The residents of the International Space Station will receive a new shipment of fuel, food, supplies and holiday gifts on Sunday, Nov. 30. Docking of the cargo delivery spacecraft, known as ISS Progress 31, is set for 6:23 a.m. CST. NASA Television will begin coverage of the event at 5:45 a.m.
The unpiloted Russian resupply craft is carrying more than two tons of supplies for the station's crew, Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke and Flight Engineers Yury Lonchakov and Sandy Magnus. The ISS Progress 31 launched at 6:38 a.m. Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
NASA TV's broadcast will include commentary and available downlink television of the final hours of space shuttle Endeavour's STS-126 mission. Endeavour is scheduled to land Sunday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Labels: NASA TV to Broadcast Space Station Cargo Ship Arrival
The combined crews of shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station have sent a special greeting to members of the American military in time for the upcoming holiday season.
From orbit 220 miles above Earth, Commander Chris Ferguson (captain, U.S. Navy), Pilot EricBoe (colonel, U.S. Air Force), Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke (colonel, U.S. AirForce), Mission Specialist Shane Kimbrough (lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army), Mission Specialist Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper (captain, U.S. Navy) and Mission Specialist Steve Bowen (captain, U.S. Navy) sent greetings to the soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines around the world who are away from their families this holiday season. The crew thanked the service members for their commitment and dedication and wished them well.
The combined crews will be celebrating Thanksgiving aboard the International Space Station. During the mission, the astronauts have been working to service the station's solar arrays and deliver and install cargo and equipment necessary to expand the crew size from three to six people next year. Endeavour is scheduled to return home Sunday, Nov. 30.
The special message to members of the military will be available during Tuesday's video file on NASA Television. The video file will air at 9:00 a.m. CST on the standard-definition channel and also will be available on the NASA TV high-definition channel 105. The high-definition highlights will air at 8:30 a.m., 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. For more information about how to receive NASA TV, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. Labels: Shuttle and Station Astronauts Send Special Greetings to Military
 Nature's been recycling water on Earth for eons, and now NASA is set to do the same thing above Earth on the International Space Station.
Space shuttle Endeavour is carrying two refrigerator-sized racks packed with a distiller and an assortment of filters designed to process astronauts' urine and sweat into clean drinking water.
The station crew depends now on water carried up aboard a space shuttle or cargo rocket. But an operational water recycler is expected to cut that need by 65 percent by producing about 6,000 pounds of potable water each year. That's enough fresh water to allow the station to host six crew members instead of three.
A system that operates on the station also will provide a significant stepping stone to developing even more efficient processes that will support astronauts on the moon or on long-duration voyages into the solar system.
Although Russia's space station Mir recycled cosmonaut's sweat, the NASA recycler is the first to be flown in space that intends to cleanse and reuse almost all the water a crew member produces.
The system can recycle about 93 percent of the water it receives, said Bob Bagdigian, the Environmental Control Life Support System project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The water recycler counts in large part on a distiller that Bagdigian compares to a keg tilted on its side. On Earth, distilling is a simple process of simply boiling water and cooling the steam back into pure water. But without gravity, the contaminants in water never separate from the steam no matter how much heat is used.
"In space, it becomes quite a challenge to distill any liquid in the absence of gravity," Bagdigian said.
So the keg-sized distiller is spun up to produce an artificial gravity field. The contaminants in the urine press against the sides of the drum while the steam gathers in the middle and is pumped to a filter.
The filters are not much different from those used on Earth, which means they use charcoal-like materials to pull more unwanted elements from the water. Another process uses chemical compounds that bond with the remaining contaminants so filters can pick them out of the water, too.
"The water that we produce meets or exceeds most municipal water product standards," Bagdigian said.
The system has been in different stages of development ever since NASA committed to building a space station in the 1980s. Along the way, individual parts of the system have been flown on space shuttle missions for tests.
The distiller mechanism flew in 2003 and worked just fine in orbit, Bagdigian said.
Now the crew of the International Space Station will test the whole apparatus, but they won't drink any at first. Instead, they will take numerous samples and return them to Earth for detailed testing. After the testing is complete, controllers will clear the astronauts to use the fresh water in orbit.
NASA's water filter development has also helped produce filters that are now used in humanitarian efforts to make clean water in areas served only by contaminated sources.
The effort to make a crew support system that reduces the need for fresh supplies from Earth includes an oxygen generator that is already installed in NASA's Destiny lab on the space station.
Housed in one rack instead of the two required for the water recycler, the oxygen producer splits the oxygen and hydrogen molecules in water and sends the oxygen into the space station as breathable air. The hydrogen is now dumped overboard. However, another process is under development that will combine the hydrogen with other chemicals that react with each other and produce more water.
While the water recycler in use will work fine for the International Space Station's needs, Bagdigian said work is already under way to make it more efficient so it can be used on long moon exploration missions.
"We'll take this system and continue to push its performance and efficiency," Bagdigian said. Labels: Recycling Water is not Just for Earth Anymore
Among the 32,000 pounds of cargo in NASA's space shuttle Endeavour, which is set to launch Friday, there is a camera that will help U.S. farmers and provide unique educational opportunities for students.
Students and faculty at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, built the Agricultural Camera, known as AgCam, that will be delivered and installed on the International Space Station. The students will operate the camera from their campus and work closely with NASA engineers and station astronauts.
AgCam will take images in visible and infrared light of growing crops, rangeland, grasslands, forests and wetlands in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions.
"AgCam provides students with the opportunity to do real engineering and provide valuable data to protect our environment now and in the future," said George Seielstad, the director of AgCam and the University of North Dakota Center for People and Environment.
The information from AgCam will provide useful data to agricultural producers in North Dakota and neighboring states, benefiting farmers and ranchers and providing ways for them to protect the environment.
Images from the camera also will be shared with educators throughout the country for use in their classrooms. AgCam is an example of a space-related research project that delivers direct benefits to the general public. AgCam imagery also may assist in disaster management, such as flood monitoring and wild fire mapping.
NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has awarded a contract to ZIN Technologies Inc., of Middleburg Heights, Ohio, for the definition, design, fabrication, assembly, integration, test and operation of a broad array of space flight projects. These projects are particularly in the Exploration Technology Development and Human Research Programs.
The total value of the cost plus incentive fee, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract, including a three-year base period of performance and two one-year options, is approximately $94.5 million. The contract is scheduled to begin this month.
ZIN Technologies Inc., will perform unique International Space Station flight investigations in the physical sciences, advanced technology development and flight investigations for human research. Other investigations include advanced technology development and demonstrations in power, in-space propulsion, space communications, lunar surface and in-situ resource applications, spacecraft fire safety and energy storage and distribution.
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has ceased communications after operating for more than five months. As anticipated, seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments.
Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2. Phoenix, in addition to shorter daylight, has encountered a dustier sky, more clouds and colder temperatures as the northern Mars summer approaches autumn. The mission exceeded its planned operational life of three months to conduct and return science data.
The project team will be listening carefully during the next few weeks to hear if Phoenix revives and phones home. However, engineers now believe that is unlikely because of the worsening weather conditions on Mars. While the spacecraft's work has ended, the analysis of data from the instruments is in its earliest stages.
"Phoenix has given us some surprises, and I'm confident we will be pulling more gems from this trove of data for years to come," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix landed May 25, 2008, farther north than any previous spacecraft to land on the Martian surface. The lander dug, scooped, baked, sniffed and tasted the Red Planet's soil. Among early results, it verified the presence of water-ice in the Martian subsurface, which NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter first detected remotely in 2002. Phoenix's cameras also returned more than 25,000 pictures from sweeping vistas to near the atomic level using the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth.
"Phoenix not only met the tremendous challenge of landing safely, it accomplished scientific investigations on 149 of its 152 Martian days as a result of dedicated work by a talented team," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Phoenix's preliminary science accomplishments advance the goal of studying whether the Martian arctic environment has ever been favorable for microbes. Additional findings include documenting a mildly alkaline soil environment unlike any found by earlier Mars missions; finding small concentrations of salts that could be nutrients for life; discovering perchlorate salt, which has implications for ice and soil properties; and finding calcium carbonate, a marker of effects of liquid water.
Phoenix findings also support the goal of learning the history of water on Mars. These findings include excavating soil above the ice table, revealing at least two distinct types of ice deposits; observing snow descending from clouds; providing a mission-long weather record, with data on temperature, pressure, humidity and wind; observations of haze, clouds, frost and whirlwinds; and coordinating with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to perform simultaneous ground and orbital observations of Martian weather.
 "Phoenix provided an important step to spur the hope that we can show Mars was once habitable and possibly supported life," said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Phoenix was supported by orbiting NASA spacecraft providing communications relay while producing their own fascinating science. With the upcoming launch of the Mars Science Laboratory, the Mars Program never sleeps."
The University of Arizona leads the Phoenix mission with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin Corporation in Denver. International contributions came from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College of London. Labels: Mars Phoenix Lander Finishes Successful Work on Red Planet
India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 (meaning 'moon craft' in Sanskrit) has finished the difficult manoeuvre of entering the lunar orbit at 5:15 PM Indian standard time. This was an important milestone for the Indian mission to the Moon, which was launched on October 22 from Indian spaceport Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota. ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair said everything onboard Chandrayaan-1 is working fine.
The lunar orbit insertion (LOI) began at 4:50 P.M and lasted for 817 seconds (14 minutes). The ground control station at Peenya in Bangalore remotely fired the satellite's rockets to move it into its new trajectory. This was considered to be a most dangerous moment of the entire mission. The satellite has now been placed in a 7,502 km X 504 km elliptical orbit around the Moon. Chandrayaan will be gradually lowered to a circular orbit at a distance of 100 km from the lunar surface. Once the circular orbit is achieved, Chandrayaan will eject the Moon Impact Probe, a lunar probe, to impact on the moon's surface. Besides carrying three important scientific instruments, the lunar probe will also carry a picture of the Indian national flag.
With this, India will become both the fourth country to place a flag on the moon and the fifth country to send a spacecraft to the moon. The other countries which have sent spacecraft to the Moon are the United States, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and China, along with the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries. Labels: Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-1
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