Inside Kibo, the Japanese Experiment Module, Mark Polansky (left), STS-127 commander, shakes hands with Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.
Wakata has been onboard the International Space Station for a tour of duty as flight engineer but will return to Earth with Polansky and the rest of the STS-127 crew.
Image credit: NASA
July 23, 2009
› More images from Flight Day 9
The repair by flight controllers, albeit temporary, came as a great relief to NASA.
Even if the carbon dioxide-removal system had remained broken, shuttle Endeavour would not have had to undock early from the international space station, said flight director Brian Smith. But the system needs to work to support six station residents over the long term, he said.
The machine for cleansing the station atmosphere, on the U.S. side of the sprawling outpost, failed Saturday when it got too hot and tripped a circuit breaker.
Flight controllers managed to get the unit up and running again 8 1/2 hours later in manual mode. That means extra people are needed in Mission Control — six each day — to handle the approximately 50 computer commands that need to be sent up every few hours.
Normally, the system runs automatically. Smith said engineers hope to come up with a software solution soon to have the system back in automatic.
An air-cleansing system on the Russian side of the station is working fine. In addition, the station has about three weeks' worth of canisters for removing the carbon dioxide exhaled by six crew members. The astronauts would have relied on those canisters to prevent an early undocking of Endeavour, if the U.S. carbon-dioxide removal machine not been coaxed back into operation.
The shuttle and its crew of seven will depart Tuesday, as originally planned.
Before leaving, the shuttle astronauts have their fifth and final spacewalk to perform.
During Monday's spacewalk, Christopher Cassidy and Thomas Marshburn will rearrange some power cable hookups, fold down a piece of popped-up insulation on a small, dexterous robot arm, and install TV cameras on the brand new porch of Japan's space station lab.
"We're all keenly aware that (spacewalks) carry some risk to them, and so we're going to be very, very deliberate and careful," said shuttle commander Mark Polansky. "In my book, the last one you do is always the one that you have to watch out for the most."
After experiencing elevated carbon dioxide levels on the past two spacewalks, astronaut Christopher Cassidy promises to take it nice and slow Monday. His first spacewalk last week had to be cut short because of the problem.
Mission Control has urged Cassidy to rein himself in, not so easy for a former Navy SEAL.
"Yes, I am taking quite a bit of teasing about this," Cassidy said at a news conference as his crewmates erupted in laughter. "I have a whole lot of confidence in the suit and the system there. ... It's not like you leave them out on the loading dock overnight or anything."
A spare carbon-dioxide removal system for the space station, meanwhile, will be launched at the end of August on the next shuttle flight, a plan put in place long before this weekend's trouble.
NASA has wrapped up extensive testing of the foam insulation on the fuel tank for that mission, and so far everything looks to be in good shape. Engineers wanted to make sure that the insulation was attached properly after considerable foam was lost during Endeavour's July 15 launch. The tests delayed Discovery's mission by a week.
Liftoff is now targeted for Aug. 25 at the earliest.
After suffering a problem with one of their space suits, the astronauts on Wednesday's spacewalk were forced to return to the International Space Station early. CBS News Space Consultant Bill Harwood explains.
US astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn on Friday undertook an intense spacewalk to change batteries on a solar panel of the International Space Station (ISS).
During seven hours and 12 minutes of work, the astronauts replaced four batteries that collect and store energy from the station's solar panels. The old batteries are to return to Earth aboard the space shuttle Endeavour.
The spacewalkers had more work to do than originally planned after a spacewalk Wednesday was cut short due to problems with carbon dioxide buildup in Cassidy's spacesuit. A piece of equipment that filters the gas from the air inside the suit was not working properly, but Cassidy was never in imminent danger, NASA said.
The spacesuit has been repaired and the astronauts are trained in what to do in case of an emergency, NASA said.
Wednesday's spacewalk saw Cassidy and astronaut Dave Wolf replace only two batteries instead of the four 170-kg batteries that had been planned. That work was cut short due to the spacesuit problems.
Each solar panel on the station has six batteries, which were designed to be changed after six and a half years. Because they are so large the work must be done while NASA is still operating the space shuttles that are capable of carrying large loads, the space agency said.
A fifth and final spacewalk is planned for Monday, when astronauts will put a video camera on the Japanese Kibo laboratory's new porch, which was installed earlier in the mission allowing experiments to be exposed to the extremities of space.
NASA has captured amazing images of debris from an object that plunged into Jupiter after an amateur Aussie stargazer spotted the impression from his backyard.
Scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture what they call the "sharpest visible-light picture" so far of the expanding gash. The debris possibly came from a comet or asteroid that hit Jupiter.
Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, told AP the magnitude of the impact is believed to be rare. Mr Simon-Miller estimates the diameter of the object that hit the planet was the size of several football fields.
Computer programmer Anthony Wesley made the rare discovery using a telescope in his backyard at Murrumbateman, north of Canberra.
He told the ABC he immediately realised its significance.
"By two o'clock I'd come back up to the house and was sending alerts to all the people I could think of that should be looking at this and especially the professional astronomers with specialised instrument for measuring this," he said.
The longest solar eclipse of the 21st century pitched a swath of Asia from India to China into near darkness Wednesday.
turned their eyes skyward Wednesday as dawn suddenly turned to darkness across the continent in the longest total solar eclipse of this century. Millions of others, seeing the rare event as a bad omen, shuttered themselves indoors.
Chinese launched fireworks and danced in Shanghai. On a remote Japanese island, bewildered cattle went to their feeding troughs thinking night had fallen. And in India, a woman was crushed as thousands of viewers crowded the banks of the Ganges for a glimpse.
Starting off in India just after dawn, the eclipse was visible across a wide swath of Asia before moving over southern Japan and then off into the Pacific Ocean.
The eclipse is the longest since July 11, 1991, when a total eclipse lasting 6 minutes, 53 seconds was visible from Hawaii to South America. There will not be a longer eclipse than Wednesday's until 2132.
The celestial event was met by a mixture of awe, excitement and fear.
Cloudy skies and rain damped the show in many areas, but villagers in the town of Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges in India, got one of the best views.
Thousands of Hindus took to the waters to cleanse their sins. The eclipse was seen there for 3 minutes and 48 seconds.
The gathering was marred when a 65-year-old woman was killed and six people injured in a stampede at one of the river's banks where about 2,500 people had gathered, said police spokesman Surendra Srivastava. He said it is not clear how the stampede started.
Others in India, though, were gripped by fear and refused to come outdoors. In Hindu mythology, an eclipse is caused when a dragon-demon swallows the sun, while another myth is that sun rays during an eclipse can harm unborn children.
"My mother and aunts have called and told me stay in a darkened room with the curtains closed, lie in bed and chant prayers," Krati Jain, 24, who is expecting her first child, said in New Delhi.
Clouds obscured the sun when the eclipse began. But they parted in several Indian cities minutes before the total eclipse took place at 6:24 a.m. (0054 GMT; 8:54 p.m. EDT).
On the tiny Japanese island of Akuseki, where the total eclipse lasted 6 minutes and 25 seconds, more than 200 tourists had to take shelter inside a school gymnasium due to a tornado warning.
But when the sky started to darken, everyone rushed out to the schoolyard, cheering and applauding, said island official Seiichiro Fukumitsu.
"The sky turned dark like in the dead of the night. The air turned cooler and cicadas stopped singing. Everything was so exciting and moving," Fukumitsu said.
Some villagers reported that their cows gathered at a feeding station, apparently mistaking the eclipse as a signal that it was dinner time, he said.
"It was rather mysterious," he said. "It must have been a frightening experience for people hundreds of years ago."
Jubilant eclipse watchers in China set off fireworks near the banks of the Qiantang River in coastal Zheijiang province as skies darkened overhead for about six minutes. Visitors from countries including Britain, Germany and Australia joined curious Chinese onlookers. Heavy clouds blocked the full eclipse but watchers saw a partial one.
The river bank in Yanguan village drew an exceptional number of watchers because it was also the site of the world's largest tidal bore, a phenomenon triggered by the eclipse where a giant tidal wave runs against the river's currents.
In Beijing, a thick blanket of grayish smog blotted out the sky.
In coastal Shanghai, eclipse watchers were disappointed by a light drizzle in the morning. As the sky darkened fully for about five minutes, however, watchers became excited.
Holding a big green umbrella and wearing special glasses, Song Chunyun was prepared to celebrate the occasion in a new white dress.
"Although the rain came, I don't want to screw up the mood. I want to enjoy the special day," she said before dancing and singing in the rain with her two sisters.
At a Buddhist temple in the Thai capital Bangkok, dozens of monks led a mass prayer at a Buddhist temple to ward off evil.
"The eclipse is bad omen for the country," said Pinyo Pongjaroen, a prominent astrologer. "We are praying to boost the fortune of the country."
In Myanmar, Buddhists went to Yangon's famed Shwedagon pagoda to offer flowers, fruits and water to ward off misfortune. Some warned their friends and family not to sleep through the eclipse for fear of getting bad luck.
"We all got up early this morning and prayed at home because our abbot told us that the solar eclipse is a bad omen," said a 43-year old school teacher Aye Aye Thein.
Bangladeshis also came out in droves.
"It's a rare moment, I never thought I would see this in my life," said Abdullah Sayeed, a college student who traveled to Panchagarh town from the capital, Dhaka.
He said cars in the town needed to use headlights as "night darkness has fallen suddenly." People hugged each other and some blew whistles when the eclipse began.
Total eclipses are caused when the moon moves directly between the sun and the earth, covering it completely to cast a shadow on earth.
Charlie Bolden likes to talk -- and he's also prone to choking up.
Making his first major staff appearance as NASA administrator, Bolden spoke before agency employees Tuesday at Washington headquarters along with his deputy, Lori Garver. Over the course of 35 minutes of remarks -- which he admitted should have lasted for about five -- Bolden's voice broke and tears welled up at least five times.
Describing his visit on Monday to the White House with Apollo 11 astronauts, he said that Neil Armstrong "represented us so well," then stopped as his voice cracked for the fourth time.
"I cry because my dad cried," he explained. "He taught me how to cry. He was my high school football coach. He expressed to me, and everyone else he coached, to have something you're passionate about." NASA became his passion, he said, even though he admitted, "I never dreamed of being an astronaut. I definitely didn't dream of being administrator."
He also choked up when describing his views on the environment and what the Middle East looked like from Space.
Moving into a more formal tone, Bolden blasted critics of the space agency who have suggested in recent months that the lack of an administrator signaled President Obama's unwillingness to commit to future space exploration.
"I was insulted to hear people who we thought knew better say, 'Well, there's no one to talk to at NASA'" because it lacked a permanent administrator, he said, adding later "we don't need one" because rank-and-file career employees have carried the agency in recent months.
After months of delay in selecting a new administrator, President Obama nominated the Naval Academy graduate and retired Marine Corps major general earlier this year for the top space job. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) -- whose state is home to thousands of NASA employees -- lobbied hard for the nomination since Bolden piloted the shuttle that Nelson traveled on in 1986. His nomination all but assured, Bolden bused dozens of extended family members from his native South Carolina to pack the seats at his confirmation hearing earlier this month.
Bolden, 62, told the AP on Tuesday that he will be "incredibly disappointed" if people do not make it to Mars -- or beyond -- in his lifetime. His comments appeared to signal a shift in space policy that currently plans to get humans back to the moon by 2020 and then to the red planet or beyond.
During Tuesday's meeting, the new administrator also encouraged employees to reach out to reporters and bloggers or to use Twitter to spread bad news or concerns about agency policy.
“But share them with me and Lori and your supervisor too," he said. (Share news tips or concerns in the comments section below, or e-mail them to The Eye here.)
He also urged frustrated employees to consider moving on.
"If you don't wake up wanting to come to work everyday and you don't feel proud about what you do... go in and talk to your boss," he said.
"I can promise you we're going to help you with the transition. Even if you think we can't survive without you, we can."
CosmosCode is now open for internal alpha testing! Please contact us (email below) for more information or to be part of the testing process.
CosmosCode will be a core offering of free and open source space software through an independent project hosting website, and the development and management of a free software community specific to the challenges and opportunities afforded by space. This community will provide a common access point for individuals, academics, companies, and space agencies around the world using, contributing to, or supporting re-usable, modular, extensible, or standards driven space exploration software.
As the NASA lead for IT within the Constellation program, Ames Research Center is incubating the CosmosCode project in recognition of the immense advances of recent years in collaborative and Internet technologies, and the ability of those technologies to support and extend its work.
The goals of CosmosCode are to:
CosmosCode will offer:
In building this online space, CosmosCode aims to solidify and extend the core competency of skills, knowledge and tools that the space community can draw from, and to create incentive for the community to converge upon common practices and open standards. By leveraging this, a shared platform can emerge upon which markets and commercial enterprise can invest, bootstrapping the advancement of space exploration. By bridging the divide between the free and open source community, and space agencies, CosmosCode aims to make space exploration a truly participatory activity.
Receive periodic email announcements and updates about CosmosCode
To subscribe to cosmoscode-announce:
Send email to cosmoscode-announce-request@lists.arc.nasa.gov with the word subscribe in the subject line of the message.
Be part of the discussions and brainstorming about CosmosCode
To subscribe to cosmoscode-discuss:
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Contact: Jessy Cowan-Sharp: jessy.k.cowan-sharp@nasa.gov
Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon at the Hadley-Apennine landing site. Credit: NASA Forty Years Later
Computer generated diagram of the Integrated Cardiovascular investigation onboard the ISS. Image Credit: NASA/JSC When humans venture into space for long periods, their muscles tend to weaken. The heart of the matter is that muscles don't have to work as hard without gravity.
Catherine (Cady) Coleman is performing a remotely guided echocardiogram on a test subject utilizing the Integrated Cardiovascular protocols, while Betty Chen, a training coordinator observes. Image Credit: NASA/JSC While in space, crewmembers will wear four devices: a portable Holter monitor that measures heart rate continuously for extended periods; a Cardiopres that measures blood pressure with every heart beat; and two Actiwatches -- one on an ankle and one on a wrist -- to monitor and record body movements.
The planet Jupiter shows evidence of having being hit by a large object, either a comet or asteroid.
A dark mark has appeared in its atmosphere towards the southern pole.
It was first seen by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on 19 July, and was then quickly followed up by others including the US space agency.
Nasa used its Infrared Telescope Facility on top of the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii to obtain detailed pictures of the disturbance.
The agency's scientists say the observations reveal a bright upwelling of particles in the upper atmosphere, and a warming of the upper troposphere with possible extra emission from ammonia gas detected at mid-infrared wavelengths.
It is 15 years since Jupiter was famously hit by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. It broke up into several pieces as it plunged on to the gas giant.
Scientists had plenty of warning of that impact but this latest event came out of the blue.
Researchers say that if the mark really was caused by a comet or asteroid, it should spread out in the coming days in a predictable way with jet streams .
NASA cannot continue on its present path, which includes staffing the International Space Station and returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, and fulfill its ultimate goal of getting people to Mars, the U.S. space agency's new chief said Tuesday.
NASA is trying to finish construction of the $100-billion (U.S.) space station and retire the shuttle fleet next year. It also is developing two new rockets and a capsule-style craft that can ferry crews to the moon and other destinations in addition to the station, which orbits 360 kilometres above Earth.
“We cannot continue to survive on the path that we're on right now,” Charlie Bolden, a retired Marine Corps general and four-time shuttle astronaut, said in a speech to NASA employees.
Mr. Bolden said he believes the space program's long-term objective is sending people to Mars.
“The challenge for us in the next few months is to figure out what the single most efficient, most cost-effective path is to get there,” he said.
Mr. Bolden was appointed NASA administrator by President Barack Obama's administration in May, about five years after Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, set a goal for the agency to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, resume sending humans to the moon by 2020 and then push on to Mars.
Returning astronauts to the moon was estimated in 2005 to cost about $110-billion, but that figure has since been cut by about $40-billion. NASA spends about half of its $18-billion annual budget on human spaceflight.
A presidential panel is reviewing options for the U.S. human space program and is expected to issue its report next month. Mr. Bolden told workers the review is “nothing to be afraid of.”
Concurrently, a second review that encompasses all areas of space - military, commercial, civil and scientific - is under way by the national security adviser, James Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, Mr. Bolden said.
“There needs to be a coherent policy and so President Obama has asked General Jones to put together a group to take a look at the national space policy,” Mr. Bolden said. “That's already under way to a limited extent but we hope to be participating in that as a full member.”
Mr. Bolden's address to NASA employees came seven days into space shuttle Endeavour's 16-day construction mission to the International Space Station.
Gary Peach, 73, who was working at a Nasa space tracking facility in Australia in July 1969, says that he coined the phrase because he feared that the landmark moment would pass without a suitably dramatic opening line.
He said that he worried that astronauts would mark mankind’s arrival on the moon with a mundane observation about dust.
After toying with variations on the theme of taking steps, he says that he came up with the phrase: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind”.
After suggesting it to his director, the next he heard of it was when Neil Armstrong famously fluffed the line, failing to pronounce the “a” audibly as he set foot on the moon.
Mr Armstrong says that he came up with the phrase himself as he stepped off the lunar module but has spoken in the past about drawing on thoughts which were there “subliminally or in the background”.
Mr Peach, a grandfather of four who trained as an engineer during national service with the RAF in the 1950s, described the fact that he has never hitherto been credited with coming up with one of the most quoted phrases in history as a minor “annoyance”.
He claims that he only spoke openly about it after being drawn into discussion about the moon landing in an internet forum.
It was during final preparations at the Tidbinbilla tracking station near Canberra for the moon mission in July 1969 that he hit on the term, he maintains.
“It was already a topic had been among the boys anyway,” he said.
“I was thinking, what is he going to say when he steps down on the moon for the first time? It is going to be in the history books forever – it will probably be something like ‘Holy **** look at all that dust’.
“First of all I crafted it as ‘it’s a small step for a man, it’s a big step for mankind’ and then I thought I have too ‘steps’ in there so I changed it to a leap.”
A few days later he passed his idea to the director of the station in a chance conversation as he made some late night checks as the mission was due to get under way.
“He asked me have you any other concerns and I said: ‘Yes, what they are going to say’,” he recalled.
Mr Peach believes that the director then passed on his suggestion to mission control and the next he heard was as Mr Armstrong stepped onto the moon.
Even when the astronaut garbled the line, he says that he was not displeased.
“I was busy working, it didn’t really matter, I didn’t really give it a second thought,” he said.
Speaking in 2001, Mr Armstrong said that he came up with the phrase as he waited in the Eagle landing craft before finally walking on the moon.
“I thought about it after landing,” he told a Nasa history project.
“Because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on but just something that was kind of passing around subliminally or in the background.”
Christiaan Huygens, (HY guhnz), (1629-1695), was a Dutch physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. In 1678, Huygens proposed that light consists of series of waves. He used this theory in investigating the refraction (bending) of light.
Huygens's wave theory competed for many years with the corpuscular theory of the English scientist Isaac Newton. Newton maintained that light is made up of particles. Today, scientists believe that light behaves as both a particle and a wave.
Huygens was born on April 14, 1629, in The Hague, the Netherlands. He studied mathematics and law at the University of Leiden and the College of Orange at Breda. Huygens worked with his brother Constantijn to develop skill in grinding and polishing spherical lenses. With these lenses, they built the most powerful telescopes of their time. Huygens also discovered Saturn's moon Titan and asserted that what astronomers called "Saturn's arms" was a ring. In mathematics, he refined the value of pi . In the 1650's, Huygens invented a clock with a freely suspended pendulum. He died on July 8, 1695.
The European Space Agency honored Huygens's discovery of Titan by naming a space probe after him. The Huygens probe, designed to drop through Titan's atmosphere, was launched aboard the Cassini spacecraft in 1997. Contributor: Ronald S. Calinger, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Catholic University of America. How to cite this article: To cite this article, World Book recommends the following format: Calinger, Ronald S. "Huygens, Christiaan." World Book Online Reference Center. 2004. World Book, Inc. http://www.worldbookonline.com/wb/Article?id=ar268300.
This movie shows one cycle of pulsed gamma rays from the Vela pulsar as constructed from photons detected by Fermi's Large Area Telescope. The movie includes data from August 4 to Sept. 15, 2008. The bluer color in the latter part of the pulse indicates the presence of gamma rays with energies exceeding a billion electron volts. For comparison, visible light has energies between two and three electron volts. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
One of the two bathrooms on the International Space Station is broken. Engineers at the Johnson Space Center are working around the clock to troubleshoot the problem, but it could take days to fix.
Astronaut Hal Getzelman radioed up the bad news to the crew on the space station. "When you get a second, if you could put an out-of-service note on the WHC [NASA's term for a toilet] and advise the crew members that station crew members will have to use the Russian toilet and shuttle crew members on the shuttle until further notice."
European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne is the guy tasked with putting his plumbing skills to work on short notice. He asked if engineers had an estimate on how long it might take to get the toilet back in operation.
"No, we don't have a good estimate," Getzelman said. "What happened, the pre-treat (chemical), we think, flooded the pump separator and we may have got some fluid where we didn't want it and it'll take us a while to work through a procedure to recover."
In 1972 the last Apollo astronauts came home from the moon, and that was that. The budget was tight, and they'd only found rocks. So for a quarter of a century at NASA, the moon was a dead issue.
No longer. In 1994 a military space probe called Clementine, sent to map the moon as a way of testing sensors for possible Defense Department use, found evidence of ice in the shadowed corners of craters near the moon's south pole. In 1998 a NASA probe called Lunar Prospector was sent to confirm Clementine's findings, and as it orbited the moon it found evidence of large amounts of ice in the lunar soil.
Neither ship completely settled the issue; Clementine relied on radar data, and Lunar Prospector did indirect chemical measurements. But ice on the moon? Lunar Prospector's readings, in particular, suggested there may be hundreds of billions of gallons of it. Engineers on Earth almost salivate at the thought.
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The STS-132 mission will be the 32nd flight of the space shuttle Atlantis. The primary STS-132 mission objective is to deliver the Russian-made MRM-1 (Mini Research Module) to the International Space Station (ISS). Atlantis will also deliver a new communications antenna and a new set of batteries for one of the ISS solar arrays. The STS-132 mission patch features Atlantis flying off into the sunset as the end of the Space Shuttle Program approaches. However the sun is also heralding the promise of a new day as it rises for the first time on a new ISS module, the MRM-1, which is also named "Rassvet," the Russian word for dawn. The NASA insignia design for shuttle and space station flights is reserved for use by the astronauts and for other official use as the NASA Administrator may authorize. Public availability has been approved only in the form of illustrations by the various news media. When and if there is any change in this policy, which is not anticipated, it will be publicly announced.
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