by Steve Cole / WASHINGTON / Over the next six months this blog will take you on a globe-circling journey of exploration. You’ll travel alongside scientists who are pushing back the frontiers of what we know about how our planet works. With a collection of innovative instruments and intricately choreographed experiments adapted to the vagaries …
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image and ask you to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. However, this March we have a special challenge with a seasonal theme (at least in […]
NASA’s scientific balloon technicians marked another flight checklist item complete today after joining the base fitting of the Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) to the payload parachute. After making the connection, technicians worked to verify power and signal cables were aligned and properly connected. The team continues to work toward an April 1 launch date from …
Strata-1 Locker Preparation: On Saturday, Peake removed the EXPRESS Rack 8 locker from the Lab in preparation for the OA-6 Strata-1 installation. Strata-1 investigates the properties and behavior of regolith on small, airless bodies. Regolith is the impact-shattered “soil” found on asteroids, comets, the Moon, and other airless worlds, but it is different from soil …
The Expedition 47 crew is at full strength after the arrival of three new crew members Friday night. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin will be familiarizing themselves with station systems over the next few days and will be staying in space till September. All six crew members, including Commander …
Preparations continued throughout the weekend for NASA’s upcoming super pressure balloon flight. Technicians worked on the top and bottom fittings of the balloon, installing electrical systems and the inflation ports that pass helium into the balloon. The team’s next major milestone is the balloon payload hang test, essentially a full-up launch day rehearsal going through …
It took Gavin McMorrow a mere 30 minutes to solve our February puzzler. As he pointed out, the rectangular patterns were cleared forest areas in Argentina’s Salta province. (Learn more about the area in our February 27, 2016, Image of the Day). McMorrow even recognized this was an Operational Land Imager (OLI) image from Landsat […]
The Soyuz TMA-20M vehicle docked to the International Space Station’s Poisk module at 11:09 p.m. EDT approximately 250 miles above the Southern Pacific Ocean off the western coast of Peru. Aboard the space station, 47 Commander Tim Kopra of NASA and Flight Engineers Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency) and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko of …
A Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft carrying astronaut Jeff Williams of NASA and cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, is scheduled to dock to the International Space Station at 11:11 p.m. EDT. NASA Television coverage of the docking is now live: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ NASA TV will resume at 12:30 a.m. EDT to cover hatch opening between …
The Soyuz TMA-20M launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station at 5:26 p.m. EDT Friday (3:26 a.m. on March 19 in Baikonur). Jeff Williams of NASA and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin are now safely in orbit. NASA Television coverage of the launch continues: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ Below is a …
