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A new module for the space station blasted off today from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan at 9:22 a.m. EST. The Poisk (which means “explore” in Russian) is a combination docking module/airlock/future research module. It will meet up with the ISS on Thursday at 10:44 am. Poisk is the first permanent pressurized module to be added since May of 2008, when the Japanese “JEM” research module became part of the ISS, and is the first major Russian addition to the station since the Pirs docking compartment was launched in 2001. The new module will be used as an additional docking port for Russian vehicles, as an airlock for Russian-based spacewalks and as a platform for external science experiments.
The new module is almost identical in size to Pirs, at 2.5 meters (8 feet wide) and about 4 meters (13 feet) long. Its first use will be as a docking port during the relocation of a Soyuz crew vehicle in January.
About 1,800 pounds of cargo is loaded into Poisk’s pressurized compartment for delivery to the space station.
A companion module, the Mini Research Module-1, will be carried to orbit on space shuttle Atlantis’ STS-132 mission, targeted to launch in May 2010. That module will be robotically attached to the station’s Zarya module.
Update #2, 5:30 pm: NASA has now said that after further analysis, the space debris they have been tracking no longer poses any concern or threat to the ISS. Everyone can rest easy tonight! The piece of debris was only 5 cm long, and will not pass within the “pizza box” zone around the station (0.75 x 25 x 25 kilometers) that calls for an alert.
A hard-to-track piece of space junk may come within a half a kilometer of the International Space Station later today, and NASA managers are considering asking the crew to board the docked Soyuz capsules as a precaution. The time of closest approach is at 10:48 p.m. EST, and the object was detected too late for the station to do an evasive maneuver. Depending on the outcome of additional tracking data analysis, the crew may be awakened later and directed to go into the Soyuz vehicles around 10:30 pm or given the option to sleep in Soyuz tonight. NASA says they don’t believe the crew is at risk, but precautions are prudent in dealing with space debris.
The crew was told about the debris, which ground stations have not been able to track consistently, said NASA spokesman Kyle Herring. Trajectory experts are continuing to verify information about the debris. “All this is a precaution, and we do not believe the crew is in any danger at this time or at the time of closest approach, but are making preparations in the unlikely event the approach would be closer than expected,” Herring said.
UPDATE: 2:30pm: As of now, NASA is planning for the crew to close all the hatches on the station and enter the Soyuz. “We have data that indicates we might be heading to a conjunction, however we do not have enough data to have any confidence in the outcomes we’re predicting at this point,” Capcom Ricky Arnold told the crew from mission control. “We’re hoping we’re going to be a lot smarter at 2200 (GMT), but right now we have to plan for an indication that we will have a conjunction.”
NASA will make a final decision on what course of action they will take at about 5 p.m.
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Now that it’s mostly complete, the International Space Station is the brightest human-built object in space. It’s easy to see with your own eyes, the trick is knowing when to step outside and look up to see the station go overhead. If you do get your timing right, you’ll see the station as a bright star moving quickly in the sky. It only take a couple of minutes to pass through the sky above your house. Want to see the station for yourself? Here are some resources for International Space Station viewing.
The best place to go is NASA’s Human Spaceflight tracking page. This shows you the current location of the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and any space shuttles currently in orbit.
So that shows you where the space station and shuttles are right now, but how will you know when they’re going to be passing over your part of the Earth?
NASA has a page for sighting opportunities. You can either choose your location from a list of common locations around the world, or you download an application that lets you pick your specific spot on Earth. It will then tell you the exact times ISS will be passing overhead.
If you’ve got an iPhone, check out the ISS Visibility App. This tool will calculate the next times you’ll be able to see the ISS pass overhead.
You can also use a great service called Heavens Above. This will also show you the current location of satellites, as give you times when ISS will be passing overhead.
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The International Space Station is taking on the look and feel of a busy space way station, with three Soyuz now docked and a current crew count of nine. Expedition 21 Flight Engineers Jeff Williams and Maxim Suraev along with spaceflight participant Guy Laliberté arrived at the ISS, docking their Soyuz TMA-16 to the aft end of the Zvezda service module at 4:35 a.m. EDT Friday. Williams and Suraev are relieving Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Michael Barratt who will depart on Oct. 10 along with the Canadian visitor, Laliberté (the one with the clown nose, below). Watch the docking video below, along with another video of the hatch opening and the new crew members entering the station.
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It’s not quite like requesting “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” and having a steaming drink appear, but almost. The Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center, is an engineer’s version of the science fiction replicator on Star Trek. “You start with a drawing of the part you want to build, you push a button, and out comes the part,” said Karen Taminger, the technology lead for NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program.
Electron beam freeform fabrication process. Image credit: NASA
Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication or EBF3150 creates parts for airplanes — not food and drink — and uses an environmentally-friendly construction process to manufacture layered metal objects. This technique could revolutionize the aviation industry and may have applications for the future spacecraft and the medical community as well. It can be used to make small, detailed parts or large structural pieces of airplanes.
EBF3150 works in a vacuum chamber, where an electron beam is focused on a constantly feeding source of metal, which is melted and then applied layer by layer on top of a rotating surface until the part is complete. A detailed 3-dimensional cross-sectional drawing of the part is fed into the device’s computer, providing information of how the the part should be built from the inside out. This guides the electron beam and and the inflow of metal to produce the object, building it up layer by layer.
Commercial applications for EBF3150 are already known and its potential already tested, Taminger said, noting it’s possible that, within a few years, some aircraft will be flying with parts made by this process.
The metals used must be compatible with the electron beam so that it can be heated by the stream of energy and briefly turned into liquid form. Aluminum is an ideal material to be used, but other metals can be used as well. In fact, the EBF3150 can handle two different sources of the feed stock metal at the same time, either by mixing them together into a unique alloy or embedding one material inside another, such as inserting a strand of fiber optic glass inside an aluminum part, enabling the placement of sensors in areas that were impossible before, Taminger said. structural metal part fabricated from EBF3. Image credit: NASA
While the EBF3 equipment tested on the ground is fairly large and heavy, a smaller version was created and successfully test flown on a NASA jet that is used to provide researchers with brief periods of weightlessness. The next step is to fly a demonstration of the hardware on the International Space Station, Taminger said.
Future lunar base crews could use EBF3 to manufacture spare parts as needed, rather than rely on a supply of parts launched from Earth. Astronauts might be able to mine feed stock from the lunar soil, or even recycle used landing craft stages by melting them.
But the immediate and greatest potential for the process is in the aviation industry where major structural segments of an airliner, or casings for a jet engine, could be manufactured for about $1,000 per pound less than conventional means, Taminger said.
The device is environmentally friendly because its unique manufacturing technique cuts down on the amount of waste. Normally an aircraft builder might start with a 6,000-pound block of titanium and machine it down to a 300-pound part, leaving 5,700 pounds of material that needs to be recycled and using several thousand gallons of cutting fluid used in the process.
“With EBF3 you can build up the same part using only 350 pounds of titanium and machine away just 50 pounds to get the part into its final configuration,” Taminger said. “And the EBF3 process uses much less electricity to create the same part.”
While initial parts for the aviation industry will be simple shapes, replacing parts already designed, future parts designed from scratch with the EBF3150 process in mind could lead to improvements in jet engine efficiency, fuel burn rate and component lifetime.
“There’s a lot of power in being able to build up your part layer by layer because you can get internal cavities and complexities that are not possible with machining from a solid block of material,” Taminger said.
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The International Space Station, or ISS, is the largest object every built by humans in space. And because it’s so large, it’s also very bright; easily visible with the unaided eye. The ISS also follows an orbital track that takes over different parts of the Earth. That means if you know the right time, you can go out and watch the station pass right over. But you need to know the right time, and that requires some kind of ISS tracking tool. Let’s take a look at some ISS tracking tools you can use to tell you when you should head outside and look up.
The best place to track ISS is from NASA’s human space flight ISS tracking page. This site will tell you the current location of the International Space Station, and space shuttles currently in flight, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The problem is that this tells you where the space station is right now, and not when it’s going to be passing through your skies… at night.
A better tool for that is the ISS sightings page. You download an applet that lets you put in your place on Earth and it gives you some upcoming dates and times that the station will be passing overhead. There’s also a quick drop down box, where you can select your location from many places in the world.
Another great tool is Heavens Above. It allows you to track the current position of thousands of satellites, including ISS and the space shuttles, when they’re in orbit.
So use one of these tools for ISS tracking, and then head outside and see if you can see the station with your own eyes.
Artist concept of Chandrayaan-1 orbiting the moon. Credit: ISRO
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After giving up on re-establishing contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman G. Madhavan Nair announced the space agency hopes to launch its first mission to Mars sometime between 2013 and 2015. Nair said the termination of Chandrayaan-1, although sad, is not a setback and India will move ahead with its plans for the Chandrayaan-2 mission to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface to prospect for chemicals, and in four to six years launch a robotic mission to Mars.
“We have given a call for proposal to different scientific communities,” Nair told reporters. “Depending on the type of experiments they propose, we will be able to plan the mission. The mission is at conceptual stage and will be taken up after Chandrayaan-2.”
On the decision to quickly pull the plug on Chandrayaan-1, Nair said, “There was no possibility of retrieving it. (But) it was a great success. We could collect a large volume of data, including more than 70,000 images of the moon. In that sense, 95 percent of the objective was completed.”
Contact with Chandrayaan-1 may have been lost because its antenna rotated out of direct contact with Earth, ISRO officials said. Earlier this year, the spacecraft lost both its primary and back-up star sensors, which use the positions of stars to orient the spacecraft.
The loss of Chandrayaan-1 comes less than a week after the spacecraft’s orbit was adjusted to team up with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter for a Bi-static radar experiment. During the maneuver, Chandrayaan-1 fired its radar beam into Erlanger Crater on the moon’s north pole. Both spacecraft listened for echoes that might indicate the presence of water ice – a precious resource for future lunar explorers. The results of that experiment have not yet been released.
Chandrayaan-1 craft was designed to orbit the moon for two years, but lasted 315 days. It will take about 1,000 days until it crashes to the lunar surface and is being tracked by the U.S. and Russia, ISRO said.
The Chandrayaan I had 11 payloads, including a terrain-mapping camera designed to create a three-dimensional atlas of the moon. It is also carrying mapping instruments for the European Space Agency, radiation-measuring equipment for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and two devices for NASA, including the radar instrument to assess mineral composition and look for ice deposits. India launched its first rocket in 1963 and first satellite in 1975. The country’s satellite program is one of the largest communication systems in the world.
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Tweets coming from up above our Earthly sphere.
The newest International Space Station astronaut has started Tweeting from space. Tim Kopra is the first ISS crew member to use the social media tool Twitter to discuss living and working in orbit. Kopra (@Astro_Tim) recently joined the Expedition 20 crew after arriving July 17 aboard space shuttle Endeavour. But the coolest thing is that his first Tweets’ origin was “from Mobile Web.” Yep, from the ISS, that’s really mobile.
But of course, there isn’t really “the web” up on the space station. But Kopra will sent down his Tweets messages to mission control in Houston, and they will post them on Twitter.
NASA says Kopra will provide followers with a unique perspective as an Expedition 20 flight engineer and member of the Army. He is an Army aviator and West Point graduate. He periodically will answer questions submitted on the Army’s Web site. To submit questions and view Kopra’s answers, visit the US Army’s website
This is Kopra’s first spaceflight. He completed his first spacewalk July 18 during the STS-127 mission. Kopra is in orbit with station Commander Gennady Padalka and Roman Romanenko — both Russian cosmonauts — and NASA astronaut Mike Barratt, European Space Agency astronaut Frank DeWinne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk.
As of this writing, Astro_Tim has close to 5,000 followers.
ISS as seen from departing space shuttle Endeavour. Credit: NASA TV
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A great opportunity tonight (July 28) to see three spaceships cross the sky at once! Endeavour just undocked from the ISS today, so they will be close to each other, plus there’s another spaceship lurking nearby: a Progress re-supply ship ready to dock with the ISS. How can you find out when and where to look for the three spacecraft? There are a couple of different websites that provide real-time tracking data and information about the ISS sighting opportunities. See below for more info.
The image above is a screenshot from NASA TV of the ISS as Endeavour undocked. Notice the shadow of the shuttle on the ISS solar arrays!
NASA has a Quick and Easy Sightings by City site, where you just search for your country and city which provides local times and the location in the sky where the station will be visible.
The European Space Agency also provides their ISS: Where Is It Now site that also allows you to select your country and city to find the station’s location.
The Heaven’s Above website (which also powers ESA’s site) is also an excellent site to find out when the ISS, as well as all sorts of other satellites and other heavenly sights will be visible. At Heaven’s Above, you can plug in your exact latitude and longitude, so if you live in a remote area, you’ll be able to have exact times and locations to look for satellites instead of relying on information for the nearest city.
Additionally, you can get a notification on Twitter when the space station will be zooming over your skies. Follow Twisst. (Thanks to big ian for the reminder of this new Twitter addition!)
Here’s wishing everyone clear skies and great views!
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As space shuttle Endeavour undocks from the International Space Station today (Tuesday), now is a good time to look back at the very successful STS-127 mission. Here’s some great images which tell the story of the mission. Above, astronaut Tim Kopra is pictured in the forward port side area of Endeavour’s cargo bay during the first of five planned spacewalks performed by the STS-127 crew. Kopra is now part of the ISS crew, and is staying onboard the space station to serve as flight engineer.
Moon rock on board the ISS. Credit: NASA
Of course, during this mission we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Fittingly, there was a Moon rock on board the ISS. The 3.6 billion year-old lunar sample was flown to the station aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-119 in April 2009. NASA says the rock, lunar sample 10072 serves as a symbol of the nation’s resolve to continue the exploration of space. It will be returned on shuttle mission STS-128 to be publicly displayed.
Here’s a view of the newly installed “front porch” of the Kibo lab, which is actually the Japanese Experiment Module – Exposed Facility (JEF). This platform will hold experiments designed to work outside the protective confines of the station, exposing them to the space environment. The JEF was installed by the astronauts during this mission. Dave Wolf during an EVA. Credit: NASA
During the second STS-127 spacewalk, astronaut Dave Wolf worked outside bringing the Linear Drive Unit (LDU) and two other parts to the station’s External Stowage Platform 3 for long-term storage. Wolf is near the end of Canadarm2, which is anchored on the ISS. Arms in space. Credit: NASA
Speaking of the robotic arms, here’s a view of both the space station and space shuttle robotic arms as seen from inside the Kibo laboratory. A portion of the Japanese Experiment Module – Exposed Facility is also visible. The blackness of space and Earth’s horizon provide the backdrop for the scene. Tom Marshburn during an EVA. Credit: NASA
Astronaut Tom Marshburn makes his second spacewalk on July 24, along with Christopher Cassidy, out of frame. Eleven other astronauts and cosmonauts remained inside the International Space Station and the shuttle while the two astronauts worked outside. Astronauts share a lunch on the ISS. Credit: NASA
In total, there were 13 astronauts on board the ISS, a record for the amount of astronauts in one vehicle. Pictured, clockwise from bottom right, are astronauts Christopher Cassidy and Mike Barratt, with Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, an unidentified crew member, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata (floating above), Canadian Space Agency astronauts Robert Thirsk and Julie Payette, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne, and astronaut Christopher Cassidy. Either out of frame or not clearly seen are astronauts Mark Polansky, Doug Hurley, Dave Wolf, Tim Kopra and Tom Marshburn, plus Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Gennady Padalka. ISS as seen from departing space shuttle Endeavour. Credit: NASA TV
This screen shot shows the ISS as seen as Endeavour departed from the station on July 28. The views of both the ISS and shuttle were stunning. We’ll post the high-resolution versions when they become available. Notice the shadow of the space shuttle on the space station solar arrays! Amazing! Endeavour's launch. Credit: NASA
And now we’re back to the beginning of the mission. Liftoff for the STS-was at 6:03 p.m. (EDT) on July 15, 2009 from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The storm clouds stayed far enough away so that Endeavour and her STS-127 crew finally on its sixth attempt. Watch a replay of the launch here.
