Station Crew Preps for Spacesuit Troubleshooting, Cargo Ship Departure

The International Space Station’s Expedition 36 crew spent Friday immersed in robotics and research, and prepared for this weekend’s troubleshooting of a faulty spacesuit that resulted in an abbreviated spacewalk in July. Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano began their day with an array of medical tests and checkups, including ultrasound exams of their eyes. Later the two flight engineers participated in blood pressure measurements and cardiac scans for the Ocular Health study.  Vision changes have been observed in some astronauts returning from long-duration spaceflight, and researchers are seeking to learn more about its root causes and develop countermeasures to mitigate the risk.
Meanwhile, Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy interacted with an experiment known as the eValuatIon And monitoring of microBiofiLms insidE the ISS, or VIABLE, as he touched and breathed on sample bags. The VIABLE study involves the evaluation of microbial biofilm development on space materials.
Afterward, Cassidy and Nyberg reviewed procedures for this weekend’s troubleshooting of the spacesuit Parmitano wore during a July 16 spacewalk that was cut short when his helmet began to fill with water.  The crew will replace a water relief valve inside the suit, power up the empty suit as if it were going out on a spacewalk and see if the water leak persists. They will also replace a gas trap in the suit. Cassidy and Parmitano were able to recreate the leak during suit testing Tuesday, giving NASA managers key insight for developing the plan for this weekend.
› Video: Station Crew Recreates Spacesuit Leak
The suspect parts will be returned to Earth aboard the Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft when Cassidy, Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin undock from the station on Sept. 10.
To prepare for their departure, Vinogradov, Misurkin and Cassidy performed leak checks on the Sokol launch and entry suits they will wear during the journey home after five and a half months aboard the orbiting complex.
 › View NASA TV schedule of Soyuz landing events
 With its mission to deliver more than three tons of supplies and spare parts completed, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s H-II Transfer Vehicle-4 (HTV-4) is being prepared for its Sept. 4 departure from the complex.  In concert with the robotics team at Mission Control Houston, Cassidy and Parmitano helped guide the station’s 57-foot robotic arm, Canadarm2, as it returned HTV-4’s Exposed Pallet and an attached Department of Defense payload back into the unpressurized section of the Japanese cargo ship. Earlier on Friday, the Exposed Pallet, which originally housed critical spare parts and the Space Test Payload-4 when it arrived to the station inside HTV-4, was removed from the exposed facility at the front end of the Kibo module by the Japanese experiment module’s robotic arm and Canadarm2.
With the pallet now securely stowed, the robotics team was given a “go” to attach Canadarm2 to a grapple fixture on HTV-4 in preparation for the robotic unberthing of the cargo craft from the Earth-facing port of the Harmony node on Wednesday. NASA TV will provide coverage of HTV-4’s departure, including its planned noon EDT release from Canadarm2, beginning at 11 a.m. Wednesday as part of the regularly scheduled Space Station Live program.  The unpiloted Japanese space freighter will be commanded to de-orbit on Sept. 7 for a destructive re-entry over the south Pacific Ocean.
 The departure of HTV-4 will clear the way for the arrival of the Orbital Sciences Cygnus resupply ship on its first demonstration flight to the station.  Following its launch from the Wallops Flight Facility, Va. on Sept. 17, the U.S. commercial cargo craft will be robotically grappled and berthed to the station on Sept. 22 for a month-long stay at the station.
› Read more about Cygnus
Nyberg rounded out her workday aboard the station with the start of the Asian Seed experiment, preparing and watering containers of azuki bean seeds. Students in Asia will participate in this educational experiment to learn about the importance of space biology as they compare plant growth in space to those grown on Earth.
On the Russian side of the complex, Misurkin collected data from the Matryoshka experiment. Named after the traditional Russian nesting dolls, Matryoshka analyzes the radiation environment onboard the station.
Meanwhile, Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin replaced dust collector filters inside the Zarya module, which was the first section of the space station launched back in November 1998. He also performed routine maintenance on life-support systems inside the Zvezda service module.

NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon under Greenland Ice Sheet

Data from a NASA airborne science mission reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.
The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is at least 460 miles (750 kilometers) long, making it longer than the Grand Canyon. In some places, it is as deep as 2,600 feet (800 meters), on scale with segments of the Grand Canyon. This immense feature is thought to predate the ice sheet that has covered Greenland for the last few million years.
"One might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped," said Jonathan Bamber, professor of physical geography at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and lead author of the study. "Our research shows there's still a lot left to discover."
Bamber's team published its findings Thursday in the journal Science.
The scientists used thousands of miles of airborne radar data, collected by NASA and researchers from the United Kingdom and Germany over several decades, to piece together the landscape lying beneath the Greenland ice sheet.
A large portion of this data was collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice. One of IceBridge's scientific instruments, the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, can see through vast layers of ice to measure its thickness and the shape of bedrock below.
In their analysis of the radar data, the team discovered a continuous bedrock canyon that extends from almost the center of the island and ends beneath the Petermann Glacier fjord in northern Greenland.
At certain frequencies, radio waves can travel through the ice and bounce off the bedrock underneath. The amount of times the radio waves took to bounce back helped researchers determine the depth of the canyon. The longer it took, the deeper the bedrock feature.
"Two things helped lead to this discovery," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was the enormous amount of data collected by IceBridge and the work of combining it with other datasets into a Greenland-wide compilation of all existing data that makes this feature appear in front of our eyes."
The researchers believe the canyon plays an important role in transporting sub-glacial meltwater from the interior of Greenland to the edge of the ice sheet into the ocean. Evidence suggests that before the presence of the ice sheet, as much as 4 million years ago, water flowed in the canyon from the interior to the coast and was a major river system.
"It is quite remarkable that a channel the size of the Grand Canyon is discovered in the 21st century below the Greenland ice sheet," said Studinger. "It shows how little we still know about the bedrock below large continental ice sheets."
The IceBridge campaign will return to Greenland in March 2014 to continue collecting data on land and sea ice in the Arctic using a suite of instruments that includes ice-penetrating radar.

NuSTAR Delivers the X-Ray Goods

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is giving the wider astronomical community a first look at its unique X-ray images of the cosmos. The first batch of data from the black-hole hunting telescope is publicly available today, Aug. 29, via NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, or HEASARC.
"We are pleased to present the world with NuSTAR's first look at the sky in high-energy X-rays with a true focusing telescope," said Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
The images, taken from July to August 2012, shortly after the spacecraft launched, comprise an assortment of extreme objects, including black holes near and far. The more distant black holes are some of the most luminous objects in the universe, radiating X-rays as they ferociously consume surrounding gas. One type of black hole in the new batch of data is a blazar, which is an active, supermassive black hole pointing a jet toward Earth. Systems known as X-ray binaries, in which a compact object such as a neutron star or black hole feeds off a stellar companion, are also in the mix, along with the remnants of stellar blasts called supernovas.
The data set only contains complete observations. Data will be released at a later date for those targets still being observed.
"Astronomers can use these data to better understand the capabilities of NuSTAR and design future observing proposals. The first opportunity will be this fall, for joint observations with XMM-Newton," said Karl Forster of Caltech, who is leading the effort to package the data for the public.
The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, like NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, complements NuSTAR. While XMM-Newton and Chandra see lower-energy X-ray light, NuSTAR is the first telescope capable of focusing high-energy X-ray light, allowing for more detailed images than were possible before.
Astronomers can compare data sets from different missions using HEASARC, which gives them a broader understanding of an object of interest. NuSTAR's high-energy observations help scientists bridge a gap that existed previously in X-ray astronomy, and will lead to new revelations about the bizarre and energetic side of our universe.
Other NASA missions with data available via HEASARC include Chandra, Fermi, Swift, Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and many more.
The HEASARC is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. HEASARC holdings include data obtained by NASA's high-energy astronomy missions observing in the extreme-ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray bands, as well as data from missions, balloons and ground-based facilities that have studied the relic cosmic microwave background. HEASARC is online at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov .
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/ .

Astronaut Candidate Survival Training

The countenance of astronaut candidate Christina M. Hammock signals her success at fire-starting, a technique that will help sustain her for three days in the wilderness. As the first phase of their extensive training program along the way to become full-fledged astronauts, eight new candidates spent three days in the wild participating in their wilderness survival training, near Rangeley, Maine.

Guy Bluford Remembered 30 Years Later

Years later, Bluford still recalls the rain-soaked, early Florida morning of Aug. 30, 1983, when a crowd of VIPs and other soggy well-wishers at the Kennedy Space Center awaited Space Shuttle Challenger's soar into history on STS-8.

"People came from all over to watch this launch because I was flying," said Bluford, recalling his thoughts while strapped in and awaiting Challenger's dramatic liftoff. "I imagined them, all standing out there at one o'clock in the morning with their umbrellas, all asking the same question, 'Why am I standing here?'"

 Bluford, one of three African-Americans in that 1978 barrier-breaking class of astronauts (former NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory and Challenger astronaut, the lateRon McNair, the others), believes he was selected for the history-making mission because of his complement of pilot and engineering experience.

"All of us knew that one of us would eventually step into that role...I probably told people that I would probably prefer not being in that role...because I figured being the No. 2 guy would probably be a lot more fun."

Regardless, Bluford says he had plenty of fun as he and his four crew members successfully completed their mission.

"The crew taped the intercom conversation," says Bluford of Challenger's liftoff, an experience they replayed upon their safe return to Earth. "There's somebody giggling and laughing all the way up. And we listened to it for quite a while to try and figure out who that was, only to come to the conclusion that it was me. I mean, I laughed and giggled all the way up. It was such a fun ride."

Bluford says it took him awhile to recognize the historical significance of his selection to be the first African-American in space. But when his pioneering role became apparent, Bluford says he embraced it.

"I wanted to set the standard, do the best job possible so that other people would be comfortable with African-Americans flying in space and African-Americans would be proud of being participants in the space program and… encourage others to do the same."

NASA Prepares for First Virginia Coast Launch to Moon

In an attempt to answer prevailing questions about our moon, NASA is making final preparations to launch a probe at 11:27 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 6, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.

The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. A thorough understanding of these characteristics of our nearest celestial neighbor will help researchers understand other bodies in the solar system, such as large asteroids, Mercury, and the moons of outer planets.

"The moon's tenuous atmosphere may be more common in the solar system than we thought," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "Further understanding of the moon's atmosphere may also help us better understand our diverse solar system and its evolution."

The mission has many firsts, including the first flight of the Minotaur V rocket, testing of a high-data-rate laser communication system, and the first launch beyond Earth orbit from the agency's Virginia Space Coast launch facility.

LADEE also is the first spacecraft designed, developed, built, integrated and tested at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The probe will launch on a U.S. Air Force Minotaur V rocket, an excess ballistic missile converted into a space launch vehicle and operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

LADEE was built using an Ames-developed Modular Common Spacecraft Bus architecture, a general purpose spacecraft design that allows NASA to develop, assemble and test multiple modules at the same time. The LADEE bus structure is made of a lightweight carbon composite with a mass of 547.2 pounds -- 844.4 pounds when fully fueled.

"This mission will put the common bus design to the test," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This same common bus can be used on future missions to explore other destinations, including voyages to orbit and land on the moon, low-Earth orbit, and near-Earth objects."

Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at Ames, said the innovative common bus concept brings NASA a step closer to multi-use designs and assembly line production and away from custom design. "The LADEE mission demonstrates how it is possible to build a first class spacecraft at a reduced cost while using a more efficient manufacturing and assembly process," Hine said.

Approximately one month after launch, LADEE will begin its 40-day commissioning phase, the first 30 days of which the spacecraft will be performing activities high above the moon's surface. These activities include testing a high-data-rate laser communication system that will enable higher rates of satellite communications similar in capability to high-speed fiber optic networks on Earth.

After commissioning, LADEE will begin a 100-day science phase to collect data using three instruments to determine the composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and remotely sense lofted dust, measure variations in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and collect and analyze samples of any lunar dust particles in the atmosphere. Using this set of instruments, scientists hope to address a long-standing question: Was lunar dust, electrically charged by sunlight, responsible for the pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon detected during several Apollo missions?

After launch, Ames will serve as a base for mission operations and real-time control of the probe. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will catalogue and distribute data to a science team located across the country.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington funds the LADEE mission. Ames manages the overall mission. Goddard manages the science instruments and technology demonstration payload, the science operations center and provides overall mission support. Wallops is responsible for launch vehicle integration, launch services and operations. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages LADEE within the Lunar Quest Program Office.

For more information about the LADEE mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ladee