Blogs

by Ellen Gray / BOISE, IDAHO/ Each morning Amber Soja gets up at 5:00 a.m. to check the fire weather. She’s an associate scientist from the National Institute of Aerospace based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, one of the lead forecasters for FIREX-AQ with one of the most important jobs: distilling the information …

A new U.S. space freighter is open for business today after delivering its payload to the International Space Station on Saturday. Meanwhile, a Russian resupply rocket is processing for another space delivery mission on Wednesday that will take less than three and a half hours after launch. NASA Flight Engineer Nick Hague opened Dragon’s hatch …

by Ellen Gray / BOISE, IDAHO/ The FIREX-AQ campaign is flying out of Boise, Idaho. The choice of location was no accident. Boise is also home to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), the nerve center of all major firefighting operations for the United States. Earlier this week, we took a tour. “NIFC is not …

SpX-18 Capture, Berthing and Ingress:  The Dragon vehicle was successfully captured at 8:12 AM CT yesterday. The robotic ground controllers then maneuvered the SSRMS to inspect the Dragon Passive CBM sealing surface and installed/berthed Dragon on the Node 2 Nadir CBM at 11:23 AM CT. The crew also completed vestibule pressurization, leak check and vestibule …

While the International Space Station was traveling more than 260 miles over southern Chile, astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch of NASA grappled Dragon at 9:11 a.m. EDT using the space station’s robotic arm Canadarm2. Ground controllers will now send commands to begin the robotic installation of the spacecraft on bottom of the station’s Harmony …

By Ellen Gray / BOISE, IDAHO/ Thursday, July 25 “It’s nice to have a flight plan to deviate from,” said DC-8 pilot Tim Vest at the debrief on Thursday night. It was just after 10 p.m. and the DC-8 had just returned from a 6-hour flight over a fire they weren’t planning on visiting. The …

Two days after its launch from Florida, the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft was installed on the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station’s Harmony module at 12:01 p.m. EDT. The 18th contracted commercial resupply mission from SpaceX (CRS-18) delivers more than 5,000 pounds of research, crew supplies and hardware to the orbiting laboratory. A key …

Rodent Research-17 (RR-17):  The crew installed Rodent Habitats in the Lab rack in preparation for upcoming RR-17 operations following SpX-18 arrival.  RR-17 uses younger and older mice as model organisms to evaluate the physiological, cellular and molecular effects of the spaceflight environment. Some responses to spaceflight in humans and model organisms such as mice resemble …

By Ellen Gray / NEAR STANLEY, IDAHO / Wednesday, July 24 We were ready to fly. We’d heard Tuesday evening that there were two seats open on the DC-8 for the communications team on Wednesday, but as often happens in the field, plans change. For the first science flight, requests for extra seats from the …

By Susannah Darling NASA Headquarters Imagine, if you will, that you are driving to your favorite restaurant. The traffic is bad, so you use your GPS to find the best route. To get your current location, your phone or GPS listens to a satellite in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This satellite sends the GPS system …