At NASA’s Building 836, the Spacecraft Labs Telemetry Station at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II booster is removed from its shipping container on Monday, April 16, 2018. Once it was offloaded, preliminary checkouts and preflight processing began in preparation for the agency’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation …
NASA’s ground tracking station at McMurdo, Antarctica, has acquired signals from both GRACE-FO spacecraft.
The GRACE-FO satellites have successfully separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and are now flying independently. They will be in different orbits for the next few days that will put them into the correct configuration for science operations.
Advanced Combustion via Microgravity Experiments (ACME): The crew replaced the Combustion Integrated Rack (CIR) manifold bottles this morning. To prepare for the second part of the CLD Flames investigation the crew configured the ACME Chamber Insert, replaced the igniter tip, and replaced two ACME controllers. The ACME experiment series being performed in the CIR includes …
The main engine has cut off, and second stage engine has ignited as planned on the Falcon 9 rocket carrying GRACE-FO to orbit. The payload fairing, which protects the payloads during launch, has been jettisoned.
The Expedition 55 crew members had a full complement of work today as they conducted microgravity research, trained to capture a resupply ship and prepared for a June spacewalk. Astronaut Norishige Kanai explored how living and working in space affects everything from fluid physics to the human body today. He first set up hardware to …
The SpaceX Falcon rocket lifted off Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force at 12:47 p.m. PDT, carrying the NASA/German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On mission. In about two and a half minutes, a series of critical milestones will occur in rapid succession, starting with main engine cutoff.
As the GRACE Follow-On countdown continues, science teams in the U.S. and Germany and mission control team at the German Spacecraft Operations Center (GSOC, shown here) are both GO for launch. NASA’s GRACE-FO partner, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), subcontracted mission operations to the German Space Agency, which operates GSOC. Credit: NASA/Jim Round
The fueling of the SpaceX Falcon 9 has begun.
It’s a beautiful day for a launch. In several locations around Vandenberg Air Force Base, and at the German Space Operations Center near Munich, engineers and scientists from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission are at their computers and communications consoles for the countdown and go/no go poll to verify all systems …
