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NASA Scheduled To Launch ISS-RapidScat on Saturday, September 20th

September 15, 2014 By Jason Leathers Leave a Comment

Fourth SpaceX cargo chore to the International Space Station (ISS) beneath NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services contract, hauling the ISS-RapidScat scatterometer instrument planned and constructed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is listed to launch Saturday, September 20th, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Certainly, in one-day modification commencing date was ready to lodge preparations of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and was synchronized with the station’s partners and managers.

The company’s Falcon 9 rocket will pick off at 11:16pm PDT September 19th (2:16am EDT September 20th) hauling its Dragon cargo spacecraft laden with more than 5,000 pounds (2, 270 kilograms) of scientific experiments and supplies.

In the meanwhile, NASA Television coverage of the commencing starts at 10:15pm PDT (1:15am EDT). But, if it is postponed for any reason, the next commence prospect is on Saturday, September 20th, at about 10:53pm PDT (Sunday, September 21st, at approximately 1:53am EDT).

The mission elected SpaceX CRS-4, is the 4th of 12 SpaceX flights NASA treated with the company to resupply the space station. Thus, it would be the 5th trip by a Dragon spacecraft to the orbiting laboratory. It has been said that the spacecraft’s carrying 2.5 tons of supplies, science experiments, and technology demonstrations comprise of critical materials to hold up 255 science and research investigations that will happen during the station’s Expeditions 40 and 41.

Science freights comprise of the ISS-Rapid Scatterometer to scrutinize ocean surface, wind speed and direction. Novel biomedical hardware, which will lend a hand protracted biological studies of rodents in microgravity along with the study of a small flowering plant associated to cabbage that enables scientists to learn plant growth and adaptations in space.

New technology demonstrations on board, the Dragon spacecraft comprise of Special Purpose Inexpensive Satellite, or SpinSat in order to check how a small satellite moves and positions itself in space by means of new thruster technology and the 3-D Printing In Zero-G Technology Demonstration, the first 3-D printer in space.

It has been reported that the NASA will host a series of prelaunch news conferences Thursday, September 18th, and Friday, September 19th, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will be on-aired live on NASA TV and the agency’s website.

Scientists and researchers will talk about various science and research studies, including RapidScat, 3-D printing in Zero-G, and technology to gauge bone density, and model organism research using rodents, fruit flies and plants, in panel discussions September 18th at 6:00am, 7:00am and 8:00am PDT (9:00am, 10:00am and 11:00am EDT).

Though, NASA senior leaders will host a conference September 19th at 6:00am PDT (9:00am EDT), pursued by a prelaunch news conference at 7:00am PDT (10:00am EDT), going to held at agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The entire briefings are subjected to a change in time, will be on-aired live on NASA TV and the agency’s website. A post-launch conference will be held just about 90 minutes after inauguration.

NASA TV will provide live coverage Monday, September 22nd, of the arrival of the Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station, if inauguration happens on September 20th. Grapple and berthing coverage will start at 2:30am PDT (5:30am EDT) with grapple at about 4:30am PDT (7:30am EDT). Berthing coverage begins at 6:30am PDT (9:30am EDT).

The Dragon will stayed attached to the space station’s Harmony module for more than 4 weeks and then splatter down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California with nearly 2 tons of experiment samples and equipment returning from the station.

NASA Get a Hold on SLS: Largest Spacecraft Welding Tool

September 14, 2014 By Brian Galloway Leave a Comment

NASA publicizes the approval of the next generation rocket known as Space Launch System (SLS) about a year ago. This significant consent will permit the organization to move ahead with plans that diverge from formulation tests and more towards practical stages of constructing the rocket.

Recently NASA formally opened their Vertical Assembly Center at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, LA to begin working on the SLS. This is the largest spacecraft welding tool ever built.

This indicates that NASA continues to smash new ground both here and in space. Speaking of space, “The SLS Program continues to make significant process.” “The core stage and boosters have both completed critical design review, and NASA recently approved the SLS Program’s progression from formulation to development. This is a major milestone for the program and proof the first new design for SLS is mature enough for production,” says Todd May, SLS program manager.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden says that “This rocket is a game changer in terms of deep space exploration and will launch NASA astronauts to investigate asteroids and explore the surface of Mars while opening new possibilities for science missions, as well,”
This manufacturing plant holds welding equipment that stands 170 feet tall and 78 feet across. Indeed, they need to construct the rocket first, and that’s where the Vertical Assembly Center comes in to play. The SLS will stand at least 200 feet tall with a diameter of 27.6 feet across. The first rocket will be a 70-metric-ton version of the plan but will have the ability of lifting and carrying 130 metric tons of cargo into space. The rocket itself will be even bigger than the toolkit. It will take at least three years to complete and cost more than 7 billion dollars.

Mars Rover Snooping Lastly Turn Up at Mt. Sharp

September 14, 2014 By Germaine Hicks 1 Comment

NASA’s inquisitiveness rover has lastly reached at its pledged land: the base of Mt. Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound in the middle of Gale Crater, after wandering in the Martian desert for about 25 months.

The onset marks the start of the Mars Science Laboratory rover’s original mission: to read the mountain’s clay-rich lower layers like pages in a history book, pages that could expose signs of life-affable environments on the Red Planet.

A project scientist and Caltech geologist John Grotzinger said, “We have finally arrived at the far frontier that we have sought for so long.”
Receiving to Mt. Sharp has been a long-time pending. Certainly, the trip was delayed in part by a diversion the rover took to seem at a hopeful spot named Yellowknife Bay. Although it charge the team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on half a year, the venture paid off; rocks drilled there exposed a smorgasbord of chemical elements that would have been appropriate for microbial life, if it ever survived.

Grotzinger stated, Now that the scientists know livable environments did survive on the Red Planet, part of the next step will be seeking those fastidious environments that have a most probability of protecting organic molecules.

The rover is finishing in on a spot called as Pahrump Hills, a projection that wasn’t on the real itinerary, a pleased result of the detour snooping took to keep away from sharp rocks that had been causing an shocking quantity of smash up on the rover’s thin wheels. However, this spot will now be the gateway to Mt. Sharp, and it possibly holds Curiosity’s foremost official drilling target. The rover would make it there in the next week or two, Grotzinger said.

Scientists are principally involved in an extension of rock named as the Murray Formation. It will cross en route to its actual stopping point, Murray Buttes. The Murray Formation could give an exceptional wealth of information about the history of habitable environments on Mars, Kathryn Stack, Curiosity rover mission scientist pointed. Nevertheless, the Yellowknife Bay formation where Curiosity found its first life-friendly spot was only 5-meters thick which represents possibly thousands to hundreds of thousands of years of sedimentary deposits. In contrast, The Murray Formation is 200 meters thick.

Stack stated, “We potentially have millions to tens of millions of years of Martian history just waiting for us to explore.”

The hard part would be to decide how much time to allocate to Pahrump Hills, Murray Buttes and the next interesting unit up the slopes, called Hematite Ridge, scientists said. He was mainly interested in the silicon in the upcoming rocks as the element’s distribution can often signal the movement of water, Grotzinger said.

The mission officials also reacted to disapproval from a NASA Planetary Senior Review panel report out this summer. According to the report, the plan to explore Mt. Sharp did not make good use of the rover’s instruments, calling it “a poor science return for such a large investment in a flagship mission.”

Earth Hit By Twin Solar Storms, Effects Expected This Weekend

September 12, 2014 By Jason Leathers 1 Comment

It has been predicted by the scientists that in the upcoming days the two huge explosions on the surface of the sun will cause a moderate to burly geomagnetic storm on Earth, perhaps upsetting radio and satellite communications.

During late Friday and early Saturday, the odd storm is not expected to cause chaos with personal electronics but may cause colorful nighttime auroras, or displays of the Northern Lights.

According to the views of Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “We don’t expect any unmanageable impacts to national infrastructure from these solar events at this time but we are watching these events closely”. He further told that, “More pleasantly, we do expect these storm levels to cause significant auroras displays across much of the northern US on Friday night”.

The scientists claims that the storm begin with a slight solar blaze on Monday, followed by a major X-class blaze, the strongest classification on Wednesday at around 1745 GMT (1000 AEST).

Both flare-ups arrive from the same sunspot next to the centre of the solar disk, and both created momentous coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, of magnetized plasma shifted toward Earth.

Berger said if we see it on a one to five scale, the resulting geomagnetic storm should be “moderate to strong,” ranking a G2 or G3. He further reported that, “It is fairly rare for two CMEs of this magnitude to come in close succession like this”.

“Because of this we cannot rule out higher storm levels perhaps as high as G4 or severe geomagnetic storming, particularly in the Polar Regions.”

In order to get control over the expected situation, The National Weather Service has alarmed power grid operators and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The scientists had compared the strength of the storm pales to major geomagnetic storms of years past, like the 1859 Carrington event that eventually drained out power across a swath of Canada. This storm seem to be weaker than a near-miss geomagnetic storm in July 2012 that NASA scientists said could have knocked Earth’s technology back at least 150 years. That storm didn’t cause huge smash up as the fast-moving energized particles were not heading straight towards Earth.

William Murtagh, program coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Centre said, “The events that just occurred over the last 24 hours were Earth-directed, they are just not that big”.

“If we had a very big storm and this is not it that produced big problems with the power grid that would be our biggest concern.”

Experts told the reporters that, there is no radiation caused by these flares presently enough to raise the concern for astronauts at the International Space Station. Although given the nature of CMEs with their internal magnetic fields, scientists are not yet sure accurately what will happen when they bounce off the Earth’s protective shield.

Murtagh explained, “The sun just shot out a magnet that is going to interact with another magnet, the Earth’s magnetic field and how they pair together is going to be critical in determining how intense the geomagnetic storm is going to be”.

Solar Flare Geomagnetic Strength Increased by Twice: NASA

September 11, 2014 By Germaine Hicks 8 Comments

NASA’s recent reports alerted that Earth’s magnetic field will face a double-blow from a pair of CMEs on Sept. 12th. Previously, the two storm clouds were propelled in our direction by explosions in the magnetic canopy of sunspot AR2158, which also fired off another intense solar flare on 9th and 10. These two flare outburst process was captured on camera by NASA. Huge geomagnetic tornados are expected on Sept. 12th and 13th as an outcome of the above repeated impacts.

Solar flares are exploding of high-energy radiation. Huge ones are frequently convoyed by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which send clouds of superheated solar plasma streaking through space at millions of miles per hour. These incoming two CMEs that will strike Earth can produce powerful geomagnetic storms, which can cause short-term interruption in radio communications, GPS navigation, and power grids.

The AR2158 burst of Sept 10th reasoned a radio blackout on Earth and it was also liable for a minor-intensity eruption. Strangely, it also caused an explosion of radio noise. Radio astronomers and hams in the Americas and across the Pacific Ocean listened heavy roaring from the amplifiers of their shortwave receivers. An astronomic scientist stated that “It was extremely horrified,” reports, who mailed this 3-minute evidence recording from his amateur radio observatory in country New Mexico.

Even Ar2158 not stricken straightly at Earth, but that predecessor would produce a partial clearing in the interplanetary medium that would permit two CMEs blasts to reach us on Sept. 12th that is why Sky watchers, even those at mid-latitudes, should be aware of these CMEs.

The intensive radio emissions from shock waves at the leading edge of the CME show that the cloud tore through the sun’s atmosphere at speeds as high as 3,750 km/s. By the time it’s gone from the sun’s atmosphere, though, the cloud had a record speed of 1,400 km/s, this higher speed creates it a quite typical CME instead of a “super CME”.

Even reduce in speed; this CME has the possibility to cause major geomagnetic movement when it will arrive at the Earth’s magnetic field during the mid-to-late hours of Sept. 12th. NASA analysts presumed that an approximately-80% possibility of geomagnetic tornados on Sept. 12-13.

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