Blogs

On Saturday, Jan. 27, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe began space environment testing, starting with the air being pumped out of the 40-foot-tall thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland where the spacecraft is currently housed. The chamber – officially called the Space Environment Simulator – creates a nearly identical replication of the conditions the spacecraft will face during its mission to the Sun.

International Space Station managers have rescheduled a U.S. spacewalk postponed on Monday to mid-February. Meanwhile, the Expedition 54 crew is also preparing for a Russian spacewalk this Friday. Astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Norishige Kanai are planning to begin their spacewalk Feb. 15 at 7:10 a.m. EST to stow and reposition a pair of Latching …

Traveling with us were four journalism students from the Stony Brook University School of Journalism; their professor, Elizabeth Bass, the founding director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University; and teaching assistant Kevin Lizarazo. This group joined us in the field to see firsthand how research gets done. They hiked […]

USOS ExtraVehicular Activity (EVA) 48 status:  Over the weekend, ground teams were able to identify a root cause and a fix for the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) Latching End Effector (LEE) anomaly seen after USOS EVA 47.  Because of this, the EVA to return the LEE to the configuration prior to EVA 47 …

The Centaur upper stage, part of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that will help launch NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S, is in place for prelaunch processing. The Centaur arrived at the Delta Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Jan. 24, two days after its delivery by ship to nearby Port …

Expedition 54 is now focusing on Friday’s spacewalk to install and remove gear on the Russian side of the International Space Station. This comes after today’s spacewalk to work on the Canadarm2 robotic arm was postponed to mid-February. Cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov will put on their Orlan spacesuits Friday and exit the Pirs …

NASA’s Recovery Team from Kennedy Space Center just finished a week at sea, testing and improving their processes and ground support hardware to recover astronauts in the Orion capsule once they splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Aboard the USS Anchorage, NASA and the U.S. Navy worked together to run through different sea conditions, time …

International Space Station officials have postponed Monday’s spacewalk to swap latching end effectors (LEEs) on the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The decision was made after the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and its robotics specialist team developed a diagnostics software patch confirming an anomaly noted in a primary communications string on the spare end effector installed during …

European Modular Cultivation System (EMCS) Preparation for Plant Gravity Perception Operations: To prepare the EMCS for the Plant Gravity Perception investigation, the crew replaced the empty EMCS Air Mix Supply Module located on the lower left side of the EMCS holding structure with a full Air Mix Module and then opened the EMCS Gas Valves …

During a spacewalk on Jan. 23, 2018, Expedition 54 flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle replaced a Latching End Effector (LEE-B) on the Canadarm2 robotic arm. An issue preventing the LEE from transitioning to an operational state on one of two redundant sets of communications strings was detected. The spacewalking crew demated and …