Crew Begins Week with Cargo Transfers, Redocking and Spacewalk Preps

Expedition 39 has opened the doors to the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft that arrived Sunday morning. The crew has begun unloading the nearly 2.5 tons of cargo including science hardware, a U.S. spacesuit, food and other supplies.
Read about the SpaceX-3 launch and docking.
NASA astronaut Steve Swanson opened the hatches to Dragon at 4:01 a.m. EDT Monday. He wore goggles and a mask, required by safety procedures, to protect him from dust potentially floating inside the commercial freighter.
Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio assisted Swanson with the hatch opening. He and Commander Koichi Wakata also assisted Swanson for the first day of cargo transfers. Cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev sampled the air inside Dragon before installing air ducts to the new SpaceX vehicle.
One critical experiment, T-Cell Activation in Aging, was quickly offloaded from Dragon by Mastracchio and immediately activated inside Europe’s Columbus laboratory module. That study observes the depression of the immune system and other changes seen in elderly citizens on Earth and astronauts living in microgravity.

The crew now turns its attention to a Progress undocking early Wednesday morning and a short spacewalk a few hours later.
The ISS Progress 53 will undock from the Zvezda service module at 4:58 a.m. EDT Wednesday so Russian mission controllers can test its upgraded Kurs automated rendezvous system. The Russian cargo craft will fly no further than 311 miles from the International Space Station for two days before it re-docks Friday morning to Zvezda.
Wednesday’s spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 9:20 a.m. EDT and last 2.5 hours. Swanson and Mastracchio will exit the Quest airlock to replace a failed backup computer on the station’s S0 Truss.

Also known as a Multiplexer/Demultiplexer (MDM), the backup MDM provides telemetry and commands to truss systems, solar alpha rotary joints and the Mobile Transporter rail car which rides along the truss structure.
Veteran station cosmonauts Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Tyurin started their morning on the ongoing Russian Bar experiment. That study researches tools and procedures to detect pressure leaks inside the space station.
 Afterward, Tyurin recharged a battery in the Seiner experiment’s photo spectral system to continue photography work for the Earth observation study. He also continued more work with the radiation exposure experiment Matroyshka.
 Skvortsov started up the Constanta experiment for before moving on to the Kulonovskiy Kristall study in the afternoon. He and Artemyev also worked to prepare the Progress 53 for its undocking.

SpaceX Dragon Heads to Space; Station Astronauts Prep for Wednesday Spacewalk

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon spacecraft loaded with nearly 2.5 tons of supplies and experiment hardware for the International Space Station’s Expedition 39 crew, lifted off at 3:25 p.m. EDT Friday from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Friday’s launch of the third SpaceX commercial resupply services mission sent the Dragon space freighter on a course to rendezvous with the station Sunday morning. Commander Koichi Wakata and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio will capture Dragon using the Canadarm2 robotic arm at 7:14 a.m. to set it up for its berthing to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module. Live NASA Television coverage of Sunday’s Dragon activities begins at 5:45 a.m. and returns at 9:30 a.m. for coverage of the berthing of Dragon to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony node.

The scientific payloads on Dragon include investigations that focus on efficient ways to grow plants in space, demonstrating laser optics to communicate with Earth, human immune system function in microgravity and Earth observation. Also being delivered is a set of high-tech legs for Robonaut 2, which can provide the humanoid robot torso already aboard the orbiting laboratory with the mobility it needs to help with regular and repetitive tasks inside the space station.
Dragon also will deliver the second set of investigations sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages the portion of the space station designated a U.S. National Laboratory. CASIS investigations on Dragon are part of the organization's initial suite of supported payloads linked to Advancing Research Knowledge 1, or ARK 1. The investigations include research on protein crystal growth, which may lead to drug development through protein mapping, and plant biology.

Meanwhile aboard the International Space Station, the Expedition 39 crew is in the homestretch of preparations for a spacewalk to replace a failed backup computer relay box in the S0 truss.  That 2 ½-hour spacewalk by Mastracchio and Flight Engineer Steve Swanson is slated to begin at 9:20 a.m. Wednesday.
The spacewalk will be the 179th in support of space station assembly and maintenance, the ninth in Mastracchio’s career and the fifth for Swanson. Mastracchio will carry the designation of EV 1, wearing the spacesuit bearing red stripes. Swanson will be EV 2, wearing the spacesuit without stripes.
 Mastracchio and Flight Engineer Steve Swanson installed a new circuit board inside a spare multiplexer-demultiplexer (MDM) that they will carry with them outside the station to replace the backup MDM that failed during routine testing April 11. The failed unit is one of the station's two external MDMs that provide commands to some of the space station's systems, including the external cooling system, solar alpha rotary joints and mobile transporter rail car.
After the two NASA astronauts installed the new card in the spare MDM, Wakata worked with the ground team at Mission Control in Houston to perform a functional checkout of the spare.
Afterward, Mastracchio trimmed a spare thermal insulator sheet to properly fit the MDM.
Wakata also found time for station science with another session of the Hybrid Training experiment. This Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency study takes a look the health benefits of applying electric stimulation to a muscle opposing the voluntary contraction of an active muscle. In addition to providing a backup to the traditional exercise devices aboard the station, Hybrid Training may be useful in keeping astronauts fit as they travel beyond low Earth orbit aboard smaller spacecraft.
Mastracchio took a brief break from his work to talk with students at his three alma maters -- the University of Connecticut, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and the University of Houston-Clear Lake near the Johnson Space Center.
Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin spent much of his day working in the Zvezda service module as he cleaned ventilation screens and performed routine maintenance on the Russian life-support system.
Flight Engineer Alexander Skvortsov performed another session of the Kulonovskiy Kristall experiment, gathering information about charged particles in a weightless environment.
Skvortsov also teamed up with Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev to unload items from the ISS Progress 53 cargo craft docked at the aft port of Zvezda.  Progress 53 is set to undock from the station on Wednesday, April 23, at 4:54 a.m. to test its Kurs automated rendezvous equipment. The vehicle will redock with Zvezda on April 25 at 8:16 a.m. Progress 53 delivered 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies to the station on Nov. 29 following a four-day journey that included a “flyby” of the station to test a new lighter, revamped Kurs system .
And after 11 days of free flight for engineering tests, the Russian ISS Progress 54 cargo ship, now loaded with trash from the station, was commanded to deorbit for its fiery entry into the Earth’s atmosphere for disposal.  The deorbit burn at 10:52 a.m. sent the cargo craft on a course for atmospheric entry over the Pacific Ocean at 11:32 a.m.

NASA's Kepler Discovers First Earth-Size Planet In The 'Habitable Zone' of Another Star

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.
While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.
"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."
Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.
"We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth," said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. "Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward."
Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
"M dwarfs are the most numerous stars," said Quintana. "The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf."
Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130-days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.
"Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has," said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. "Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth."
The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d, and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.
The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins -- Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star -- and measuring the their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA's first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.
Ames is responsible for Kepler's ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency's Science Mission Directorate.
The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach.  The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

Astronauts Prep for Spacewalk as Mission Managers Evaluate Busy Schedule

The astronauts of the International Space Station’s Expedition 39 crew focused Tuesday on preparations for a contingency spacewalk to be conducted in the next week or so. Meanwhile station program managers and SpaceX officials are working toward scheduling dates for the next launch attempt for Dragon cargo spacecraft and that contingency spacewalk, while managing all this around the planned undocking and redocking of a Russian cargo craft next week.
Monday's launch attempt of the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft, loaded with nearly 5,000 pounds of supplies and experiment hardware, was scrubbed due to a helium leak on the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage. The next launch opportunity would be Friday at 3:25 p.m. EDT if the issue can be resolved.
 Flight Engineers Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson, both NASA astronauts, spent their day preparing for the 2 ½-hour spacewalk they will conduct to replace a failed multiplexer demultiplexer (MDM) backup computer relay system in the S0 truss that assists in providing insight into truss systems, the operation of the external cooling loops, the operations of the Solar Alpha Rotary joints and the Mobile Transporter rail car.
 Swanson performed a full end-to-end checkout of his spacesuit with its new fan separator pump installed.  During the checkout, a cranky CO2 sensor was discovered and is now being investigated.
Mastracchio meanwhile gathered and configured the tools he and Swanson will use during the excursion.
Swanson and Mastracchio also participated in an on-board training session for the spacesuit “life jacket,” known as the Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue, or SAFER. Should a spacewalker become untethered during a spacewalk and begin floating away from the station, the small nitrogen-jet thrusters of SAFER would propel the astronaut back to safety.
The two NASA astronauts joined up with Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for an audio conference with ground team that is finalizing procedures for the spacewalk.
Wakata assisted with the spacewalk preparations Tuesday as he completed a flush of the water inside the cooling loops of the spacesuits and the airlock.
 The Japanese commander also found time for station science with another session of the Hybrid Training experiment. This Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency study takes a look the health benefits of applying electric stimulation to a muscle opposing the voluntary contraction of an active muscle. In addition to providing a backup to the traditional exercise devices aboard the station, Hybrid Training may be useful in keeping astronauts fit as they travel beyond low Earth orbit aboard smaller spacecraft.

Later, Wakata helped the ground team scout out locations aboard the station for the upcoming Petri Plants payload, which will use ambient light to sprout seedlings.
Wakata rounded out his day recharging batteries for the spacewalk.
On the Russian side of the complex, Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev performed another session of the Relaxation experiment, which studies chemical luminescent reactions in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin downloaded micro-accelerometer data from the Identification experiment to provide insight into the station’s dynamic loads. The veteran cosmonaut also participated in the Seiner ocean-observation study, documenting color blooms in the oceans’ waters for the fishing industry.
Flight Engineer Alexander Skvorstov continued unloading cargo from the ISS Progress 55 cargo ship, which delivered nearly three tons of cargo to the orbital laboratory when it launched and docked with the station’s Pirs docking compartment on April 9.
A second Russian cargo ship currently at the station, ISS Progress 53, is set to undock from the Zvezda service module on April 23 at 4:54 a.m. to test its Kurs automated rendezvous equipment. The vehicle will redock with Zvezda on April 25 at 8:16 a.m. Progress 53 delivered 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies to the station on Nov. 29 following a four-day journey that included a “flyby” of the station to test a new lighter, revamped Kurs system.

Station, SpaceX Officials to Proceed With Monday's Dragon Launch

International Space Station Program officials, the international partners and representatives of SpaceX agreed Sunday to proceed with Monday’s scheduled launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon cargo craft on the company’s third commercial resupply mission to the orbital laboratory.
After a series of meetings and reviews of procedures, flight controllers, engineers and managers concluded that the SpaceX-3 mission could be conducted as planned without violating any launch commit criteria despite the loss Friday of a backup computer command relay box called a multiplexer/demultiplexer (MDM) that resides in the station’s S0 truss. The problem with the box, which measures 10.5 x 14.9 x 16.4 inches and weighs 50.8 pounds, occurred during a routine health check of the device. The prime multiplexer continues to operate flawlessly with no impact to station operations. This pair of MDMs provide commanding to the station’s external cooling system, Solar Alpha Rotary joints, Mobile Transporter rail car and insight into other truss systems.
The engineering teams reported to mission managers that the station possesses enough redundancy to allow the SpaceX mission to launch Monday at 4:58 p.m. EDT from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. In advance of launch, the station’s Mobile Transporter will be moved to the proper position on the truss later today and after Dragon’s launch, the station’s solar arrays will be oriented Monday to the correct angles for the scheduled capture of the U.S. cargo craft on Wednesday and its berthing to the Earth-facing port on the Harmony module. These are steps that would properly configure the station for the mission even if the prime MDM experiences a problem.
Additionally, preparations are underway for a contingency spacewalk by two of the Expedition 39 crewmembers no earlier than around April 22 to replace the failed MDM with a spare housed inside the station. Mission managers approved a plan for the preparation of two of the U.S. spacesuits on the station and the replacement of a fan pump separator on one of the suits prior to the spacewalk. That work will begin immediately. The move of the Mobile Transporter rail car to another worksite from its current location will clear the area on the S0 truss for the spacewalking astronauts to gain access to the failed MDM during the planned 2 ½ hour excursion. The station crew will also be readying the spare MDM for its staging in the Quest airlock prior to the spacewalk.

Veggie Will Expand Fresh Food Production on Space Station

A plant growth chamber bound for the International Space Station inside the Dragon capsule on the SpaceX-3 resupply mission may help expand in-orbit food production capabilities in more ways than one, and offer astronauts something they don’t take for granted, fresh food.
NASA’s Veg-01 experiment will be used to study the in-orbit function and performance of a new expandable plant growth facility called Veggie and its plant “pillows.” The investigation will focus on the growth and development of “Outredgeous” lettuce seedlings in the spaceflight environment.
“Veggie will provide a new resource for U.S. astronauts and researchers as we begin to develop the capabilities of growing fresh produce and other large plants on the space station,” said Gioia Massa, NASA payload scientist for Veggie. “Determining food safety is one of our primary goals for this validation test.”
Veggie is a low-cost plant growth chamber that uses a flat-panel light bank that includes red, blue and green LEDs for plant growth and crew observation. Veggie’s unique design is collapsible for transport and storage and expandable up to a foot and a half as plants grow inside it.
“The internal growing area is 11.5 inches wide by 14.5 inches deep, making it the largest plant growth chamber for space to date,” Massa said.
Orbital Sciences Corp. (ORBITEC) in Madison, Wis., developed Veggie through a Small Business Innovative Research Program. NASA and ORBITEC engineers and collaborators at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida worked to get the unit’s hardware flight-certified for use on the space station.
Because real estate on the station is limited, some adjustments to the growth chamber were made to accommodate space requirements. At Kennedy’s Space Life Sciences Laboratory, a crop of lettuce and radishes was grown in the prototype test unit. Seedlings were placed in the Veggie root-mat pillows, and their growth was monitored for health, size, amount of water used, and the microorganisms that grew on them.
“I am thrilled to be a member of the Veggie and Veg-01 team and proud of all the work we have done to prepare for flight,” Massa said. “Our team is very excited to see the hardware in use on the space station.”
As NASA moves toward long-duration exploration missions, Massa hopes that Veggie will be a resource for crew food growth and consumption. It also could be used by astronauts for recreational gardening activities during long-duration space missions. The system may have implications for improving growth and biomass production on Earth, thus benefiting the average citizen.
For the future, Massa said she is looking forward to seeing all sorts of “neat payloads” in the Veggie unit and expanding its capability as NASA learns more about the food safety of crops grown in microgravity.

Astronaut Mike Hopkins: Workout in Space 4

Astronaut Mike Hopkins, a lifelong athlete, worked closely with his strength and conditioning coach Mark Guilliams to develop these specially-designed workouts in orbit. Shown here, Hopkins is using the the station's treadmill and the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device to perform this challenging workout -- four rounds of 200m run, 11 thrusters, 200m run, 11 shoulder presses, 200m run and 11 bench presses.