Happy 15th Birthday, International Space Station! The first International Space Station component, the Russian Zarya module, was launched in November 1998. In the years since, NASA and its global partners have built a world-class orbiting laboratory and kept a continuous human presence in space since 2000. I decided to celebrate the occasion by searching through the […]
Last week, a city-state sized chunk of ice broke off of Pine Island Glacier (PIG), sending iceberg B-31 into a bay off West Antarctica. Though the formation of the 700 square-kilometer iceberg could be a purely natural event — the result of a floating ice tongue growing too long and losing its balance on the sea — […]
Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (J-SSOD)-2 Launches: Flight Engineer (FE)-6 Wakata opened the JEM Airlock outer hatch and extended the slide table with the SSOD out to the JEM Exposed Facility (JEF). He released the JEM Remote Manipulator System (JEMRMS) Small Fine Arm (SFA) Attachment Mechanism (SAM) Latching Arm to prepare for …
AnisoTubule Experiment: Today, Flight Engineer (FE)-6 Wakata began activities to support JAXA’s Aniso Tubule experiment. He watered seeds in a sample chamber and then stowed the chamber in a Minus Eighty Degree Celsius Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI) for a five-day preparation for sprouting, simulating the winter season for plants. The Aniso Tubule experiment investigates …
You can watch the post-launch press conference under way on NASA TV.
“This is the result of the effort of a really tight team that’s been working really hard,” said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden as he congratulated the MAVEN launch teams on Monday’s liftoff. “I hope this mission serves as a model for those that come after it.”
Courtesy United Launch Alliance
Another roar of applause today as MAVEN deployed its twin solar arrays. The gull-wing-shaped arrays are essential to generate electrical power for the spacecraft and recharge the spacecraft’s batteries.
MAVEN is on its own now, headed for Mars! Applause roared up from the control rooms.The Centaur is far behind the scientific spacecraft and getting farther behind. The Centaur will be maneuvered so it doesn’t interfere with MAVEN or Mars later. Next up for MAVEN is the unfurling of its gull wing solar arrays so …
