KREUZADER (Posts tagged nasa)

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murderous space toilet “On November 22, 1989, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a five-day secret mission in Earth orbit. It is believed to have deployed a spy satellite for the...

murderous space toilet

On November 22, 1989, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a five-day secret mission in Earth orbit. It is believed to have deployed a spy satellite for the Department of Defense, but since the mission was (and still is) classified, only the United States government knows for sure.

But some details of the mission have emerged, and they involve something a little more down-to-earth: the space shuttle’s toilet, or Waste Collection System (WCS), as it was more properly known.

[…]

When Gregory reverse-shifted again, the overboard vent valve opened. Now both the toilet gate valve and the overboard valve were open at the same time, exposing the interior of the space shuttle to the vacuum of outer space. That was a big problem: the air inside the shuttle cabin was now rushing down the toilet and out into space. If it were not stopped, the shuttle could depressurize completely, killing all of the astronauts on board.

Source: neatorama.com
nasa space shuttle space
NASA, FEMA Hold Asteroid Emergency Planning Exercise “What would we do if we discovered a large asteroid on course to impact Earth? While highly unlikely, that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees at an Oct. 25 NASA-FEMA tabletop...

NASA, FEMA Hold Asteroid Emergency Planning Exercise

What would we do if we discovered a large asteroid on course to impact Earth? While highly unlikely, that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees at an Oct. 25 NASA-FEMA tabletop exercise in El Segundo, California.

[…]

In the fictitious scenario, observers continued to track the asteroid for three months using ground-based telescope observations, and the probability of impact climbed to 65 percent. Then the next observations had to wait until four months later, due to the asteroid’s position relative to the sun. Once observations could resume in May of 2017, the impact probability jumped to 100 percent. By November of 2017, it was simulated that the predicted impact would occur somewhere in a narrow band across Southern California or just off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.

While mounting a deflection mission to move the asteroid off its collision course had been simulated in previous tabletop exercises, this particular exercise was designed so that the time to impact was too short for a deflection mission to be feasible – to pose a great future challenge to emergency managers faced with a mass evacuation of the metropolitan Los Angeles area.

Source: jpl.nasa.gov
nasa fema asteroid planetary defense
NASA Completes Webb Telescope Center of Curvature Pre-test “Engineers and technicians working on the James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed the first important optical measurement of Webb’s fully assembled primary mirror, called a Center...

NASA Completes Webb Telescope Center of Curvature Pre-test

Engineers and technicians working on the James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed the first important optical measurement of Webb’s fully assembled primary mirror, called a Center of Curvature test.

Taking a “before” optical measurement of the telescope’s deployed mirror is crucial before the telescope goes into several stages of rigorous mechanical testing. These tests will simulate the violent sound and vibration environments the telescope will experience inside its rocket on its way out into space. This environment is one of the most stressful structurally and could alter the shape and alignment of Webb’s primary mirror, which could degrade or, in the worst case, ruin its performance.

Webb has been designed and constructed to withstand its launch environment, but it must be tested to verify that it will indeed survive and not change in any unexpected way. Making the same optical measurements both before and after simulated launch environment testing and comparing the results is fundamental to Webb’s development, assuring that it will work in space.

Source: nasa.gov
nasa james webb space telescope astronomy
“International Space Station (ISS) project partners are inching ever closer toward an agreement to begin the development of a new human outpost in the vicinity of the Moon. If successful, the cis-lunar space station (a space station in the vicinity...

International Space Station (ISS) project partners are inching ever closer toward an agreement to begin the development of a new human outpost in the vicinity of the Moon. If successful, the cis-lunar space station (a space station in the vicinity of the Moon) will be the largest international space project to date, influencing the direction of human space flight for decades to come.

During a closed-door meeting in Houston last week, NASA officials met their colleagues from Europe, Russia, Japan, and Canada to discuss the latest changes to the cis-lunar space station concept. The team, known as the International Spacecraft Working Group, ISCWG, is charged with brainstorming all the technical details necessary to start the development of the new deep-space exploration program after the retirement of the ISS, now expected in mid 2020s. The team’s recommendations are not binding, but will likely form the reference architecture for any future project.

holy shit, had no idea this was in the offing

Source: planetary.org
international space station space nasa esa roscosmos jaxa csa

Loaded with more than 2.5 tons of supplies and science experiments, Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo craft arrived at the International Space Station Oct. 23 following its launch on a refurbished Antares rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia Oct. 17. Expedition 49 crewmembers Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Kate Rubins of NASA captured Cygnus using the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm. Ground controllers then maneuvered Cygnus to the Earth-facing port of the Unity module where it was installed and bolted into place for a month-long stay.

orbital atk international space station nasa space jaxa
dlr.de

Recently active lava flows on the eastern flank of Idunn Mons on Venus

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express mission has provided a great amount of data from the surface and atmosphere of Earth’s inner twin planet. Among these observations was the mapping of the southern hemisphere of Venus in the near infrared spectral range using the VIRTIS (Visible and InfraRed Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) instrument. However, the thick and permanent cloud cover of Venus limits the achievable resolution, similar to observing a scene through fog. Using a numerical model, planetary researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) pushed the limits of the data resolution. With this new technique, the emissivity anomalies were analysed on the top and eastern flank of Idunn Mons, a volcano with a diameter of 200 kilometres at its base situated in the southern hemisphere of Venus. These anomalies provide an indication of geologically recent volcanism in this area. “We could identify and map distinctive lava flows from the top and eastern flank of the volcano, which might have been recently active in terms of geologic time,” says Piero D'Incecco, the DLR planetary researcher who presented these results at the joint 48th meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) and 11th European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.

“With our new technique we could combine the infrared data with much higher-resolution radar images from the NASA Magellan mission, having been in orbit about Venus from 1990 until 1992. It is the first time that - combining the datasets from two different missions - we can perform a high resolution geologic mapping of a recently active volcanic structure from the surface of a planet other than Earth.”

geology volcano venus esa nasa
blogs.esa.int

Burn baby, burn! The technology of the Mars Orbit Insertion burn

The most critical moment so far in the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter’s journey will be Wednesday’s Mars Orbit Insertion burn – the long (ca. 134 mins) engine firing that will slow the spacecraft down sufficiently to be captured into Mars orbit. What actually happens during this critical burn, though? Here we thought we’d give you a more detailed rundown of that all-important moment.

[…]

When this radio reconfiguration is complete, the orbiter will start sending out this ‘carrier only’ signal. The Low Gain Antenna isn’t powerful enough to send data to Earth, hence why we use this simple beacon signal. The key advantage is that the Low Gain Antenna signal can be picked up almost no matter what orientation Trace Gas Orbiter is in. The signal will be acquired by NASA’s big 70m-diameter dish in Canberra, Australia and that will let the team on ground know that the orbiter is there. Critically it should also show a jump in frequency caused by Doppler shift as the orbiter fires its engine, allowing us to monitor the progress of the burn even without telemetry data.

exomars mars space esa roscosmos nasa