Orbiter.ch Space News

jeudi 24 mars 2022

NASA Provides Update to Astronaut Moon Lander Plans Under Artemis

NASA - ARTEMIS Program logo.

March 24, 2022

As NASA makes strides to return humans to the lunar surface under Artemis, the agency announced plans Wednesday to create additional opportunities for commercial companies to develop an astronaut Moon lander.

Under this new approach, NASA is asking American companies to propose lander concepts capable of ferrying astronauts between lunar orbit and the lunar surface for missions beyond Artemis III, which will land the first astronauts on the Moon in more than 50 years.

Image above: An illustration of a suited Artemis astronaut looking out of a Moon lander hatch across the lunar surface, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle and other surface elements. Image Credit: NASA.

Built and operated according to NASA’s long-term requirements at the Moon, new landers will have the capability to dock to a lunar orbiting space station known as Gateway, increase crew capacity, and transport more science and technology to the surface.

“Under Artemis, NASA will carry out a series of groundbreaking missions on and around the Moon to prepare for the next giant leap for humanity: a crewed mission to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Competition is critical to our success on the lunar surface and beyond, ensuring we have the capability to carry out a cadence of missions over the next decade. Thank you to the Biden Administration and Congress for their support of this new astronaut lander opportunity, which will ultimately strengthen and increase flexibility for Artemis.”

NASA’s plans call for long-term lunar exploration and include landing the first woman and first person of color on the Moon as part of future Artemis missions. The agency is pursuing two parallel paths for continuing lunar lander development and demonstration, one that calls for additional work under an existing contract with SpaceX, and another open to all other U.S. companies to provide a new landing demonstration mission from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon.

In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX as its partner to land the next American astronauts on the lunar surface. That demonstration mission is targeted for no earlier than April 2025. Exercising an option under the original award, NASA now is asking SpaceX to transform the company’s proposed human landing system into a spacecraft that meets the agency’s requirements for recurring services for a second demonstration mission. Pursuing more development work under the original contract maximizes NASA’s investment and partnership with SpaceX.

To bring a second entrant to market for the development of a lunar lander in parallel with SpaceX, NASA will issue a draft solicitation in the coming weeks. This upcoming activity will lay out requirements for a future development and demonstration lunar landing capability to take astronauts between orbit and the surface of the Moon. This effort is meant to maximize NASA’s support for competition and provides redundancy in services to help ensure NASA’s ability to transport astronauts to the lunar surface.

This upcoming second contract award, known as the Sustaining Lunar Development contract, combined with the second option under SpaceX’s original landing award, will pave the way to future recurring lunar transportation services for astronauts at the Moon.

“This strategy expedites progress toward a long-term, sustaining lander capability as early as the 2026 or 2027 timeframe,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for the Human Landing System Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the Moon under NASA’s guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market.”

After the new draft solicitation is published, NASA will host a virtual industry day. Once comments and questions from the draft solicitation process have been reviewed, the agency plans by to issue the formal request for proposals this summer.

Astronaut Moon landers are a vital part of NASA’s deep space exploration plans, along with the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, ground systems, and Gateway. NASA is committed to using a commercial astronaut lunar lander to carry the astronauts to the surface of the Moon, expanding exploration and preparing humanity for the next giant leap, human exploration of Mars.

For more information about this procurement, visit: https://go.nasa.gov/3twqf6g

Related links:

Artemis: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/

Gateway: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Jackie McGuinness/Jimi Russell/Marshall Space Flight Center/Janet Sudnik.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA Finalizes Plans for Its Next Cosmic Mapmaker

NASA - SPHEREx Mission logo.

March 24, 2022

The SPHEREx mission will have some similarities with the James Webb Space Telescope. But the two observatories will take dramatically different approaches to studying the sky.

Images above: It’s a long road from designing a spacecraft to launching and operating it. Major components of NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft, which will seek to answer big questions about the universe, are shown in these illustrations, in draft form (above) and now more fully realized (below). Images Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s upcoming SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before. Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the big bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy. Achieving these goals will require cutting-edge technology, and NASA has this month approved final plans for all the observatory’s components.

“We’re at the transition from doing things with computer models to doing things with real hardware,” said Allen Farrington, SPHEREx project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “The design for the spacecraft, as it stands, is confirmed. We have shown that it’s doable down to the smallest details. So now we can really start building and putting things together.”

To answer big questions about the universe, scientists need to look at the sky in different ways. Many telescopes, like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are built to focus on individual stars, galaxies, or other cosmic objects, and to study them in detail. But SPHEREx (which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) belongs to another class of space telescopes that quickly observe large portions of the sky, surveying many objects in a short period of time. SPHEREx will scan over 99% of the sky every six months; by contrast, Hubble has observed about 0.1% of the sky in more than 30 years of operations. Although survey telescopes like SPHEREx can’t see objects with the same level of detail as targeted observatories, they can answer questions about the typical properties of those objects throughout the universe.

Exploring Cosmic Origins with NASA’s SPHEREx

Video above: NASA’s SPHEREx mission will scan the entire sky in 97 color bands, creating a map that will benefit astronomers around the world. This video explains the three key science topics that SPHEREx will explore: cosmic inflation, galaxy evolution, and interstellar ices. Video Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

For example, NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope will target individual exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), measuring their size, temperature, weather patterns, and makeup. But do exoplanets, on average, form in environments that are conducive to life as we know it? With SPHEREx, scientists will measure the prevalence of life-sustaining materials like water that reside in icy dust grains in the galactic clouds from which new stars and their planetary systems are born. Astronomers believe the water in Earth’s oceans, thought to be essential to life starting on Earth, originally came from such interstellar material.

“It’s the difference between getting to know a few individual people, and doing a census and learning about the population as a whole,” said Beth Fabinsky, deputy project manager for SPHEREx at JPL. “Both types of studies are important, and they complement each other. But there are some questions that can only be answered through that census.”

SPHEREx and Webb differ not only in their approach to studying the sky but in their physical parameters. Webb is the largest telescope to ever fly in space, with a 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror to capture the highest-resolution images of any space telescope in history. The observatory protects its sensitive instruments from the Sun’s blinding light with a sunshield that’s as big as a tennis court. SPHEREx, on the other hand, has an 8-inch primary mirror and a sunshield that is just 10.5 feet (3.2 meters) across.

But both observatories will collect infrared light – wavelengths outside the range that human eyes can detect. Infrared is sometimes called heat radiation because it is emitted by warm objects, which is why it’s used in night vision equipment. The two telescopes will also both use a technique called spectroscopy to break infrared light into its individual wavelengths, or colors, just like a prism breaks sunlight into its component colors. Spectroscopy is what enables both SPHEREx and Webb to reveal what an object is made of, because individual chemical elements absorb and radiate specific wavelengths of light.

In order to pursue big-picture questions, the SPHEREx team first had to answer more practical ones, such as whether the instrument on board could survive the environment in space, and if all its components could be packed together and operate as a system. Last month, the team’s final plans were approved by NASA, a step that the agency calls critical design review or CDR. This marks a major milestone for the mission on the way to launch.

“COVID continues to be a big challenge for us in developing new space projects. Everything the country went through over the past year, from supply chain disruptions to working at home with kids, we’ve gone through as well,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator James Bock, who is a scientist at JPL and Caltech in Pasadena, California. “It’s really incredible to be part of a team that has handled these difficulties with enthusiasm and a seemingly unlimited supply of determination.”

More About the Mission

SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA and will also develop the payload in collaboration with JPL. Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, will supply the spacecraft. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) is an instrument and science partner for the mission. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx science team includes members from 10 institutions across the U.S. and South Korea.

For more information about the SPHEREx mission, visit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/

Related link:

Exoplanets: https://www.nasa.gov/content/the-search-for-life

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Tony Greicius/JPL/Calla Cofield.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Zooming into the Sun with Solar Orbiter

ESA / NASA - Solar Orbiter Mission patch.

March 24, 2022

Solar Orbiter’s latest images shows the full Sun in unprecedented detail. They were taken on 7 March, when the spacecraft was crossing directly between the Earth and Sun.

One of the images, taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) is the highest resolution image of the Sun’s full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona, ever taken.

Another image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument represents the first full Sun image of its kind in 50 years, and by far the best one, taken at the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas.

The Sun in high resolution

The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was at a distance of roughly 75 million kilometres, half way between our world and its parent star. The high-resolution telescope of EUI takes pictures of such high spatial resolution that, at that close distance, a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes, including the time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next.

In total, the final image contains more than 83 million pixels in a 9148 x 9112 pixel grid. For comparison, this image has a resolution that is ten times better than what a 4K TV screen can display.

EUI images the Sun at a wavelength of 17 nanometers, in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This reveals the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, which has a temperature of around a million degrees Celsius.

At the 2 o’clock (near the image of the Earth for scale) and 8 o’clock positions on the edges of the Sun, dark filaments can be seen projecting away from the surface. These ‘prominences’ are prone to erupt, throwing huge quantities of coronal gas into space and creating ‘space weather’ storms.

Taking the Sun’s temperature

In addition to EUI, the SPICE instrument was also recording data during the crossing. These too needed to be pieced together as a mosaic.

SPICE is designed to trace the layers in the Sun’s atmosphere from the corona, down to a layer known as the chromosphere, getting closer to the surface. The instrument does this by looking at the different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light that come from different atoms.

In the SPICE sequence of images purple corresponds to hydrogen gas at a temperature of 10 000°C, blue to carbon at 32 000°C, green to oxygen at 320 000°C, yellow to neon at 630 000°C.

This will allow solar physicists to trace the extraordinarily powerful eruptions that take place in the corona down through the lower atmospheric layers. It will also allow them to study one of the most puzzling observations about the Sun: how the temperature is rising through the ascending atmospheric layers.

Taking the Sun’s temperature

Usually the temperature drops as you move away from a hot object. But above the Sun, the corona reaches a million degrees Celsius whereas the surface is only about 5000°C. Investigating this mystery is one of the key scientific objectives of Solar Orbiter.

The images were taken on 7 March, precisely when Solar Orbiter crossed the Sun-Earth line, so the images can be compared with Earth-bound solar instruments and cross-calibrated. This will make it easier to compare results from different instruments and observatories in future.

On 26 March, Solar Orbiter reaches another mission milestone: its first close perihelion. The spacecraft is now inside the orbit of Mercury, the inner planet, taking the highest resolution images of the Sun it can take. It is also recording data on the solar wind of particles that flows outwards from the Sun.

Solar Orbiter

And this is just the start, over the coming years the spacecraft will repeatedly fly this close to the Sun. It will also gradually raise its orientation to view the Sun’s previously unobserved polar regions.

Solar Orbiter is a partnership between ESA and NASA.

Related link:

Solar Orbiter: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter

ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI team; Data processing: E. Kraaikamp (ROB)/ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/SPICE team; Data processing: G. Pelouze (IAS)/ATG medialab.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Perseverance rover seen by Tianwen-1 orbiter

CNSA - Tianwen-1 (天問-1) Mission to Mars logo.

March 24, 2022

Perseverance rover seen by Tianwen-1 orbiter

According to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the Zhurong rover and the Tianwen-1 orbiter are currently operating normally.

Perseverance rover seen by Tianwen-1 orbiter

The Tianwen-1 (天问一号) orbiter has been in orbit for 609 days, while the Zhurong (祝融) rover has been working on the surface of Mars for 306 Martian days, traveling a total of 1784 meters.

Tianwen-1 orbiter

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Gaia finds parts of the Milky Way much older than expected

ESA - Gaia Mission patch.

March 24, 2022

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have shown that a part of the Milky Way known as the ‘thick disc’ began forming 13 billion years ago, around 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

The colour of the sky from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3

This surprising result comes from an analysis performed by Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix, from the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany. They took brightness and positional data from Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) dataset and combined it with measurements of the stars’ chemical compositions, as given by data from China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) for roughly 250 000 stars to derive their ages.

Milky Way edge-on view

They chose to look at sub giant stars. In these stars, energy has stopped being generated in the star’s core and has moved into a shell around the core. The star itself is transforming into a red giant star. Because the sub giant phase is a relatively brief evolutionary phase in a star’s life, it permits its age to be determined with great accuracy, but it’s still a tricky calculation.

How old are the stars?

The age of a star is one of the most difficult parameters to determine. It cannot be measured directly but must be inferred by comparing a star’s characteristics with computer models of stellar evolution. The compositional data helps with this. The Universe was born with almost exclusively hydrogen and helium. The other chemical elements, known collectively as metals to astronomers, are made inside stars, and exploded back into space at the end of a star’s life, where they can be incorporated into the next generation of stars. So, older stars have fewer metals and are said to have lower metallicity.

The LAMOST data gives the metallicity. Together, the brightness and metallicity allow astronomers to extract the star’s age from the computer models. Before Gaia, astronomers were routinely working with uncertainties of 20-40 percent, which could result in the determined ages being imprecise by a billion years or more.

Gaia’s EDR3 data release changes this. “With Gaia’s brightness data, we are able to determine the age of a sub giant star to a few percent,” says Maosheng. Armed with precise ages for a quarter of a million sub giant stars spread throughout the galaxy, Maosheng and Hans-Walter began the analysis.

Milky Way anatomy

Anatomy of the Milky Way

Our galaxy is made of different components. Broadly, these can be split into the halo and the disc. The halo is the spherical region surrounding the disc, and has traditionally been thought to be the oldest component of the galaxy. The disc is composed of two parts: the thin disc and the thick disc. The thin disc contains most of the stars that we see as the misty band of light in the night sky that we call the Milky Way. The thick disc is more than double the height of the thin disc but smaller in radius, containing only a few per cent of the Milky Way’s stars in the solar neighbourhood.

By identifying sub giant stars in these different regions, the researchers were able to build a timeline of the Milky Way’s formation – and that’s when they got a surprise.

Two phases in Milky Way history

The stellar ages clearly revealed that the formation of the Milky Way fell into two distinct phases. In the first phase, starting just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang, the thick disc began forming stars. The inner parts of the halo may also have begun to come together at this stage, but the process rapidly accelerated to completion about two billion years later when a dwarf galaxy known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merged with the Milky Way. It filled the halo with stars and, as clearly revealed by the new work, triggered the nascent thick disc to form the majority of its stars. The thin disc of stars which holds the Sun, was formed during the subsequent, second phase of the galaxy’s formation.

The analysis also shows that after the star-forming burst triggered by the merger with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, the thick disc continued to form stars until the gas was used up at around 6 billion years after the Big Bang. During this time, the metallicity of the thick disk grew by more than a factor of 10. But remarkably, the researchers see a very tight stellar age—metallicity relation, which indicates that throughout that period, the gas forming the stars was well-mixed across the whole disk. This implies that the early Milky Way’s disk regions must have been formed from highly turbulent gas that effectively spread the metals far and wide.

A timeline thanks to Gaia

The earlier formation age of the thick disc points to a different picture of our galaxy’s early history. “Since the discovery of the ancient merger with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, in 2018, astronomers have suspected that the Milky Way was already there before the halo formed, but we didn’t have a clear picture of what that Milky Way looked like. Our results provide exquisite details about that part of the Milky Way, such as its birthday, its star-formation rate and metal enrichment history. Putting together these discoveries using Gaia data is revolutionising our picture of when and how our galaxy was formed.” says Maosheng.

And we may not yet be looking far enough into the Universe to see similar galactic discs forming. An age of 13 billion years corresponds to a redshift of 7, where redshift is a measure of how far away a celestial object is, and so how long its light has taken to cross space and reach us.

Gaia's Milky Way discoveries

New observations could come in the near future as the James Webb Space Telescope has been optimised to see the earliest Milky Way-like galaxies in the Universe. And on 13 June this year, Gaia will release its full third data release (Gaia DR3). This catalogue will include spectra and derived information like ages and metallicity, making studies like Maosheng’s even easier to conduct.

“With each new analysis and data release, Gaia allows us to piece together the history of our galaxy in even more unprecedented detail. With the release of Gaia DR3 in June, astronomers will be able to enrich the story with even more details,” says Timo Prusti, Gaia Project Scientist for ESA.

“A time-resolved picture of our Milky Way’s early formation history” by Maosheng Xiang and Hans-Walter Rix is published in Nature. doi https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04496-5%20

Related links:

Early Data Release 3 (EDR3): https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_s_new_data_takes_us_to_the_Milky_Way_s_anticentre_and_beyond

Gaia: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgement: A. Moitinho/Stefan Payne-Wardenaar/MPIA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/ATG medialab.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Install Station Upgrades

EVA - Extra Vehicular Activities patch.

March 24, 2022

Image above: Spacewalkers Raja Chari and Matthias Maurer will exit the station for a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk on Wednesday, March 23, 2022. Image Credit: NASA.

Expedition 66 Flight Engineers Raja Chari of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) concluded their spacewalk at 3:26 p.m. EDT after 6 hours and 54 minutes in preparation for upcoming solar array installation.

Image above: Expedition 66 Flight Engineers Raja Chari of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) began a spacewalk at 8:32 a.m. EDT to install hoses on a Radiator Beam Valve Module to support temperature regulation on the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA TV.

Maurer and Chari completed their major objective for today to install hoses on a Radiator Beam Valve Module that routes ammonia through the station’s heat-rejecting radiators to keep systems at the proper temperature. The crew members also installed a power and data cable on the Columbus module’s Bartolomeo science platform, replaced an external camera on the station’s truss, and conducted other upgrades to station hardware. The pair deferred a few secondary tasks, such as torque resets and cable routing, to a future spacewalk.

Image above: Astronauts Raja Chari and Matthias Maurer are pictured replacing an external high-definition camera during a 6-hour 54-minute spacewalk today. Image Credit: NASA TV.

It was the 248th spacewalk in support of space station assembly, upgrades and maintenance, and was the second in Chari’s career and the first for Maurer. Chari and Maurer are in the midst of a planned six-month science mission living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions as part of NASA’s Moon and Mars exploration approach, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program.

Related links:

Expedition 66: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition66/index.html

Canadarm2 robotics arm: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/mobile-servicing-system.html

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Heidi Lavelle.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

mardi 22 mars 2022

Station Go for Spacewalk Ahead of Upcoming Crew Departure

ISS - Expedition 66 Mission patch.

March 22, 2022

Mission managers have given the go for two astronauts to exit the International Space Station on Wednesday for a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk. Meanwhile, three Expedition 66 crew members are getting ready for their return to Earth at the end of the month.

Flight Engineers Raja Chari of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA (European Space Agency) began Tuesday morning with standard medical checkups the day before their spacewalk. The duo had an ear exam and measured heart and breathing rate, blood pressure, and temperature. Afterward, Chari and Maurer staged their U.S. spacesuits and readied their spacewalking tools inside the U.S. Quest airlock.

Image above: (From left) Astronauts Raja Chari and Matthias Maurer will exit the space station on Wednesday for a 6.5-hour maintenance spacewalk. Image Credit: NASA.

During the afternoon, the spacewalking pair were joined by NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn for a procedures review with engineers on the ground. Barron and Marshburn will also be on robotics duty commanding the Canadarm2 robotics arm to assist the spacewalkers during Wednesday’s excursion. Chari and Maurer set their spacesuits to battery power at 8:50 a.m. EDT signifying the start of their spacewalk. Their main objective is to install thermal system and electronics components on the outside of the space station. Live NASA TV coverage begins at 7:30 a.m. on NASA Television, the NASA app and the agency’s website.

The next major event at the orbital lab will be on March 30 when NASA Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth with Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov. The trio will undock from the Rassvet module inside the Soyuz MS-19 crew ship and parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan about three-and-a-half hours later. The two cosmonauts practiced Soyuz descent procedures and loaded cargo and personal items inside the vehicle. Vande Hei, who will land with a NASA-record breaking 355 continuous days in space, focused mainly on science today studying space archeology and glass optics.

International Space Station (ISS). Animation Credit: ESA

The station’s three newest crew members are in their first full week on the orbiting lab and continue their station familiarization activities. Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, on his third space station mission, and first time space-flyers Sergey Korsakov and Denis Matveev will spend the next few days getting used to life on orbit.

Related links:

NASA Television: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

Expedition 66: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition66/index.html

Canadarm2 robotics arm: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/mobile-servicing-system.html

Rassvet module: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/rassvet

Space archeology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=8684

Glass optics: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=8383

Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/overview.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch