Astronauts Command Robotic Arm to Release Cygnus Cargo Craft

NASA / Orbital ATK - Cygnus OA-8 Mission patch.

Dec. 6, 2017

Image above: The Cygnus cargo craft is seen from an International Space Station video camera moments after it was released from the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Image Credit: NASA TV.

After delivering almost 7,400 pounds of cargo to support dozens of science experiments from around the world, the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo spacecraft has departed the International Space Station. At 8:11 a.m., Expedition 53 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA gave the command to release Cygnus.

On Tuesday, Dec. 5, ground controllers used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to detach the Cygnus spacecraft from the Earth-facing side of the station’s Unity module. The spacecraft, which arrived at the station Nov. 14, then maneuvered above the Harmony module to gather data overnight that will aid in rendezvous and docking operations for future U.S. commercial crew vehicles arriving for a linkup to Harmony’s international docking adapters.

Experiments delivered on Cygnus supported NASA and other research investigations during Expedition 53, including studies in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.

Image above: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik photographed Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo spacecraft at sunrise, prior to its departure from the International Space Station at 8:11 a.m., Dec. 6, 2017. Expedition 53 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA gave the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm the command to release Cygnus. Image Credits: NASA/Randy Bresnik.

Later today, Cygnus will release 14 CubeSats from an external NanoRacks deployer. Cygnus also is packed with more than 6,200 pounds of trash and other items marked for disposal during its destructive reentry Monday, Dec. 18.

The Cygnus launched Nov. 12 on Orbital ATK’s upgraded Antares 230 rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for the company’s eighth NASA-contracted commercial resupply mission.

Related links:

Orbital ATK Cygnus: http://www.nasa.gov/orbitalatk

External NanoRacks deployer: http://nanoracks.com/launch-of-full-external-cygnus-deployer/

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

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

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Cygnus Cargo Craft Leaves Station today

NASA / Orbital ATK - Cygnus OA-8 Mission patch.

December 6, 2017

The Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo spacecraft is set to leave the International Space Station today, Dec. 6. NASA Television and the agency’s website will provide live coverage of Cygnus’ departure beginning at 7:45 a.m. EST. Cygnus arrived to the space station Nov. 14 with nearly 7,400 pounds of cargo to support dozens of science experiments.

Image above: The Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft was pictured February 19, 2016, attached to the Canadarm2 before it was released back into Earth orbit. Read more about the Cygnus missions to the space station. Image Credit: NASA.

At approximately 8:10 a.m., Expedition 53 Flight Engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA will give the command to release Cygnus.

Earlier today, ground controllers used the Canadarm2 robotic arm to detach the Cygnus spacecraft from the Earth-facing side of the station’s Unity module.

This was Orbital ATK’s eighth contracted commercial resupply mission.

Related links:

Orbital ATK Cygnus: http://www.nasa.gov/orbitalatk

Live coverage of Cygnus’ departure: http://www.nasa.gov/live

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

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

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

At the LHC, tomorrow is already here

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

Dec. 5, 2017

Image above: The CERN Control Centre in 2017, from where all the Laboratory's accelerators and technical infrastructure are controlled. The accelerator complex and the LHC produced a record amount of data in 2017. (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN).

On Monday, 4 December at 4.00 a.m., the accelerator operators hit the stop button on the accelerator complex and the Large Hadron Collider for their usual winter break. But while the machines are hibernating, there’s no rest for the humans, as CERN teams will be busy with all the maintenance and upgrade work required before the machines are restarted in the spring.

The LHC has ended the year with yet another luminosity record, having produced 50 inverse femtobarns of data, i.e. 5 million billion collisions, in 2017. But the accelerator hasn’t just produced lots of data for the physics programmes.

Before the technical stop, a number of new techniques for increasing the luminosity of the machine were tested. These techniques are mostly being developed for the LHC’s successor, the High-Luminosity LHC. With a planned start-up date of 2026, the High-Luminosity LHC will produce five to ten times as many collisions as the current LHC. To do this, it will be kitted out with new equipment and will use a new optics scheme, based on ATS (Achromatic Telescopic Squeezing), a configuration that was tested this year at the LHC.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Animation Credit: CERN

Handling beams of particles is a bit like handling beams of light. In an accelerator, dipole magnets act like mirrors, guiding the beams around the bends. Quadrupole magnets act alternately like concave or convex lenses, keeping the beams in line transversally, but also and above all focusing them as much as possible at the interaction points of the experiments. Corrector magnets (hexapoles) correct chromatic aberrations (a bit like corrective lenses for astigmatism). Configuring the optics of an accelerator is all about combining the strengths of these different magnets.

One particularly efficient approach to increasing luminosity, and therefore the number of collisions, is to reduce the size of the beam at the interaction points, or in other words to compress the bunches of particles as much as possible. In the High-Luminosity LHC, more powerful quadrupole magnets with larger apertures, installed either side of the experiments, will focus the bunches before collision. However, for these magnets to be as effective as possible, the beam must first be considerably expanded: a bit like a stretching a spring as much as possible so that it retracts as much as possible. And this is where the new configuration comes in. Instead of just using the quadrupole magnets either side of the collision points, the ATS system also makes use of magnets situated further away from the experiments in the machine, transforming seven kilometres of the accelerator into a giant focusing system.

Graphic above: Graph showing the integrated luminosity over the various runs of the LHC. In 2017, the LHC produced 50 inverse femtobarns of data, the equivalent of 5 million billion collisions. (Image: CERN).

These techniques have been used in part this year at the LHC and will be used even more during future runs. “The heart of the High-Luminosity LHC is already beating in the LHC,” explains Stéphane Fartoukh, the physicist who came up with the new concept.  “The latest tests, carried out last week, have once again proved the reliability of the scheme and demonstrated other potential applications, sometimes beyond our initial expectations.”

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States.

For further information:

See the article in the Accelerating news newsletter: https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/12/lhc-tomorrow-already-here#http://acceleratingnews.web.cern.ch/content/novel-optics-scheme-meet-hl-lhc-targeted-performance

Related links:

High-Luminosity LHC: https://home.web.cern.ch/topics/high-luminosity-lhc

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

For more information about European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Visit: http://home.cern/

Image (mentioned), Graphic (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Stefania Pandolfi.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA-funded Simulations Show How Massive Collisions Delivered Metal to Early Earth

NASA logo.

Dec. 5, 2017

Planetary collisions are at the core of our solar system’s formation. Scientists have long believed that after the Moon’s formation, the early Earth experienced a long period of bombardment that diminished about 3.8 billion years ago.

Image above: Artist concept shows the collision of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth's core, with some particles ricocheting back into space. Image Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi.

During this period, called “late accretion,” collisions with moon-sized planetary bodies, known as planetesimals, embedded extensive amounts of metal and rock-forming minerals into the Earth's mantle and crust. It is estimated that approximately 0.5 percent of Earth’s present mass was delivered during this stage of planetary evolution.

With the support from a NASA Exobiology grant and NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute, or SwRI, and University of Maryland have created high-resolution impact simulations that show significant portions of a large planetesimal’s core could penetrate all the way down to merge with Earth’s core—or ricochet back into space and escape the planet entirely.

Animation above: The simulations show significant portions of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth's core, and ricocheting back into space. On the right, particles are color coded with temperature, indicated in Kelvin. Animation Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi.

For a recently published paper in Nature Geoscience about the topic, Simone Marchi and his colleagues found evidence of more massive accretion onto the Earth than previously thought after the Moon’s formation. The mantle abundances of certain trace elements such as platinum, iridium and gold, which tend to bond chemically with metallic iron, are much higher than what would be expected to result from core formation. This discrepancy can most easily be explained by late accretion after core formation was complete. The team determined the total amount of material delivered to Earth may have been 2-5 times greater than previously thought, and the impacts altered Earth in a profound way while depositing familiar elements like gold.

“These results have far-reaching implications for Moon-forming theories and beyond,” said Marchi. “Interestingly, our findings elucidate the role of large collisions in delivering precious metals like gold and platinum found here on Earth.”

Researchers at SwRI and the University of Maryland are part of 13 teams within SSERVI, based and managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. SSERVI is funded by the Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Related links:

Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI: http://sservi.nasa.gov/

Science Mission Directorate: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system

Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/index.html

Planets: https://www.nasa.gov/subject/6960/planets

Ames Research Center: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/home/index.html

Animation (mentioned), Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Kimberly Williams/Ames Research Center/Kimberly Minafra.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Station Ramps Up for December Cargo and Crew Swaps

ISS - Expedition 53 Mission patch.

Dec. 4, 2017


A pair of commercial resupply missions are coming and going this week at the International Space Station. Meanwhile, a new crew has arrived at its launch site to prepare for a Dec. 17 liftoff to the orbital laboratory. All missions to and from the station this month will be televised live on NASA TV.

NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba are brushing up on their robotics skills today ahead of this week’s release of the Orbital ATK Cygnus resupply ship. Ground controllers will remotely command the Canadarm2 on Tuesday to detach Cygnus from the Unity module. While still attached to the Canadarm2, Cygnus will be used for a series of communications tests to assist NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Then on Wednesday, the two astronauts will be in the cupola commanding the Canadarm2 to release Cygnus into Earth orbit at 8:10 a.m. EST.

Image above: The next crew to visit the International Space Station was in Moscow last week posing in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral for traditional ceremonies. From left are Anton Shkaplerov from Roscosmos, Scott Tingle from NASA and Norishige Kanai from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Image Credit Roscosmos.

Just two days later on Friday, the SpaceX Dragon will launch at 1:20 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center where it will begin a two-day trip to the space station. Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli is cleaning up a pair of modules today to make way for the nearly 4,800 pounds of crew supplies and research gear Dragon is delivering to the station. Dragon is due to arrive Sunday at 6 a.m. when it will be captured by Vande Hei and Acaba once again operating the Canadarm2.

Three Expedition 53 crew members are due to return to Earth Dec. 14 after 139 days in space. Nespoli, Expedition 53 Commander Randy Bresnik and Soyuz Commander Sergey Ryazanskiy will parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz MS-05 spaceship.

Image above: Flying over South Atlantic Ocean, altitude: 414,64 Km / speed: 27'560 Km/h. Image captured (by Roland Berga) with EarthCam from ISS - International Space Station (via ISS HD Live application) on December 1, 2017 at 12:48 UTC.

The homebound trio will be replaced shortly after that when the Expedition 54-55 crew launches Dec. 17 for a two-day ride to its new home in space. Veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov will blast off with two first-time astronauts Scott Tingle of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to begin a four-month tour on the orbital laboratory. The crew has arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and is in final launch preparations.

Related links:

Commercial Space: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/index.html

Expedition 53: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition53/index.html

Orbital ATK Cygnus: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/orbital-atk-cygnus-launches-arrivals-and-departures

SpaceX Dragon: https://www.nasa.gov/spacex

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program: https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/index.html

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

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

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA Extends Expandable Habitat's Time on the International Space Station

ISS - International Space Station logo.

Dec. 4, 2017

Image above: The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM, attached to the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM, will remain attached to the International Space Station to provide additional performance data on expandable habitat technologies and enable new technology demonstrations. NASA awarded a sole-source contract to Bigelow Aerospace to support extension of the life of the privately-owned module, and its use to stow spare space station hardware.

After NASA and Bigelow successfully completed collaborative analyses on BEAM life extension and stowage feasibility, astronauts began the process to provide additional storage capability aboard the station by removing hardware used for the initial BEAM expansion. They then converted sensors that monitor the BEAM environment from wireless to wired (to prevent interference from future stowage items on transmission of sensor data). Next they installed air ducting, netting, and large empty bags to define the stowage volume for hardware inside BEAM.  NASA and Bigelow later will likely add a power and data interface to BEAM, which will allow additional technology demonstrations to take place for the duration of the partnership agreement.

This new contract, which began in November, will run for a minimum of three years, with two options to extend for one additional year. At the end of the new contract, the agency may consider another extension or could again consider jettisoning BEAM from the station.

The space inside BEAM will hold up to 130 Cargo Transfer Bags of in-orbit stowage. Long-term use of BEAM will enable NASA and Bigelow to gather additional performance data on the module’s structural integrity and thermal stability and resistance to space debris, radiation, and microbial growth, to help NASA advance and learn about expandable space habitat technology in low-Earth orbit for application toward future human exploration missions. Using BEAM for stowage will free up about 1.87 cubic feet (0.53 cubic meters) of space in other station modules for research.

Image above: ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Paolo Nespoli works inside the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, outfitting it for future cargo storage aboard the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA.

NASA’s use of BEAM as part of a human-rated system allows Bigelow Aerospace to demonstrate its technology for future commercial applications in low-Earth Orbit. Initial studies have shown that soft materials can perform as well as rigid materials for habitation volumes in space and that BEAM has performed as designed in resistance to space debris.

BEAM launched on the eighth SpaceX Commercial Resupply Service mission in 2016. After being attached to the Tranquility Node using the station’s robotic Canadarm2, it was filled with air to expand it for a two-year test period to validate overall performance and capability of expandable habitats. Since the initial expansion, a suite of sensors installed by the crew automatically take measurements and monitor BEAM’s performance to help inform designs for future habitat systems. This extension will deepen NASA’s understanding of expandable space systems by making the BEAM a more operational element of the space station to be actively used in storage and crew operations.

Space station crew members have entered BEAM more than a dozen times since its expansion in May 2016. The crew has conducted radiation shielding experiments, installed passive radiation badges called Radiation Area Monitors, and routinely collect microbial air and surface samples. These badges and samples are returned to Earth for standard microbial and radiation analysis at the Johnson Space Center.

The public-private partnership between NASA and Bigelow supports NASA’s objective to develop deep space habitation capabilities for human missions beyond Earth orbit while fostering commercial capabilities for non-government applications to stimulate the growth of the space economy.

Related links:

Commercial Space: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/index.html

Expedition 53: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition53/index.html

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

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

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

CASC - Long March 2D lofts latest Yaogan Weixing satellite named LKW-1

CASC - China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation logo.

Dec. 4, 2017

Long March 2D /Yaogan-31 Launch

CASC have launched (Dec. 3, 2017) the Yaogan Weixing-31 remote sensing satellite – also known as the Land Surveying Satellite -1 (LKW-1) – via a Long March-2D (Chang Zheng-2D) on Sunday. The launch – from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center (JSLC) – took place at 04:11 UTC from the 603 Launch Platform at the LC43 Launch Complex.

China Launches Land Exploration Satellite

As per usual for the Chinese media, this spacecraft is once again classed as a new remote sensing bird that will be used for scientific experiments, land survey, crop yield assessment, and disaster monitoring.

Yaogan Weixing satellite named LKW-1

As was the case in previous launches of the Yaogan Weixing series, analysts believe this class of satellites is used for military purposes.

For more information about China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC): http://english.spacechina.com/n16421/index.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: CASC/NASA Spaceflight.com/Günter Space Page/Rui C. Barbosa/CCTV+.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch