New Status: USOS Crew Off Duty: The USOS crew was off duty today for compensation for HTV ingress activities performed on Saturday. H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)-4 Cargo Operations: Saturday and Sunday the crew performed 13 hours of HTV cargo operations, however through efficiency, the crew completed approximately 25.5 hours of cargo transfers. Today, the crew …
Different Data, Different Colors There are several types of data, each suited to different types of display. Continuously varying data, called sequential data, is the most familiar. In addition to sequential, Cynthia Brewer defines two additional types of data: divergent and qualitative. Divergent data has a “break point” in the center, often signifying a difference. […]
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)-4 Hatch Opening: This morning, Flight Engineer (FE)-5 Parmitano and FE-6 Nyberg successfully completed HTV-4 vestibule outfitting. The crew removed the HTV Hatch Thermal Blanket, installed power jumpers, removed the Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) Controller Panel Assemblies (CPAs), installed an HTV Equalization and Inter-module Ventilation (IMV) supply Jumper, equalized pressures …
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)-4 Capture and Berthing: Robotics Ground Controllers powered up the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) in Hot Backup configuration. Cassidy, Nyberg and Parmitano monitored the HTV4 approach from the Cupola Robotics Work Station (RWS) and successfully captured HTV using the SSRMS at approximately 6:22 am CDT. Robotics Ground Controllers then maneuvered …
Yesterday’s Image of the Day — Ocean Revealed — elicited an interesting response from Norman Kuring, a NASA oceanographer who frequently contributes to the Earth Observatory. He notes: “There have indeed been a number of studies that exploit sunglint for ocean research since Paul Scully-Power made his statement. However, I disagree with the follow-on sentence that, “his […]
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)-4 Status: HTV’s forward Reaction Control System (RCS)-A oxidizer latch valve exhibited two recurrences of the unexpected “closed” indication during the past 24 hours. HTV continues to fly on the RCS-B string with RCS-A available as a backup. If this occurs on the RCS-B string during free flight, Japan Aerospace …
Wildfires follow a simple but dangerous equation: Hotter, dryer conditions + more people in the world = a greater likelihood of ferocious wildfires threatening lives and property. Fires in the western United States are burning earlier, longer and with more intensity, as shown by a decades-long record from ground surveys and NASA satellites. How much of […]
New Status: Advanced Colloids Experiment (ACE)-1: FE-6 Nyberg mixed the 6th of 10 wells for the ACE-1 experiment. ACE-1 is the first in a series of microscopic imaging investigations of materials which contain small colloidal particles which have the specific characteristic of remaining evenly dispersed and distributed within the material. This investigation takes advantage of …
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle 4 (HTV4) Status: Yesterday HTV4 telemetry indicated that the Reaction Control System (RCS)-A latching valve was closed unexpectedly. Ground teams tested the latching valve today and determined that both the latch and RCS-A are working nominally. They concluded that the anomaly was a transient in the switch that detects the …
The “Perfect” Palette Despite the near-ubiquity of the rainbow palette—which distorts patterns in the underlying data—the basics of using color to represent numerical data are well-established. This 1823 map by W. C. Woodbridge is an early example of the use of colors to represent numbers—in this case more qualitative than quantitative. The rainbow palette is […]
