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Girl Astronaut Loses Posh Bag Worth 100,000

Chalk up another $100,000 lost to government screw-up, this time it was a very expensive tool bag lost in space by U.S. Astronaut (apprentice) Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper.

This video shows the actual space bag itself and your tax dollars “floating away”

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First, a grease gun inside her tool bag leaked, coating everything inside with a film of lubricant.

While she was trying to clean it up in the absence of gravity, the whole bag floated away.

Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve Bowen were outside the space station on the scheduled six-hour spacewalk, the first of the space shuttle Endeavour’s stay at the station.

After completing a few preliminary tasks, Stefanyshyn-Piper was beginning the job of cleaning and lubricating the gears of the station’s malfunctioning starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, or SARJ, when she discovered the grease gun leak and then lost the bag.

The starboard SARJ is designed to allow the solar panels on the left side of the station to rotate and track the sun.

It started malfunctioning soon after it was installed, and astronauts soon determined the gear assembly is full of metal shavings, a sure sign that metal is grinding on metal.

Cleaning and lubricating the starboard SARJ is a time-consuming job, and will take several spacewalks to complete.

When finished, the joint should be partially functional again. More extensive repairs are planned for the future.

Stefanyshyn-Piper was able to share tools with Bowen, and NASA mission controllers expressed confidence that the lost tool bag would not be too much of a problem for the duration of the spacewalk.

Mission controllers were also tracking the lost bag, which they say is floating well clear of the station and drifting further away.

As the action unfolded outside, the astronauts inside the shuttle-station complex started unloading gear from a huge trunk that was brought up by Endeavour, The Associated Press reported.

The big-ticket item — and one of the first things to be hooked up — is a recycling system that will convert astronauts’ urine and sweat into drinking water, AP reported.

It is essential if NASA is to double the size of the space station crew to six next June.

Endeavour also delivered an extra bathroom, kitchenette, two bedrooms, an exercise machine and refrigerator that will allow space station residents to enjoy cold drinks for the first time, AP reported.

The additions — coming exactly 10 years after the first space station piece was launched — will transform the place into a two-bath, two-kitchen, five-bedroom home.

Tags: astronaut, bag lost in space, Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, nasa, space bag, space tool bag, space walk

Space Toilet Needs Repair Again

The master bathroom for three astronauts aboard the international space station is on the fritz again, just days before a trio of new spacefliers are due to launch toward the orbiting lab, NASA officials said Friday.

A temporary telemetry glitch also sent the space station into a so-called survival mode earlier yesterday morning, changing the orbiting outpost’s attitude and leading to system power downs for several hours. That issue was quickly tracked to an electronics box aboard the station, but the balky space toilet in the Russian Zvezda service module continues to plague astronauts and flight controllers.
“It failed late yesterday,” NASA spokesperson John Ira Petty said of the Russian-built space commode in televised commentary from Mission Control in Houston. “Russian specialists are troubleshooting. The problem appears to be a [gas] separator issue.”
It’s a familiar problem for space station commander Sergei Volkov and flight engineers Oleg Kononenko and Greg Chamitoff. A similar glitch knocked the space toilet out of commission in June, leading Russian engineers to rush a spare gas-liquid separator assembly pump to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center spaceport in Florida, where it was packed aboard the shuttle Discovery and launched to the orbiting laboratory.

Volkov and Kononenko resuscitated the ailing space toilet in June during Discovery’s STS-124 mission, which also delivered the massive Japanese Kibo laboratory and ferried Chamitoff to join the Expedition 17 crew.

The space station’s Russian toilet uses fans and airflow in place of gravity to collect solid and liquid waste for disposal. The gas-liquid separator is part of the liquid waste system. It weighs about 35 pounds (16 kilograms) and is about 18 inches (half a meter) long and 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide and tall.

It is unclear whether there is a spare that could be added to Sunday’s planned Soyuz TMA-13 launch, which will ferry space tourist Richard Garriott and two new station astronauts to the orbiting laboratory for a crew swap.

“In the meantime, the crew has been instructed to use the toilet in the Soyuz [TMA-12] spacecraft,” Petty said.

NASA has paid $19 million for a second Russian-built space toilet, which will be delivered alongside other life support, exercise equipment and sleeping quarters during a November shuttle mission. Having two working main toilets is vital for the space station, which is expected to double its crew size to six astronauts next year.

Meanwhile, Petty said flight engineers at Russian Mission Control and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston were still working at recovering systems from Friday’s telemetry glitch. While the malfunction was swiftly tracked to an electronics box, backing out of the power-down process is a lengthy affair, he added.

“The backout so far has been accomplished without any damage or long-term impacts to station systems,” Petty said.

The station’s new Expedition 18 crew is set to launch into space on Sunday at 3:01 a.m. ET (0701 GMT). NASA will broadcast the launch live via NASA TV. Click here for Space.com’s NASA TV feed and space station mission updates.

Tags: broken toilet, international space station, ISS, nasa, space station, space toilet

ISS Catches Worm

A computer virus intrusion aboard the ISS in july has prompted astronauts to updated their anti virus software on all the laptop computers aboard the station.
Kelly Humphries NASA representative for the Johnson space center in Houston said
Oleg Kononenko, a Russian cosmonaut, was busy updating the anti-virus protection software on the russian side of the International space station.

The process is really very much like the one folks on earth are familiar with, however the software itself is proprietary.
The relatively low risk virus, W32.Gammima.AG which is a worm and was designed to seek out passwords for online computer games, was first discovered aboard the station on July 25 after being detected by the station’s anti-virus screening software. Critical computer systems used for navigation, communication and life support were not infected, NASA technical staff were however very interested to find out exactly how the computer virus got to the station.
There are apparently more than 50 computers among all the ISS modules that is used within the space crafts network

Tags: anti-virus, computer virus, computer worm, ISS, space, worm, worms

Living Creatures in space

Outer space is a pretty rough place, death valley, step aside, space will trump you every time in every way.
You would summize that nothing “alive” could survive there for any length of time.
There’s the cold vacuum, of course, which can freeze-dry an unprotected astronaut. But there are other hazards, too, including the sun’s ultraviolet rays, unfiltered by atmosphere. Being exposed to them is no day at the beach — it’s far worse.

Too bad we all can’t be tardigrades, those tiny roly-poly invertebrates that live in lakes and oceans and among mosses and lichens. European researchers report that these creatures, commonly called water bears, can survive in space.

K. Ingemar Jonsson of Kristianstad University in Sweden and colleagues shipped two species of tardigrades aboard a 2007 European Space Agency mission that reached low-Earth orbit, about 160 miles up. Some of the water bears were exposed to the vacuum of space only, while others were exposed to vacuum and ultraviolet radiation.

As the researchers describe in Current Biology, the tardigrades survived vacuum-only conditions quite well. This is perhaps not surprising, since water bears are able to deal with extreme dehydration. In fact, the specimens used in the experiment were already thoroughly desiccated, and upon re-entry they were rehydrated and revived.

But even a few of the specimens exposed to the full spectrum and intensity of ultraviolet radiation — about 1,000 times as intense as that on Earth — survived. Thus the water bears join some lichens and bacteria as the only species known to be able to cope, unprotected, with both vacuum and solar radiation in space.

Tags: biology, science, space, water bear

Hubble to be Souped Up

It was not long ago, back in early 2006 that NASA decided to let Hubble ride it out and just die, but shortly thereafter there was an outcry from influential voices in the scientific community to get up there and service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Well, not only are they now (2 years later) going to service it, but, it is due for a very impressive upgrade.

NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts are finalizing plans to fly the space shuttle this fall on a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to repair and upgrade the orbiting observatory that revolutionized astronomy. The long-delayed servicing mission will be the last for the Hubble, NASA says, but it will allow the telescope to perform at its highest level ever for the remaining five or six years of its operating life.

“This will be the first time ever that instrument box is full,” said Hubble senior scientist David Leckrone last week. “We will have the most powerful imaging capability on Hubble ever, and possibly anywhere.”

It is hard to overstate the importance of the Hubble and its insights into the evolution of the universe, the presence of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, and the existence of hundreds (and probably many more) of planets orbiting distant stars.

In a briefing at the Goddard Space Flight Center, scientists said that observations by the telescope have resulted in an average of 12 published discoveries a week for years, and that almost 4,400 principal and co-investigators have produced articles based on its data.

“This is surely the most productive telescope in history,” said Charles Mattias “Matt” Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.

It also has the most remarkable history. The upcoming mission, scheduled for early October, will be the fifth to the Hubble, which orbits almost 350 miles above Earth. Launched with great fanfare in 1990 after long delays, the more than $3 billion instrument (funded by NASA but with contributions from the European Space Agency) initially did not work because of a hugely embarrassing mistake in shaping its 2.4-meter mirror.

But the Hubble’s developers and managers went from goats to heroes in 1993 when the first-ever repair mission in orbit succeeded in installing corrective optics that allowed the telescope to begin sending back spectacular and often awe-inspiring images. Subsequent space shuttle missions steadily upgraded the observatory and its capabilities, and the Hubble gradually achieved iconic status.

Time and the harsh environment of space take a constant toll, however, and NASA began planning one final upgrade — until the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia. Heightened safety concerns led NASA to cancel the mission, but a public outcry ensued.

Officials then proposed sending a robotic mission to repair the telescope, but several years of work led to a finding that it could not do the job. Finally, in 2006, newly appointed NASA Administrator Michael Griffin reversed the earlier decision and gave the go-ahead to the final repair mission.

This last servicing will also deliver two new instruments — the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (which will explore the cosmic web in extreme ultraviolet frequencies) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (which will allow the telescope to “see” across the light spectrum from ultraviolet to optical and infrared). Over the course of five strenuous spacewalks, astronauts will also work to repair cameras and equipment that have degraded or failed, including the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which produced many of the Hubble’s most dramatic images.

The two instruments — weighing a total of 11 tons — are now in a massive “clean room” at Goddard’s Greenbelt campus, where engineers and technicians are conducting final tests and preparing to ship them to the Kennedy Space Center to be loaded onto the space shuttle Atlantis.

Last Monday, the four astronauts who will do the repairs — including John Grunsfeld, who repaired the Hubble twice before, and Michael Massimino, who will be returning for his second mission — joined the Goddard staff in head-to-toe white protective suits and booties required for the clean room to examine the tools they will use to do their work in space.

At Goddard, the new instruments have been exposed to intense vibration, extreme cold and heat and crushingly loud noises to make sure they can withstand the launch and the rigors of space. With the shuttles scheduled to be retired in 2010 and the schedule of flights to the international space station already very tight, the $900 million mission will almost certainly be the last to the Hubble.

Assuming the mission goes off as planned, the first new Hubble data and images are expected by early next year. Edward J. Weiler, who was the Hubble’s first chief scientist and is now NASA’s associate administrator of the Science Missions Directorate, said experience has taught him to be humble about predicting what the Hubble or any other new telescope will find. The major discoveries, he said, are often the ones that overthrow earlier assumptions and understandings.

Having been connected with the Hubble from its conception in the late 1970s to its 1990 launch, from its time as a multi-billion-dollar white elephant and national joke to its later repair and triumph, Weiler sees the Hubble as the ultimate “comeback kid.”

“The telescope has given us spectacular science and images you can find hung up in art galleries, but I think Americans have such strong feelings about the Hubble because of its history,” he said. “Our team and the instrument itself overcame enormous obstacles, but then delivered something that I think shows the best of America. One hundred years from now, people will remember Hubble and still be writing about what it did.”

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Tags: astronomy, hubble, science, space, telescope