Microgravity — or “zero-g” as it’s sometimes called — is not a natural state for the human body to live in for prolonged periods of time. But that is what today’s astronauts are often expected to do, whether while on expedition aboard Space Station or during a future voyage to the Moon or Mars. A host of physical issues can result from the space environment, from bone loss and muscle atrophy to the risks associated from increased exposure to radiation.
Now, there’s another downside to long-term life in orbit: eye and brain damage.
A team of radiologists led by Dr. Larry A. Kramer from The University of Texas Medical School at Houston performed MRIs on 27 astronauts, measuring in each the shape and thickness of the rear of the eyes, optic nerve, optic nerve sheath and pituitary gland.
In 7 of the 27 astronauts flattening of the backs of the eyes was noted, and enlargement of the optic nerve was detected in nearly all of them — 26 out of 27.
In addition, four exhibited deformation of the pituitary gland.
The optic nerve. (NIH)
The changes to the eyes and optic nerves are similar to what are typically seen in those suffering from idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH), a disorder characterized by increased pressure within the skull. Symptoms typically include headache, dizziness and nausea, and if left untreated it can produce permanent vision loss through optic nerve damage.
“The MRI findings revealed various combinations of abnormalities following both short- and long-term cumulative exposure to microgravity also seen with idiopathic intracranial hypertension,” said Dr. Kramer. “Microgravity-induced intracranial hypertension represents a hypothetical risk factor and a potential limitation to long-duration space travel.”
Chief of flight medicine at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Dr. William J. Tarver, noted that although no astronaut has been kept from flight duties as a result of such risks, NASA will continue to “closely monitor the situation” and has placed the potential danger “high on its list of human risks.”
The team’s paper was accepted into the journal Radiology on Feb. 1.
“Orbital and Intracranial Effects of Microgravity: Findings at 3-T MR Imaging.” Collaborating with Dr. Kramer were Ashot Sargsyan, M.D., Khader M. Hasan, Ph.D., James D. Polk, D.O., and Douglas R. Hamilton, M.D., Ph.D.
Update Oct. 24, 2013: Further investigation by researchers at Houston Methodist and Johnson Space Center have shown more evidence of long-term eye damage after just two weeks in orbit. Read more.
Expedition 30 astronaut and chemical engineer Don Pettit continues his ongoing “Science off the Sphere” series with this latest installment, in which he demonstrates some of the peculiar behaviors of thin sheets of water in microgravity. Check it out — you might be surprised how water behaves when freed from the bounds of gravity (and put under the command of a cosmic chemist!)
A stunning image taken by Don Pettit on board the International Space Station. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA
[/caption]
Astronaut Don Pettit posted this beautiful image on his Google+ page showing a view from the space station reminiscent of science-fiction. Of course, that’s the constellation Orion off in the distance, but there’s a bit of a debate going on at Pettit’s post whether the diffusion of light seen emanating from the ISS is just light from inside the space station windows (it appears to be the Cupola) spreading out into total darkness, or if the effect is actually from a reboost of the ISS for a Debris Avoidance Maneuver that was performed around the time this image was taken.
The only clue Pettit provided is the title he gave the image, “Orion in the headlights,” which would point to the effect coming from the light shining from the Cupola windows. But the The DAM took place at 10.12 GMT (5:12 a.m. EST) on February 29, 2012 and as commenter Peter Caltner points out, “the scenic lighting effect ends exactly in [the series of images that Pettit took] at the end of the 76 seconds of the burn duration.”
The original can be found here on the NASA Gateway to Astronaut Photography website, and here’s another image in the sequence.
OK, all you imaging experts out there: until Pettit gives us the real scoop, what are your thoughts?
A light seen from the International Space Station, intentionally 'flashing' at astronaut Don Pettit. Picture credit: Don Pettit, courtesy of the San Antonio Astronomical Association
[/caption]
We’ve seen lots of images and videos of city lights on Earth as seen from the International Space Station. But if you were down on Earth, flashing a light at the astronauts on the ISS – would they see you? The answer is now definitively, yes. Flashing the space station with beams of light as it passes overhead had never been successfully done—until this past weekend. Astronomers with the San Antonio Astronomy Association (SAAA) and the Austin Astronomy Society combined forces to flash enough light at the ISS from a dark location, as to appear greater than 0 magnitude to astronaut Don Pettit, on board the station. It turns out, they probably didn’t need the two 800 million lumen searchlights they used, but they sure put on a great show.
“It was amazing,” said Keith Little, from the SAAA. “It was almost like the space station lit up when we shined the lights on it. We had no idea it was going to be that bright.”
Image taken by Don Pettit on the ISS of lights flashing from Texas by the San Antonio Astronomy Association and the Austin Astronomy Society. Credit: Don Pettit, image couresty the SAAA
In a highly coordinated and engineered event, the astronomers flashed the two huge searchlights along with shining a one-watt blue laser at the ISS. Pettit explained some of the preparations in his blog on Fragile Oasis: “This took a number of engineering calculations, Pettit wrote. “Projected beam diameters (assuming the propagation of a Gaussian wave for the laser) and intensity at the target had to be calculated. Tracking space station’s path as it streaked across the sky was another challenge.”
Due to lags in communications to and from the ISS (“on space station we receive email drops two to three times a day,” Pettit said), the whole event took weeks to plan.
The SAAA had an “in” with Pettit, as he is friends with one of their members, astrophotographer and author Robert Reeves, and the idea for doing this was actually hatched before Pettit left for space back in November, 2011.
On March 4, about 65 amateur astronomers were in position at the Lazano Observatory in Springbranch Texas. They turned on the searchlights and waited as the ISS was set to make an appearance in the sky. At the precise time, they began flashing the two searchlights at a rate of two seconds on, then two seconds off, in a very non-technical, but effective manner.
“We had two people manually aiming the lights and two people holding plywood up over the lights, and they were manually tracking the space station,” Little told Universe Today.
Pettit, meanwhile, had no trouble seeing the flashes.
“Don sent us an email the next day,” Little said, “and he told us how bright it was, and how he could see the lights even before we started the flash system. He saw it from 10 degrees above from the west to 10 degrees from the Northeast.”
To everyone’s surprise, Pettit could also see the blue laser. “When the spotlights were off, he said he could still see the blue laser, which was shone steadily,” Little said. “I was pretty surprised that the laser light was that visible from space.”
Little ran the laser and he had three people aiding him by watching for aircraft, “It is an FAA offense to shoot an airplane with a laser, so we took all the safety precautions so that we wouldn’t take that chance,” he said.
But if you see the ISS passing overhead, don’t expect that you can flash a light and they will see it. For one thing, they probably won’t be looking for your light. But additionally, Pettit explained in a previous blog post how when we see the ISS best here on Earth, they can’t see much below.
Ironically, when earthlings can see us, we cannot see them. The glare from the full sun effectively turns our windows into mirrors that return our own ghostly reflection. This often plays out when friends want to flash space station from the ground as it travels overhead. They shine green lasers, xenon strobes, and halogen spotlights at us as we sprint across the sky. These well-wishers don’t know that we cannot see a thing during this time. The best time to try this is during a dark pass when orbital calculations show that we are passing overhead. This becomes complicated when highly collimated light from lasers are used, since the beam diameter at our orbital distance is about one kilometer, and this spot has to be tracking us while in the dark. And of course we have to be looking. As often happens, technical details complicate what seems like a simple observation. So far, all attempts at flashing the space station have failed.
But of course, now there has been a success.
Little said the two astronomy clubs put in 3 months of planning with several meetings, and thanks do the donation of the spotlights from SkyView Searchlights, the costs to do the experiment were minimal. “We had lots of volunteers who wanted to be a part of it,” he said.
Is there any science in this, beyond knowing that under the right conditions the ISS astronauts could see lights from people on Earth?
“Well, if the ISS were to somehow lose all communication, which I would find hard to believe, we just showed that we could spot the station and possibly send them messages through Morse code,” Little said.
But Little said the main thrust of the whole event was the novelty of trying to be the first to successfully shine a light at the ISS that the crew could see, as well as trying to bring astronomy to the attention of the general public.
Is this the best video footage ever of photos taken from the International Space Station? ISS astronaut and Expedition 29 commander Mike Fossum seems to think so.
If anyone would know what a good ISS video is, he would! So watch, and decide for yourself.
Video uploaded by YouTube user bitmeizer. Made from sequences of still photographs taken by Expedition 29 crew members, the time-lapse videos have been digitally smoothed out and a soundtrack added, along with some transition effects.
Here’s a gorgeous view from the International Space Station, taken by the Expedition 30 crew on Feb. 4, 2012 as the station passed into orbital dawn. The greens and reds of the aurora borealis shimmer above Earth’s limb beyond the Station’s solar panels as city lights shine beneath a layer of clouds.
As the ISS travels around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,163 km/h) it moves in and out of daylight, in effect experiencing dawn 16 times every day.
From that vantage point, 240 miles (386 km) above the Earth, the lights of the aurora — both northern and southern — appear below, rather than above.
See this and more images from the Space Station’s nightly flights here.
Also, here’s a time-lapse video made from photos taken by the Expedition 30 crew a few days earlier. Enjoy!
(Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.)
Long Exposure Photograph of the ISS Credit: Mark Humpage
[/caption]
If you have seen the International Space Station (ISS) pass over a few times with your own eyes, (here’s our guide on seeing it) you may want to have a go at photographing it.
Photographing the ISS is very worthwhile and gratifying. There are two basic methods; one being easy and the other being a little more difficult. Both methods are incredibly rewarding and good results can be obtained fairly quickly, once you have mastered the basics.
Method 1: Discovery and ISS pass over the UK on March 7, 2011, captured by Will Gater.
You will need a DSLR camera or another type of camera which is capable taking long exposures. Incredibly important is having a tripod or somewhere you can place your camera without it getting vibrations or movement.
Find out when and where the ISS will be passing over your location and choose a part of the sky the ISS is passing through at which you can point your camera.
Experiment with your camera settings, to get colours and exposures correct beforehand and do a couple of long exposure test shots of anything from 15 to 60 seconds. You can do shorter or longer exposures but this is up to you, depending your equipment and how artistic you want to be.
This method will produce a long white streak or line, which will show the path taken of the International Space Station as it passes over. This is the most common method for amateurs.
Method 2: The ISS and shuttle Discovery during the STS-131 mission. Credit: Ted Judah
You will need a telescope, a webcam, and a strong mount or tripod. Set up your telescope and mount, along with webcam with a laptop and make sure of the time and where the ISS will be passing over your location.
In this method we will use the telescope to magnify and see the ISS up close while recording a movie (AVI). We will then stack the frames of the recorded movie in a specialist image enhancing program such as Registax.
Insert your WebCam into the telescope focusing tube using an adapter (available from astronomy stores) and connect the cables to your laptop. When the ISS is due, start recording and track the space station using a finder scope or computerized mount.
The difficult part of this method is tracking the ISS and keeping it in the field of view of the telescope while recording the video file. It is recommended that you set your mount in “Alt/ Az” mode or use a Dobsonian telescope so that you have free movement of telescopes optical tube assembly. You will basically be using the telescope as a giant video camera and you need to keep the ISS in shot for as long as possible.
This method is very difficult as the ISS has been magnified highly while moving very quickly and can be easily lost out of the field of view, or there can be too much movement (shaking) in the video. This method requires much practice.
Once you have been able to get a video of the ISS passing over, you can feed your video file into software such as RegiStax and the program will sort each individual frame, removing bad frames and stacking good frames to create a very clear image.
This method is fantastic for creating close up images with detail on the International Space Station; you can also see docked spacecraft. You can also use this method for trying to image other Earth-orbiting satellites, too.
The ISS and shuttle Discovery as captured -- and annotated -- by Thierry Legault
It would be great to see your ISS photographs, so please send them into us via our Flickr site. Good luck!
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata plays around wiith humanoid robot Robonaut 2 during Expedition 39 in March 2014. Credit: NASA
It may have been a giant leap for robot-kind yesterday as NASA’s Robonaut shook hands in space with Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank on the International Space Station. “For the record, it was a firm handshake,” Burbank said. “Very nice. Nice job on the programming and all the engineering. Quite an impressive robot.”
Not only did the robot complete the historic first humanoid to human handshake in space, but Robonaut also sent its greetings to everyone on Earth by using sign language to say, “Hello World.”
Robonaut is designed to perform routine maintenance tasks aboard the space station to free up the astronauts for more important research tasks. You can see more capabilities of Robonaut in a video below where engineers put one of the Robonauts through its paces on a task board that mimics controls aboard the ISS. Continue reading “First Humanoid to Human Handshake in Space”
The International Space Station Credit: @VirtualAstro
[/caption]
Most readers of Universe Today are familiar with the International Space Station or “ISS” as it’s often referred to. But just in case you are visiting our site for the first time, the ISS is a huge space station orbiting Earth that serves as an orbital laboratory, factory, testing ground and home; crew members conduct experiments from biology to astronomy, including experiments for prolonged exposure to life in space for future missions to the Moon and beyond.
The ISS is major accomplishment for NASA (US), ESA (Europe), JAXA (Japan) CSA (Canada) and all the countries involved (16 in all). The space station is just over 72 m long by 108 m wide and 20 m high; it is maintained at an orbital altitude of between 330 km (205 mi) and 410 km (255 mi) and travels at an average speed of 27,724 kilometres (17,227 mi) per hour, completing 15.7 orbits per day.
One of the best things about the ISS is that you can see it with your own eyes from Earth! It’s very easy to watch the International Space Station pass over your own backyard!
All you need to do is understand when the ISS is going to be passing over your location and where to look for it in the sky. You can check this by using an ISS pass predictor app or website such as Heavens-Above.
Once you have found out when the ISS will pass over your location, all you need to do a few minutes before the pass is go outside and start looking in the right direction of the sky.
The International Space Station always passes over starting from a westerly part of the sky, but not always from the same point. It can be low on the horizon for some passes and very high others. Most of the apps or websites will tell you what direction in the sky the pass will start and end and how many degrees above the horizon the starting and ending points are. Also included are the highest altitude the ISS will be. For example, if the maximum elevation is listed as somewhere between 74-90 degrees above the horizon, the ISS will be passing almost straight overhead (Just like you learned in geometry, 90 degrees would be straight up). If you aren’t sure about where to look, a good rule of thumb is that your fist outstretched at arm’s length is 10 degrees. If the ISS will be first be seen 40 degrees above the horizon, look four fist-lengths above the horizon. Check apps and websites for where and what track the ISS will take on each individual pass.
When the station passes over it will travel from a westerly direction, heading in an easterly direction. An average good pass can last about 5 minutes.
The ISS looks like an incredibly bright, fast-moving star and can be mistaken for an aircraft. However, the ISS has no flashing lights and it can be much brighter. It seemingly just glides across the sky.
Short passes can last a few seconds to a few minutes and you can see the international space station slowly move into the Earth’s shadow, good bright passes will show the ISS moving across the sky from horizon to horizon.
ISS long exposure photograph over Donnington Castle UK Credit: www.Perfexion.com
The International Space Station usually takes around 90 minutes to orbit our planet, so if you’re really lucky you can get two, or maybe even three or four passes in an evening or morning.
Not only can you see the ISS in the evening but you can also see it in the mornings as both the ISS and Sun are in the ideal position to illuminate the spacecraft at this time. The light we see from the ISS is reflected sunlight.
You can’t watch the ISS pass over during the middle of the day because in the daytime the sky is too bright (although some people with specialized equipment have seen it) and you cannot see the space station in the middle of the night, as it is in the Earth’s shadow and no light is being reflected from it.
The position that the ISS will be in the sky changes every night. The space station does not take the same track or orbital path for each orbit and this change provides good visible passes roughly every 6 weeks in each location on Earth.
Occasionally if a spacecraft such as a Soyuz crew capsule or a Progress resupply vehicle has been sent to the ISS, you will see objects preceding or trailing the station as it moves across the sky. These can either be very close to the station or the distance between the objects can be measured in minutes. To check if there are any other spacecraft with the international space station during a pass, use the pass prediction app, or the Heaven’s Above Site.
Seeing the ISS is an incredible sight! Just remember there are people on board that fast moving point of light!
Good luck! ISS long exposure photograph Credit: Mark Humpage
A Progress resupply vehicle seen on approach to the ISS on Jan. 27, 2012. (NASA)
[/caption]
When you’re cruising along in low-Earth orbit, running out of supplies is not an option. Fortunately there are Progress vehicles: Russian spacecraft that carry much-needed supplies and equipment to the astronauts aboard the Space Station.
The photo above, taken by Expedition 30 crew members, shows the unmanned Progress 46 vehicle approaching the ISS on January 27, 2012.
Progress 46 carried 2,050 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds oxygen and air, 926 pounds of water and 2,778 pounds of parts and experiment hardware, for a total of 2.9 tons of food, fuel and equipment for the Expedition 30 crew.
The Progress is similar in appearance and design to Soyuz spacecraft, which serve as human transportation to and from the Space Station, but differs in that the second of the spacecraft’s three sections (as prior to launch) is a refueling module, and the third uppermost section is a cargo module.
In addition to bringing supplies to the ISS, Progress vehicles also serve as – for lack of a better term – “garbage trucks”, undocking from the Station loaded with trash and re-entering the atmosphere, during which time much of the refuse inside gets incinerated.
Progress 46 successfully docked to the Space Station at 7:09 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 27, 2012.
