in a July 18 ESA blog post.
NASA has at least two probes going on: an engineering analysis to find the cause, and a more wide-ranging mishap investigation to look at spacewalk procedures and overall crew safety during spaceflights. The agency also sent a spacesuit repair kit on the Progress spacecraft that docked with the International Space Station on July 27.
The July 16 spacewalk ended after just 1 hour, 32 minutes. All of the tasks for the planned 6.5-hour outing, which included preparing data cables and power for a forthcoming Russian module, are not urgent and can be done any time, NASA said. Further American spacewalks are suspended for the time being.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, Expedition 35 Commander, floats freely in the Unity node of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA.
Leave it to the well-spoken and articulate Chris Hadfield to explain the importance of the space station in such poetic language. In this interview with NPR this week, Hadfield not only talks about how his recent Expedition to the ISS “went viral” but what else is going on in space besides making music videos.
Listen to the entire interview (7 and a half minutes) below, but the main points about the cost and utility of the ISS are….
WERTHEIMER: Do you think that’s important for the future of the program, to try to make a big extra effort to engage people, when we’re all so concerned about how much it all costs?
HADFIELD: You know, you can’t support the Space Station if you don’t know it exists. People have to know it exists, and see that it serves us at a lot of different levels, everything from understanding how to extinguish flame inside a wall, to the fact that you can record a David Bowie video in weightlessness and thrill, you know, tens of millions of people. All of that is possible up there. You need to make an effort to engage people in it and show them that this is, of all the things that we’re choosing to do with our tax dollars, this is one of the really cool, interesting things. And then they can make their own decision as to whether we should support it or not.
WERTHEIMER: The science has always been interesting, of course, but the thing that I think most people on Earth think about is not going to the Space Station, but going past the Space Station, traveling in space.
HADFIELD: For thousands of years, people sailed in rivers and up and down the coast. And only after they had invented so many things – navigation, food supply, really good sails, ships they could count on – did they turn away from shore and go over the horizon. They had to invent a lot of things first. There may have been people that went over the horizon, but they probably didn’t come back, because they didn’t know enough stuff yet.
And we are, right now, sailing within the sight of shore. We’re trying to figure out all those things as we go around the world, so that when you do fire your engines and go 40 percent faster and leave the Earth, and it’s been really hard to turn around and come back, that you can count on your sailing ship, that it’s going to keep you alive and get you where you want to go. And that’s what the Space Station is. It is the crucible where we’re learning and testing and figuring out all those things so that we can go further, which is inevitably what we’re going to do.
The idea that there is life on other worlds is humbling and exciting, and finding life on another world would change everything. This has been a driving force for scientists for decades. We find life wherever we find water on Earth, in pools of boiling water, inside glaciers, even in nuclear reactors.
Because of this, our best candidate for life is probably Mars.
The planet is hostile to life now, but evidence is mounting that it was once a warm and habitable world, with rivers, lakes and oceans. Mars could have vast reserves of subsurface water, where life could thrive even now.
If we did discover life there, it’s possible that it’s completely unrelated to Earth life. This would demonstrate that life can originate on almost any world, with the right conditions.
It’s also possible that life on Mars is related to Earth, and our two planets share a common ancestor billions of years in the past.
This is a theory called panspermia.
It suggests that life on Earth and Mars are connected. That life has been traveling from Mars to Earth and vice-versa for billions of years. “How is this possible?” you might ask.
Meteorites.
Mars Meteorite. Credit: NASAWe know that both Earth and Mars have been hammered by countless asteroids in their history long. Some of these impacts are so powerful, rock debris is ejected into escape orbits. This blasted rock could orbit the Sun for eons and then re-enter the atmosphere of another planet.
We know this is true, because we have meteorites on Earth which originated on Mars. Tiny gaps in the rock contained gases which match the atmosphere of Mars. You would think that an asteroid strike would sterilize life in the rocks, but amazingly, bacterial life can survive this process.
Microbial life can even withstand the harsh temperature, radiation and vacuum of space for thousands – possibly millions of years – riding inside their rocky spacecraft.
Some bacteria could even survive when their “space rock” enters the atmosphere of another world.
So a natural space exploration program has been in place for billions of years, with asteroid strikes hurling life-filled rocks into space, which then smash into other worlds.
Life on Mars has been elusive so far, but there are missions in the works which will have the scientific instruments on board to hunt for life on the Red Planet.
Artist illustration of a Europa probe. Image credit: NASA/JPLIf we do find it, will we discover that it’s actually related to us? If we find life under the ice on Europa, or in the cloud tops of Venus, will we discover the same thing?
It gets even stranger.
The Solar System is leaving a trail of debris behind as it orbits around the Milky Way, which could be colliding with other star systems. Which means, it’s possible that life around other stars is related to us too.
So maybe there’s no life on Mars, or if there is, maybe it originated on its own, or maybe it’s all related, as a result of trading life back and forth across giant spans of time and space.
Whatever the case, the search sure is going to be exciting.
1st operational Cygnus pressurized cargo module from Orbital Science Corp. and newly arrived from Italy sits inside high bay processing facility at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, VA. This Cygnus may launch to the ISS as early as December 2013. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
The privately built Cygnus Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) was developed by Orbital Sciences Corp. & Thales Alenia Space under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) cargo transport contract with NASA.
Universe Today took an exclusive look at the unmanned Cygnus cargo carrier housed inside the high bay facility where the vehicle is being processed for flight during a visit at NASA Wallops.
Cygnus is an essential lifeline to stock the station with all manner of equipment, science experiments, food, clothing, spare parts and gear for the international crew of six astronauts and cosmonauts.
1st operational Cygnus pressurized cargo module from Orbital Science Corp. sits inside high bay clean room facility with crane overhead at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, VA for preflight processing. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
The Cygnus PCM is manufactured by Thales Alenia Space at their production facility in Turin, Italy under a subcontract from Orbital.
The design is based on the Multi Purpose Logistic Module (MPLM) space shuttle cargo transporter.
The standard version has an internal volume of 18.9 cubic meters and can carry a total cargo mass of 2000 kg.
It was encased inside a special shipping container and flown from Italy to the US aboard an Antonov An-124 aircraft on July 17. The massive An-124 is the world’s second largest operating cargo aircraft.
After unloading from the An-124 and movement into a clean room high bay at Wallops Processing Building H-100, the shipping crate’s cover was raised using a 20 ton bridge crane. The PCM was unloaded and likewise gently craned over to an adjacent high bay work stand for flight processing.
Cygnus pressurized cargo module was loaded inside this shipping container and transported aboard Antonov An-124 from Italy to NASA Wallops Flight Facility high bay processing facility and launch site in Virginia. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
Approximately a month and a half before launch, technicians mate the Cygnus PCM to the Service Module (SM) which houses the spacecraft’s avionics, propulsion and power systems and propels the combined vehicle to berth at the ISS.
The Cygnus SM is built by Orbital at their manufacturing facility in Dulles, VA., and shipped to Wallops for integration with the PCM in the processing building.
This particular vehicle is actually the second PCM bound for the ISS, but will be the first of eight operational cargo delivery runs to the space station over the next few years.
The first PCM to fly is set to blast-off on a Demonstration Mission (COTS 1) to the ISS in some six weeks on Sept. 14 atop Orbital’s privately developed Antares rocket. It is also in the midst of flight processing at Wallops inside a different building known as the Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF) where it is integrated with the Antares rocket.
Cygnus stored inside shipping container is unloaded from Antonov An-124 aircraft after arrival at NASA Wallops, VA on July 17, 2013. Credit: NASA/Patrick Black
Orbital says the Cygnus Demo vehicle is already fueled and will be loaded with about 1550 kg of cargo for the station crew.
The purpose of the demonstration flight is to prove that the unmanned spacecraft can safely and successfully rendezvous and dock with the orbiting outpost. The flight objectives are quite similar to the initial cargo delivery test flights successfully accomplished by Orbital’s commercial rival, SpaceX.
All of Orbital’s ISS cargo resupply missions will occur from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s (MARS) pad 0A at Wallops.
Antares rocket will launch Cygnus spacecraft to the ISS from Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) Launch Pad 0A at NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
This past spring on April 21, Orbital successfully launched the 1st test flight of the Antares rocket. Read my articles here and here.
Orbital’s Antares/Cygnus system is similar in scope to the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon system.
Both firms won lucrative NASA contracts to deliver approximately 20,000 kilograms each of supplies and science equipment to the ISS during some 20 flights over the coming 3 to 4 years.
Cygnus spacecraft is loaded onto the Cygnus Vertical Carrier (CVC) 16-wheeled transporter to move between processing facilities at NASA’s Wallops Island launch site. Credit: Ken Kremer (kenkremer.com)
The goal of NASA’s CRS initiative is to achieve safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation to and from the ISS and low-Earth orbit (LEO) as a replacement for NASA’s now retired Space Shuttle Program.
Orbital’s contract with NASA for at least eight Antares/Cygnus resupply missions to the ISS is worth $1.9 Billion.
