Space Station Live: Delivering Drugs in Tiny Balloons

Space Station Live commentator Pat Ryan interviews Dr. Dennis Morrison from NuVue Therapeutics, Inc. Morrison is the principal investigator of MEPS (Microencapsulation Electrostatic Processing System).

This experiment sought to deliver drugs stored in tiny balloons, called microcapsules, directly in to tumors or resistant infections. Research on the ground produced positive results and the technology was awarded patents.

Research using MEPS was conducted aboard the International Space Station during Expedition 5. The microgravity environment provided easier control of the production process of the drugs stored in the microcapsule.
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Skylab 4 Pilot William Pogue Dies

Pogue relaxes on the running board of the transfer van during a visit to the Skylab 4/Saturn 1B space vehicle at Pad B, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Skylab 4 was the third and final manned visit to the Skylab orbital workshop, launched Nov. 16, 1973, and concluded Feb. 8, 1974. At 84 days, 1 hour and 15 minutes, Skylab 4 was the longest manned space flight to that date.
Pogue was accompanied on the record setting 34.5-million-mile flight by Commander Gerald P. Carr and science-pilot Dr. Edward G. Gibson. They conducted dozens of experiments and science demonstrations during their 1,214 orbits of Earth, including extensive observations of the home planet as well as the sun's solar processes. Pogue logged 13 hours and 31 minutes in two spacewalks outside the orbital workshop.
Pogue described the excitement of launch in a 2000 interview as part of Johnson Space Center's Oral History project.
"I didn’t think we were going to launch. You know, we’d had so many problems. I was sitting there, and finally when we were at thirty seconds, I thought, well, maybe. It's a lot of noise."
Pogue said he thought he was "pretty cool" on liftoff, but a NASA doctor later told him his pulse jumped from 50 to 120. "It was pretty exciting," he said.
Pogue was born Jan. 23, 1930, in Okemah, Okla. After graduating from Oklahoma Baptist University in 1951, Pogue enlisted in the Air Force, where he went on to fly combat missions in Korea. From 1955 to 1957, he was a member of the USAF Thunderbirds, the Air Force's elite flying team.  Pogue eventually logged over 7,200 hours flying time in more than 50 types of aircraft, including more than 2,000 hours logged in space flight.
Pogue earned a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from Oklahoma State University in 1960 and served in the mathematics department as an assistant professor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from 1960 to 1963. In 1965, after a two-year tour as test pilot with the British Ministry of Aviation, Pogue became an instructor at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
Pogue was one of 19 Astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966. He served as a member of the astronaut support crews for the Apollo 7, 11, and 14 missions before being assigned to his Skylab flight.
Pogue was awarded NASA's Distinguished Service Medal in 1974, and won many other awards in his career, including the Air Medal, Air Force Commendation Medal, Robert J. Collier Trophy (1974) and Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy (1975).
He retired from the Air Force in 1975, and he left NASA in 1977.  Pogue later worked as an independent technical contractor for several aerospace and energy firms. From 1984 to 1998 he provided contract technical support to the Boeing Company for the Space Station Freedom program which later  evolved into the International Space Station project.

Space Station Sensor to Capture 'Striking' Lightning Data

Keeping a spare on hand simply makes sense. Just as drivers keep spare tires on hand to replace a flat or blowout, NASA routinely maintains “spares,” too. These flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair. When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.
Researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe. Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts. It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.
The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare -- and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well. The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016. Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload. STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoD's STP.
NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratory’s high inclination. This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to "look" farther towards Earth's poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite. Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks. LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.
"Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning -- what we call total lightning -- during both day and night," said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall. "As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics.”
LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency -- and it does this without land-ocean bias.
The sensor consists of an optical imager enhanced to locate and detect lightning from thunderstorms within its 400-by-400-mile field-of-view on the Earth's surface. The station travels more than 17,000 mph as it orbits our planet, allowing the LIS to observe a point on the Earth, or a cloud, for almost 90 seconds as it passes overhead. Despite this brief viewing duration, it is long enough to estimate the lightning-flashing rate of most storms.
Since more than 70 percent of lightning occurs during the day, daytime detection drove the technical design of the LIS. From space, lightning appears like a pool of light on the top of a thundercloud. During the day, sunlight reflected from the cloud tops completely masks the lightning signal, making it difficult to detect. However, LIS creates a solution by applying special techniques that take advantage of the differences in the behavior and physical characteristics of lightning and sunlight signals. These allow LIS to extract the strikes from bright background illumination.
As a final step in processing, a real-time event processor inside the LIS electronics unit removes the remaining background signal, enabling the system to detect the lightning signatures and achieve 90-percent detection efficiency.
Once the sensor is installed on the space station, the LIS team will operate it remotely. They will then assess the data it produces and disseminate it to forecasters and researchers from the Global Hydrology Resource Center, one of NASA’s Earth science data centers.
This instrument also can help our lives on Earth in many ways. The LIS science team has received strong endorsements from several national and international government agencies and university science organizations. These include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R- Series Program (GOES-R). Operational users, such as NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS), Aviation Weather Center (AWC), Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) and Pacific Region will be interested in the data for their operational weather warning, forecasting and even validation applications. For other users, their science and application investigations will be improved and will benefit from the new lightning observations provided by LIS.
From a research standpoint, LIS data could be very useful to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Randy Bass, a member of the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Team, said the information obtained could help them with validation activities of several oceanic convection ensemble model products they're developing, either in real-time or archive mode.
"It could also be used for validation of detection of convection from other ground- and space-based sensors we will be using at the time," said Bass. "Any data we can use for 'ground truth' over oceanic areas will be extremely helpful in development of better observing and forecasting products used for offshore aviation, especially as we expand our coverage throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans."
The end result would be better short-term forecasts of thunderstorms over offshore areas, giving pilots and air traffic controllers a better ability to reroute planes around hazards such as turbulence and lightning strikes. Bass said that while pilots have weather radar aboard, they can only see limited areas ahead of them. The FAA wants to improve their capability and give controllers the opportunity to see the weather activity too, which they don't have right now.
As lightning flashes above our heads, there's a lot to be learned about this electrical phenomena -- and the LIS team aims to find the answers to a lot of those questions.
"Measuring lightning is important for knowledge about the weather and also operationally important for aviation safety. By adding an instrument on space station, we can add observations from higher latitudes covering the 48 contiguous states,” said International Space Station Chief Scientist Julie Robinson, Ph.D. “This is a prime example of science on the International Space Station benefiting our nation.”

Space Station Live: Smart SPHERES

NASA Public Affairs Officer Brandi Dean talks with Chris Provencher, project manager for Smart SPHERES at NASA Ames Research Center. By connecting smartphones to a trio of free-flying robots known as Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, these International Space Station robots become Smart SPHERES.

Space Station Live: Treating Huntington's Disease in Space

Space Station Live commentator Pat Ryan speaks to Huntington Disease Researcher and Caltech PH.D. Candidate, Gwen Owens. The microgravity environment gives researchers the ability to produce larger, more perfect versions of the Huntington's crystal protein than in Earth. Researchers then use X-ray Crystallography to view detailed 3-D structures of the protein and locate individual molecules and atoms in their quest to design drugs to treat the disease.

Gear specially designed for this research aboard the International Space Station is due for launch March 16 aboard a Falcon rocket for the SpaceX 3 mission. The proteins grown during the experiment will then be returned aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule for study on Earth.

It’s a March of the CubeSats as Space Station Deployment Continues

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a CubeSat! With so many small, relatively inexpensive satellites deploying lately from the International Space Station, it may seem like the area referred to as low-Earth orbit, between 100 and 1,240 miles above the planet, is full of these compact cubes. The miniature satellites, or CubeSats, conduct research and demonstration missions.
In the span of several weeks, 33 new CubeSats deployed from the space station. The NanoRacks Smallsat Deployment Program provides commercial access to space, via the space station, for CubeSats to perform Earth and deep space observation. The 28 Dove satellites that make up Planet Labs Flock 1 constellation began deploying in early February. Additional NanoRacks CubeSats released this week. These various CubeSats are conducting Earth observation missions, testing technologies and even tweeting from space!
“It’s exciting,” said NanoRacks CEO Jeffrey Manber. “Our company has been working with NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to open the door for commercial pathways to space. This is a really wonderful time for getting into the commercial utilization of space.”
Commercial opportunities for CubeSats and other research on and off the space station exist through a public-private partnership enabled by Congress in which the U.S. portion of the space station was designated a national laboratory. This laboratory, managed by CASIS, provides funding avenues for companies like NanoRacks to open up research and exploration in space for many more users.
One benefit of deploying CubeSats from the space station compared with a rocket is increased opportunity for launch thanks to consistent visits from various cargo resupply vehicles. Further, the launch condition of space station cargo vehicles is not as severe as other rocket launches, since the CubeSats are often launched as part of pressurized cargo. Another benefit is that after these CubeSats have launched to space, astronauts aboard the orbiting outpost can perform quality checks on the hardware to ensure the miniature satellites are not damaged before deploying into space.
“This is the beginning of a new era in space commerce,” said Manber. “We’re helping our customers get a two-year head start in space. They don’t have to wait around for a dedicated launch to space but can instead catch the next rocket to space station.”
One of the new CubeSats deploying through the NanoRacks program is SkyCube, developed by Southern Stars Group LLC of San Francisco. The primary goal of SkyCube is to “provide cutting edge outreach and use communications channels that the public use every day,” explained Tim DeBenedictis, founder and owner of Southern Stars.
SkyCube is the first CubeSat to use a smartphone application to interact directly with the public. Southern Stars used its expertise in creating planetarium software to develop an inexpensive, accessible and easy but fun phone interface to communicate with SkyCube. The smartphone application, Satellite Safari, will be used to track SkyCube, provide updates on its mission and tweet messages from the public. A Twitter handle will communicate exactly what the satellite is broadcasting from space once it is on orbit.
“We also want to send a positive message to end our mission cleanly,” said DeBenedictis. To that end, SkyCube will be the first CubeSat to de-orbit itself using a balloon. The de-orbit of SkyCube will occur 90 days into its mission, when the seven-foot diameter balloon will inflate. Because of its size, it will be possible to see it with the naked-eye. Satellite Safari will help direct people where to look in the sky, with the goal of creating an unforgettable moment to inspire children and adults alike to become interested in space and the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.  
Another CubeSat, ArduSat-2, built and operated by NanoSatisfi of San Francisco, is an improvement upon software and hardware on ArduSat-1, which deployed from the space station in November 2013. ArduSat-2 also will use a NanoRacks deployer to send it off on its mission to test advanced electronics and hardware in the space environment that are only minimally adapted from their Earth configuration. This will help determine potential commercial applications for small satellite data collection and commercial, off-the-shelf electronics. A goal of the ArduSat-2 mission is to contribute to technological information that helps lower the cost of space applications that use low-Earth observation techniques.
Both ArduSat-2 and SkyCube used crowdsourcing methods for funding to have direct public involvement in their small satellite missions. “It is the perfect way to test public response,” said Peter Platzer, founder and CEO of NanoSatisfi. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are blown away by the interest in our ArduSat satellites.”
As ArduSat-2 tests technology to lower the cost of access to space, NanoSatisfi also seeks to continue small satellite missions that capture the imagination of students to advance educational space programs and promote student interest in STEM.
LituanicaSAT-1 and LitSat-1 are two Lithuanian satellites scheduled for release this month using NanoRacks’ deployers. LituanicaSAT-1 is the first Lithuanian satellite mission to transmit a Lithuanian message from space. LituanicaSAT-1 also will conduct technology experiments such as FM voice repeater operation, taking pictures of Earth and testing various controllers and sensors in microgravity. The data collected by the small satellite will be used to asses satellite health, attitude, operational modes and verify environmental and dynamic simulations used during the design phase. The downlinked data will be open for public use.
“We want to involve the whole nation,” said Chief Engineer Laurynas Maciulis. “The first Lithuanian message to be transmitted from space will be a salutation from the Lithuanian president to all Lithuanians around the world.” A YouTube channel, a Facebook site, media outreach and school visits will help connect Lithuanian citizens, both in their country and abroad, to the historic LituanicaSat-1 event.
LitSat-1 is a technology demonstration to determine satellite attitude by measuring data from sensors and receivers on the satellite. The CubeSat is testing technology for a future Lithuanian satellite mission.
The NanoRacks deployers will also jettison a Peruvian satellite this month, controlled primarily by students at the Alas Peruanas University in Lima, Peru. UAPSAT-1 tests the function of electronic design communication and the implementation of the technology used in manufacturing the satellite. This satellite will study the impact of weather-related phenomena on Earth’s surface.
NanoRacks is fully booked with CubeSats on the next Cygnus spacecraft resupply mission from Orbital Sciences Corporation, currently scheduled for May 1. Through collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for use of its Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) and robotic arm that positions CubeSats for release, a permanent platform exists for commercial small satellite deployment from the space station. The companies and educational institutions that take advantage of this new access to space continue to improve space technology and inspire new generations in space exploration. 

NASA Congratulates 'Gravity' on Academy Award Wins

NASA congratulates everyone involved with producing the movie "Gravity" for all of the Oscar wins, especially Alfonso Cuarón for winning "Best Director" at the 86th Academy Awards Ceremony held on March 2, 2014.Aboard the International Space Station, NASA Astronauts Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio and JAXA Astronaut Koichi Wakata congratulate the filmmakers and actors of the Academy Award-winning film "Gravity" on their achievement.
NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino congratulates the filmmakers and actors of the Academy Award-winning film "Gravity" on their achievement.
NASA Astronaut Cady Coleman congratulates the cast and crew of the Academy Award-winning film "Gravity" on their achievement. Coleman lived aboard the International Space Station during Expedition 27, while "Gravity" was being filmed, and spoke with the film's star, Sandra Bullock, from space.
In the Warner Bros. movie "Gravity," two astronauts find themselves adrift in space and struggling for survival after their spacecraft is destroyed by space debris. Although this scenario makes for gripping Hollywood entertainment, NASA actively works to protect its astronauts and vehicles from the dangers portrayed in the movie.
From protective material coating the outside of the International Space Station to meticulous and methodical training on the ground and in space covering everything from spacewalking to fires or decompression inside the space station, NASA's ground crews and astronauts are as prepared as they can be for potential anomaly, no matter how remote they may be.
On Sept. 16, Expedition 26 astronaut Cady Coleman spoke with actress Sandra Bullock to discuss Bullock’s character in the movie. While developing her role, Bullock gave Coleman a call while she was aboard the space station. At the time, the actress asked Coleman to elaborate on what it’s like living and moving about in microgravity. “I told her that I had long hair, and if you pulled a hair out and pushed it against something, you could move yourself across the space station,” said Coleman. “That’s how little force it takes."