This Week at NASA…
Astronaut Scott Kelly has been selected by NASA to begin
a one-year mission aboard the International Space Station
in 2015. Joining Kelly on the ISS will be Russian cosmonaut,
Mikhail Kornienko. The pair will launch aboard a Russian
Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan
in spring 2015. Their 12-month stay aboard the world’s only
laboratory in microgravity will provide new data about how
the human body reacts and adapts to the harsh environment of
space. That information will help scientists assess crew
performance and health, and develop better ways to reduce
the risks of long-duration spaceflight, as NASA plans to
send the next generation of explorers on missions around
the moon, to an asteroid and ultimately, Mars.
The next crew headed for the ISS on Expedition 34/35, continues
to train in Star City, Russia for their missions.. NASA’s Tom
Marshburn, the Canadian Space Agency’s Chris Hadfield and
Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko are scheduled to launch
to the station on December 19, where they’ll become the
second half of the Expedition 34 crew. They’ll be joined on
Expedition 35 next March by NASA’s Chris Cassidy, and
cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.
Scientists with NASA’s MESSENGER mission say new observations
made by the spacecraft confirm a long-held theory: that the
polar regions of Mercury harbor an abundance of water
ice and other frozen volatiles.
“Messenger has revealed a very important chapter in the story
of how water ice and other volatile materials have been
delivered to the inner planets … it's extraordinary that this
chapter is so well preserved on the planet closest to the Sun.”
Given its proximity to the Sun, Mercury would seem to be an
unlikely place to find water ice. But since the tilt of the planet’s
rotational axis is almost zero, scientists suggested decades ago
that there might be water ice and other frozen volatiles trapped
at Mercury’s poles, which NEVER see sunlight. MESSENGER, which
stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and
Ranging, is the first spacecraft to orbit the solar
system’s innermost planet.
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden toured the United Launch
Alliance’s space rocket production facility in Decatur, Ala.
The facility is home to two families of rockets, Atlas and Delta.
Together, Atlas and Delta rockets have had more than 850 successful
launches. Their major fabrication, assembly and integration are
completed at the Decatur facility. ULA is a joint venture of
Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Company.
A J-2X power pack assembly burns brightly during the latest hot-fire
test conducted at the Stennis Space Center. Lasting 278 seconds, the
test used newly-installed gauges to measure how much strain the
turboprop placed on the engine’s turbine structure as it spun at
various high speeds. The test was the latest in a series used by
engineers to evaluate the J-2X, which will help power the upper
stage of NASA’s new Space Launch System.
And, they’re getting ready for the SLS at the Kennedy Space Center.
This time-lapse video shows Crawler-Transporter 2, fresh from the
first phase of a major overhaul, taking a test drive from Pad 39A
to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Kennedy’s two crawler- transporters
have moved mobile launchers and their mounted vehicles from the VAB to
KSC’s ocean-side launch pads since the Apollo era. But, with the Space
Launch System in development, engineers began modifying crawler-transporter
2 last December to ensure it can handle the agency’s heaviest rocket
ever—and help move America’s human spaceflight program onward and
upward for years to come.
Hi my name is Torsten Zorn. I’m tactical downlink lead on the Mars
Science Laboratory and I’m coming to you with your Curiosity rover report.
Since November 10th we’ve been tracking a very large dust storm
on Mars with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Curiosity and Opportunity.
Luckily this dust storm has abated and even if it didn’t it would have
been fine for Curiosity as well within its design limitations.
Recently Curiosity was able to take a beautiful hi-res image of
herself using the MAHLI Hand Held Imager. By putting together a
sequence of very complex arm motions we were able to take dozens
of images and splice them together creating a beautiful self-portrait.
After several weeks of being stationary at the Rocknest site we began
driving again on Sol 100. This marked a significant milestone on
the mission as we reached about a half a kilometer of total
driving distance on the surface of Mars.
Currently the left front wheel is sitting on a rock that we’ve
dubbed Bell Island. We plan to back up off that rock to bring
the rock into the arm’s workspace and we’re going to do some
contact science on it with APXS and MAHLI.
After completing our science campaign at our current location we’re
going to be moving to the East to a place called Point Lake.
From here we’re going to be looking for a target to perform our
first ever drill on Mars.
This has been your Curiosity rover report. Check back for further updates.
Chief Technologist Mason Peck was a keynote speaker at the NASA
Innovative Advanced Concepts Program's 2012 Fall Symposium. Held
near the Langley Research Center, the NIAC event included panel
discussions on topics ranging from propulsion and power and space
debris removal to near-Earth object mitigation and robotics and space probes.
“It’s important for us at NASA; it’s important for us as a
nation. It’s not only about investing in technology for the
sake of science and the sake of human space. It’s also done
because it advances our economy. It means we can design new
computers, new smartphones, new applications, new medical
applications - new things that will change our lives here.
Though the effect of Hurricane Sandy is undeniable, the impact of
the storm to Wallops Flight Facility was minimized thanks to an
improvised beach and sea wall project that proved critical to the
protection of Wallops launch assets.
“You would have had sand inundation into their liquid fueling
facility area, which is all stone now and quite a big mess to
pick up. It could have been pretty catastrophic for that
operation, Antares operation possibly.”
But the protection of the beach and berm improvement, known as
the Wallops Island Shoreline Protection project, came at a cost.
It’s estimated that some 500 to 700 feet of berm was wiped out by
the super storm. But Wallops engineers have a plan in place to deal
with this temporary situation.
"It’s like a brake pad, every time that brake pad starts wearing down.
When it gets to the point when we need re nourishment, we’re going to
basically twice a year, we’re going to look at this beach, survey it
and find out where the beach is and what it’s doing, and we expect on
a three to seven year cycle we’ll have to re nourish this beach."
Each re-nourishment project is expected to include about 800,000 cubic
yards of sand. In the meantime, NASA officials are working to address
the immediate needs of the beach following Hurricane Sandy.
I'm Kody Ensley and I do software engineering on Robonaut at Johnson
Space Center. Basically the robot, Robonaut 2 behind me, has onboard
software; the processors actually live in his stomach. What I'm doing
is helping to architect the software that will allow the robot to be
able to move around inside the Space Station autonomously. I was born
and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Pablo, Montana and
when I was a kid growing up, my parents invested a lot of money into
Lego's and I think that's probably the reason that I ended up here
today. I was not one of those kids at the age of 6 who knew they
would end up with NASA. One of NASA's own, Scott Askew, was involved
in a program called the NAFP which is basically where NASA lends out
professors to travel to universities. I heard about something called
the Undergraduate Student Research Project and I applied for the USRP
program. After successive internships and then finally a coop, I was
hired here at Johnson Space Center. Being able to do outreach and show
that there are opportunities like internships, Co-ops, where not only
you can leave to get training, but can bring that back to the Reservation
and you can help pass that along to other people there. It has
probably been my proudest personal accomplishment. We don't want
robots to replace people; we don't think they can, but we definitely
think that we can assist people in getting to the next frontier faster.
Nineteen years ago, on December 2, 1993 the first Hubble Space
Telescope servicing mission, STS-61 got underway with the launch
of space shuttle Endeavour and her seven-member crew from the
Kennedy Space Center. A corrective optics package designed to fix
a flaw in the telescope’s primary mirror was successfully installed,
sharpening Hubble’s vision from blurry to pristine. Hubble also
received instrument upgrades and new solar arrays during the
course of five spacewalks.
And five years later, on December 4, 1998, Endeavour began another
mission, this time as the first shuttle assembly flight to the
International Space Station. STS-88 delivered to the station the
first American module, “Unity,” which was mated to “Zarya,” the
Russian Functional Cargo Block module launched to orbit one month
earlier. The crew completed three spacewalks to connect power and
data cables between the modules.
And that’s This Week @NASA.
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