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From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: January 15, 2015 at 11:07:06 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Thursday – Jan. 15, 2015
Finally there is a SUN ,,,,it has been missing for a couple of days!NASA and Human Spaceflight NewsThursday – Jan. 15, 2015HEADLINES AND LEADSU.S. part of space station evacuatedWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsCrew members returned safely to the U.S. segment of the International Space Station Wednesday afternoon after evacuating earlier in the day.Space debris expert warns about dangers of orbital junkTomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight InsiderThe emerging problem of orbiting space junk becomes more and more evident as time goes on. Spacecraft and satellites are currently subject to high-speed impacts by more than 19,000 trackable objects, mainly old satellites, spent rocket stages, and fragments from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. There are also several hundred thousand objects the size of marbles, and several million the size of sand grains. Even a tiny piece of debris can inflict considerable damage, or even destroy an orbiting operational spacecraft.Orion Test Flight "Tremendously Successful" But Schedule Challenges RemainJeff Foust – Space NewsAn initial analysis of data from Orion's first test flight last month indicates that the spacecraft performed better than expected in many respects, although NASA officials confirmed that this success won't accelerate its next test flight, still planned for 2018.Cruz: US must go deeper into spaceJulian Hattem – The HillSen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the new head of the Senate's subcommittee on space, wants to go where no man has gone before.Shattered Mars Rock Could Be Science GoldmineIan O'Neill - Discovery.comYesterday, on Sol 867 of its mission, Curiosity began drilling operations on a slab of bedrock at the base of Mount Sharp — but in so doing, the delicate target rock broke apart.10 years since we landed on TitanKeith Cooper – Spaceflight NowTen years ago today, on 14 January 2005, a compact, flattened cylinder called Huygens, chock-full of sensors, cameras and scientific experiments, went hurtling through the orange skies of the mysterious moon Titan.Huge asteroid to fly by Earth on January 26: NASASputnik News, of RussiaNASA said on Wednesday that a giant asteroid will safely fly past Earth on January 26.The rock, named 2004 BL86 by scientists, is expected to fly by at a distance of 1.2 million kilometers and estimated to be about 0.5 kilometers in size, India's Economic Times newspaper reported on Wednesday.COMPLETE STORIESU.S. part of space station evacuatedWilliam Harwood – CBS NewsCrew members returned safely to the U.S. segment of the International Space Station Wednesday afternoon after evacuating earlier in the day.Concern about a possible ammonia coolant leak early Wednesday prompted the three astronauts to evacuate their portion of the complex, joining three cosmonauts in Russian modules while flight controllers studied telemetry to figure out if alarms were triggered by an actual leak, a sensor problem or some other issue, officials said Wednesday.A few hours later, engineers studying telemetry found no evidence of any leaking ammonia, raising suspicion that a circuit board, or card, in a specific computer known as a multiplexer-demultiplexer, or MDM, might have suffered a failure that took four critical sensors off line. That, in turn, triggered a sequence of events that may have combined to indicate a leak in the station's ammonia coolant system."At this point, the team does not believe we leaked ammonia," Mike Suffredini, the space station program manager, said at 11 a.m. EST (GMT-5). "What we are dealing with is this failure of probably a card inside one of our multiplexer-demultiplexers, it's just a computer that sends telemetry down and brings commands back up. This card has a number of measurements on it and those were the measurements we lost."The alarms were triggered just after 4 a.m. EST (GMT-5) when an apparent pressure increase was detected in a water coolant loop in the forward Harmony module. Water is circulated inside the station to carry away the heat generated by the lab's electronics. The water then flows through components called heat exchangers, transferring the heat to ammonia coolant that flows through huge external radiators to keep the station within temperature limits.The apparent pressure spike in coolant loop B was a possible indicator of an ammonia leak, and playing it safe, flight controllers told Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti to don masks and move into the Russian segment of the space station.The telemetry was confusing at first and the initial evacuation was briefly called off. But when flight controllers saw indications of a slight pressure increase in the crew's air supply -- a more convincing sign of an actual leak into the station -- they told the crew to head back to the Russian segment.Joining cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev, Elena Serova and Anton Shkaplerov, Wilmore, Cristoforetti and Virts closed a hatch between NASA's Unity module and the Russian Zarya module, isolating all six crew members in the Russian segment of the lab complex, which uses a different cooling system.Flight controllers then powered down critical systems tied into coolant loop B and shut down an external pump to reduce the pressure in the system. After studying the telemetry, however, engineers saw signs that something in that powerdown process might have triggered the slight change in air pressure that was detected."It looked like a no-kidding pressure increase, now we're thinking this may just be normal reactions to the events that started to unfold," Suffredini said. "So the team's working through that."Water loop B was back in operation within a few hours of the initial alarm and engineers have downlinked data from the computer in question. They hoped to recover use of the internal circuit card in question after additional troubleshooting.In an earlier exchange with the crew, astronaut James Kelly at the Johnson Space Center in Houston told Wilmore and company to stand by pending additional analysis."We're still trying to figure out exactly what happened," Kelly said. "We're not entirely convinced this is an ammonia leak. ... There's a possibility of a combination of sensor problems, MDM (computer) partial failures and thermal effects all thrown together in the exact wrong way to make this thing look like it was your classic ammonia leak."Bottom line is we've got all the experts coming now. Everybody's poring over the data. We've got all the smart folks taking a look at it, and we're trying to figure out exactly what's going on.""Thank you, we really appreciate that summary," Wilmore replied. "We'll just stand by ready to do anything from our end that you have for us."Kelly told the crew to stand by for additional updates and in the meantime, "enjoy your impromptu day off.""We'll keep you guys informed as to what's going on, and we'll also let you know as the conventional wisdom comes around on the story," Kelly said. "But like I said, the good news right now is we're not utterly convinced that we had a very bad problem that we had indications of. Clearly, we did the right thing with the indications we had, but we're still trying to figure out what the actual event is."By mid-afternoon, the astronauts were cleared to return to the U.S. segment of the station, and the hatch was re-opened at 3:05 p.m. EST. Crew members went in with masks on to sample the air, and when no ammonia was detected, they were able to remove their masks.A statement from NASA Wednesday afternoon said flight controllers were continuing to analyze data in an effort to determine what triggered the initial alarm. It said the crew is expected to resume their normal research activities on Thursday.The International Space Station is equipped with two independent coolant loops that use water and ammonia circulating through a complex arrangement of heat exchangers, pumps, valves and radiators to get rid of the heat generated by the lab's electrical systems.While either loop can handle the heat produced by critical life support, communications, stabilization and key computer systems, both are needed to cool those components, the station's major science experiments and other non-essential equipment.Inside the station's pressurized modules, electrical components are mounted on "cold plates" that use water flowing through internal lines to keep equipment cool. The warmed water in the "moderate temperature loop," or MTL, is pumped to heat exchangers that transfer the thermal load to the ammonia coolant that circulates through the station's external thermal control system, or ETCS.Powerful pumps in each coolant loop push the ammonia through an intricate system of valves and lines to large radiators mounted on the back side of the lab's main solar power truss where the heat is radiated to space. The cooled ammonia then is returned to the heat exchangers for another cooling cycle.Space debris expert warns about dangers of orbital junkTomasz Nowakowski - Spaceflight InsiderThe emerging problem of orbiting space junk becomes more and more evident as time goes on. Spacecraft and satellites are currently subject to high-speed impacts by more than 19,000 trackable objects, mainly old satellites, spent rocket stages, and fragments from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. There are also several hundred thousand objects the size of marbles, and several million the size of sand grains. Even a tiny piece of debris can inflict considerable damage, or even destroy an orbiting operational spacecraft.A report in 2011 by the National Research Council (NRC) warned NASA that the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth was at critical level. So are we now really close to a disaster induced by space debris as depicted in the blockbuster movie 'Gravity'? William Schonberg, professor of aerospace engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who was the member of NRC committee that filed the report in 2011, warns that the movie scenario can come true."While the movie 'Gravity' took certain liberties with the laws of physics and certain event timelines, it certainly did wonders to bring the problem of space debris front and center in the minds of many people who may not have known about it," Schonberg told astrowatch.net. "That said, while events may not unfold precisely in the manner depicted in the movie, the general concept of a 'runaway debris collision' event as depicted in the movie might indeed be possible under the right circumstances."The odds for 'the right circumstances' are increasing as every satellite or spacecraft has the potential to create space debris. Any impact between two objects of sizeable mass can produce shrapnel debris from the force of collision. Each piece of shrapnel has the potential to cause further damage, creating even more space debris. With a large enough collision the amount of cascading debris could be enough to render low Earth orbit essentially unusable.The space debris problem is an issue that needs a worldwide cooperation to solve it. "No single nation can solve this problem on its own," Schonberg said. "All space-faring nations are engaged in addressing this problem using the best talents they have at their disposal."But there are currently no international treaties that would force nations to at least mitigate the space junk. The U.S. government has implemented a set of standard practices for both civilian and military orbital debris reduction as have some other space agencies, such as the European Space Agency (ESA). Since 2012, ESA is also designing a mission to remove a large space debris from orbit. The mission, called e.Deorbit, is to be launched by 2021.Various companies, academics, and governmental entities have put forth plans and proposed a variety of technologies for actively dealing with space debris. But most of the technological approaches have not been turned into firm, funded projects, and there is no commercial business plan extant for most companies to actually begin systematically reducing space debris."The space debris problem is a multi-faceted problem, one that has technological, legal, financial, political, etc. issues that must all be addressed in any long-lasting solution. There is currently no 'one size fits all' solution to all aspects of the problem." Schonberg noticed.Schonberg is the professor of aerospace engineering and the chair of civil, architectural and environmental engineering department at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He was the member of NRC's Committee on Space Shuttle Meteoroid/Orbital Debris Risk Management in 1997. He was also the member of the Independent Meteoroid/Orbital Debris Risk Assessment Tool Validation and Verification Committee (2004-2005) at NASA Engineering and Safety Center.Schonberg took part in NRC's committee that in 2011 issued a 180-page report warning about the dangers of space debris. In 2010, he received a NASA Engineering and Safety Center Honor Award for his work in micrometeroid and orbital debris (MMOD) protection and damage prediction.Orion Test Flight "Tremendously Successful" But Schedule Challenges RemainJeff Foust – Space NewsAn initial analysis of data from Orion's first test flight last month indicates that the spacecraft performed better than expected in many respects, although NASA officials confirmed that this success won't accelerate its next test flight, still planned for 2018.In presentations at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Human Exploration and Operations Committee Jan. 13 at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, officials also said that plans for the first crewed Orion mission will depend on which upper stage is available in time for that 2021 flight.William Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told the committee that the Dec. 5 test flight of Orion, designated Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1), was "tremendously successful." On that four-and-a-half-hour flight, Orion made two orbits of the Earth before successfully splashing down in the Pacific Ocean."The data review so far looks really, really good," he said. "We haven't seen anything in the data that's really off-nominal."In a later presentation to the committee, William Hill, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, said that Orion achieved 85 of 87 objectives during the EFT-1 flight. "The bottom line is that EFT-1 was extremely successful," he said.The two objectives the mission did not meet both involved the Crew Module Uprighting System, airbags in the nose of the capsule that are designed to inflate after splashdown to flip the spacecraft upright should it come to rest upside down. Several of the airbags did not inflate or stay inflated, although they were not needed as the capsule remained upright. "We've got some redesigning to do on that," Hill said.Other systems on Orion, though, performed better than expected. The spacecraft used significantly less hydrazine propellant than planned, Hill said. The spacecraft carried 180 kilograms of hydrazine, and engineers planned for it to use 55 kilograms, with the rest as contingency. Instead, Orion used only 42 kilograms."We need to understand why that's the case," Gerstenmaier said of Orion's propellant use, although Hill said later it was likely linked to Orion being placed into orbit very accurately by its Delta 4 Heavy launch vehicle.NASA and the Orion prime contractor, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, are continuing to review data from the EFT-1 test flight, Hill said. A final post-flight briefing on the mission is scheduled for March 4.Analysis of the data will support work on the next Orion mission, which will also be the first launch of the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. Hill told the committee that this mission, called Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1), still had an official planning window for launch between December 2017 and September 2018, leading to questions from the committee about whether a 2017 launch was indeed possible for the mission.Gerstenmaier, who told the House Science Committee at a Dec. 10 hearing that EM-1 would slip to 2018, repeated that revised schedule at the meeting. "We're in the process of re-baselining our plans for some time in 2018," he told the advisory committee.EM-1 will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon, the same orbit that NASA plans to use as the destination for its Asteroid Redirect Mission. On EM-1, SLS will employ a temporary upper stage called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), based on the upper stage used by the Delta 4.Hill said that NASA would like to repeat this mission on the first crewed Orion flight, called Exploration Mission 2 and tentatively scheduled for 2021. However, he said the ICPS would not be powerful enough to send a crewed Orion into a distant retrograde orbit, and instead NASA would need to use the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage under development.It's unclear, though, whether the Exploration Upper Stage will be ready in time for a 2021 mission. "We will make a decision this year on the upper stage," Hill said. If NASA decides to use the ICPS for the mission, he said, Orion would instead fly into a more conventional lunar orbit.Gerstenmaier told the committee that if NASA receives more funding for SLS than currently planned in future years, as it did for fiscal year 2015, it would use the money to accelerate development of the new upper stage. "If we get additional funding in 2016 and 2017, we will apply much of that to the Exploration Upper Stage," he said.Cruz: US must go deeper into spaceJulian Hattem – The HillSen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the new head of the Senate's subcommittee on space, wants to go where no man has gone before."We must refocus our investment on the hard sciences, on getting men and women into space, on exploring low-Earth orbit and beyond, and not on political distractions that are extraneous to NASA's mandate," the Texas Republican said in a statement on Wednesday.Cruz was installed as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness last week. Texas is a major hub of the U.S. space industry, and Cruz seems ready to defend the agency's gradually shrinking budget.On Wednesday, he echoed President Kennedy's call for Americans to reach for the heavens and said that returning the U.S. to its former status as the global leader in space exploration should be a geopolitical priority for the nation."Russia's status as the current gatekeeper of the International Space Station could threaten our capability to explore and learn, stunting our capacity to reach new heights and share innovations with free people everywhere," he said. "The United States should work alongside our international partners, but not be dependent on them."NASA has been reliant on Russia to ferry Americans back and forth to space since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. The U.S. is also dependent on Russian rocket engines whenever it wants to shoot many military satellites into orbit, which has raised concerns about vulnerabilities.On Wednesday, Cruz lauded private companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX that are pushing to bring Americans back to outer space, and which present "important new opportunities for us all."President Obama has called for American astronauts to land on an asteroid in the next decade, and for them to orbit Mars in the decade following that.Shattered Mars Rock Could Be Science GoldmineIan O'Neill - Discovery.comYesterday, on Sol 867 of its mission, Curiosity began drilling operations on a slab of bedrock at the base of Mount Sharp — but in so doing, the delicate target rock broke apart.Although the slab might not be suitable for further drilling, mission scientists are excited by the opportunity to study the shattered rock left in Curiosity's wake."The rock target Mojave that we drilled into yesterday is part of a larger expanse of fractured, soft bedrock at the Pahrump Hills site," Mars Science Laboratory's project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.In September, Curiosity arrived at Pahrump Hills, a small foothill at the base of Mount Sharp in the center of Gale Crater, and the mission has been studying the area ever since, trying to understand how the 3.5 mile high mountain formed. To do this, the rover is making extensive use of its suite of robotic geologist's tools to drill into and chip away at the bountiful array of bedrock.After cleaning the surface of the rock, which has been named "Mojave," it became clear that the rock contained crystallized mineral deposits that likely formed when Mars was a much wetter place. So to understand the nature of the deposits, mission managers gave the go-ahead to begin a test drill.However, rather than smoothly boring into the rock, Mojave shattered, an outcome that didn't surprise Vasavada's team."We've seen similar fractured bedrock before and even cracked it on previous drill attempts in other locations," he said. "So while we can't necessarily predict it in advance, it also wasn't terribly surprising to crack the rock and dislodge a few fragments of it."Vasavada did point out, however, that the rock will still need to be evaluated to see if it is still scientifically interesting enough for further drilling. Regardless, as the rock is fractured, a geological opportunity has presented itself."One nice outcome of yesterday's drill test was that a few rock chips were created and now are sitting on the surface of the bedrock," he said. "It's rare for Curiosity to get to study freshly broken rock surfaces, where the effects of weathering or dust might be minimized."It's the reason geologists on Earth carry rock hammers, to create fresh surfaces. So we're pretty excited to take some close-up images and compositional measurements of those fragments," added Vasavada.Whether or not Mojave is suitable for further drilling seems academic; exposing the material from freshly-cut material that hasn't been exposed since the rock formed billions of years ago could provide a wonderful opportunity for Curiosity to zoom in and record fine-scale structures that we may never have otherwise seen.10 years since we landed on TitanKeith Cooper – Spaceflight NowTen years ago today, on 14 January 2005, a compact, flattened cylinder called Huygens, chock-full of sensors, cameras and scientific experiments, went hurtling through the orange skies of the mysterious moon Titan.The surface of Titan was still largely unknown at the time, hidden behind a veil of dense smog produced by a haze of hydrocarbon aerosols, but all was about to be revealed. As its parachutes unfurled, Huygens was buffeted by winds, swaying on its ropes as the surface loomed up, a terrain of craggy ice-rocks and the dark tributaries belonging to rivers formed from a black, oily chemical mix of liquid ethane, methane and other hydrocarbon molecules. Then came touchdown, the 318 kilogram probe reduced to a relative featherweight in Titan's light gravitational touch. On the surface, Huygens fired pictures of its new surroundings, relayed by way of its mothership Cassini, back home to Earth and the eagerly awaiting throngs of scientists and press, to confirm that the European Space Agency had successfully accomplished the most distant landing ever achieved. Until we send something to land on one of the moons of Uranus or Neptune, or a body in the Kuiper Belt, this record will not be broken.Huygens spent 72 minutes transmitting data from the surface of Titan before the relaying station – Cassini – disappeared over the horizon (Huygens' batteries died soon thereafter). Yet in that short time it provided a profound view of this alien moon."We didn't know what we would land on, whether it would be solid ice as hard as granite or a liquid sea," says Professor John Zarnecki of the Open University, who was the lead scientist on the probe's Surface Science Package, which was one of six instrument suites onboard Huygens. "So for ESA the primary mission was to make measurements of the atmosphere. Survival on the surface was always going to be an added bonus."What a bonus though. Zarnecki's team suspect that Huygens hit a pebble before touching down on softer, icy gravel. Round pebbles are formed by the action of liquid flowing over rocks (or rock-hard chunks of ice, in this case), smoothing their edges through abrasion. Clearly liquid had flowed over Huygens' landing site at some point, perhaps only ten or fifteen years earlier. Huygens had come down in either a floodplain or a dried-up seasonal lake (the seasons on Titan last much longer than Earth's seasons, by virtue of its greater distance from and longer orbit around the Sun)."Cassini and Huygens have done a fantastic job showing what a varied place Titan is," Zarnecki tells Astronomy Now. "In some ways it is incredibly frustrating because although the mission has been an enormous success, we have just got to go back and do a lot more stuff because Cassini has shown how varied the surface is. There are dunes, cryo-volcanoes, river systems, lakes. Titan has absolutely lived up to the hype."Huge asteroid to fly by Earth on January 26: NASASputnik News, of RussiaNASA said on Wednesday that a giant asteroid will safely fly past Earth on January 26.The rock, named 2004 BL86 by scientists, is expected to fly by at a distance of 1.2 million kilometers and estimated to be about 0.5 kilometers in size, India's Economic Times newspaper reported on Wednesday."Monday, January 26 will be the closest asteroid 2004 BL86 will get to Earth for at least the next 200 years," according to Don Yeomans, from NASA's Near Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California."And while it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it's a relatively close approach by a relatively large asteroid, so it provides us a unique opportunity to observe and learn more," Yeomans said.Amateur astronomers will be able to see the asteroid from the evening of January 26 into the morning of January 27, when it will pass in front of the constellations Hydra, Cancer and Leo.Scientists say that the flyby is a must-see event given that no more flybys are expected until 2027 which will see another huge asteroid, 1999 AN10, whizz past Earth.Scientists plan to examine 2004 BL86 by observing it with microwave transmissions."When we get our radar data back the day after the flyby, we will have the first detailed images. At present, we know almost nothing about the asteroid, so there are bound to be surprises," according to radar astronomer Lance Benner of JPL, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations of the asteroid.Initially, the rock was spotted by a telescope belonging to the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Survey in New Mexico, on January 30, 2004.ENDMore at www.spacetoday.net
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