SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING? : ISS RESUPPLY MISSION

Monday, January 13, 2014

ANTARES ROCKET LAUNCH

FROM: NASA
Orbital Sciences Corp. launched its Cygnus cargo spacecraft aboard its Antares rocket at 1:07 p.m. EST Thursday, Jan. 9, 2014, from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, beginning the Orbital-1 cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Cygnus spacecraft is now traveling 17,500 mph in Earth's orbit to rendezvous with the space station on Sunday, Jan. 12. Over the next two and a half days, Cygnus will perform a series of engine firings to put it on track for a rendezvous with the station. When the vehicle reaches the capture point about 30 feet from the complex, Expedition 38 Flight Engineers Mike Hopkins and Koichi Wakata will use Canadarm2, the station’s 57-foot robotic arm, to reach out and grapple Cygnus at 6:02 a.m. The crew then will use the robotic arm to guide Cygnus to its berthing port on the Earth-facing side of the Harmony node for installation beginning around 6:20 a.m. NASA television coverage of the rendezvous and berthing begins at 5 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 12, followed at 7 a.m. with coverage of the installation. For its first official commercial resupply mission, designated Orbital-1, Cygnus is delivering 2,780 pounds of supplies to the space station, including vital science experiments for the Expedition 38 crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory. Orbital Sciences successfully proved the capability of the Cygnus spacecraft during its first and only demonstration flight to the station back in September 2013.

Image Credit-NASA-Chris Perry.

STAR FLASH

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before -- supernovas and novas expel matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter. Image Credit: NASA, ESA

THE SPIDERWEB GALAXY

Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk. At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. IC 342 belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2. IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way. New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy rate. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation. Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

JUMPING TO WARP SPEED

This cockpit view of a hypothetical spacecraft traveling at eight-tenths the speed of light shows the visual distortions that would be experienced at such high speeds. The star field is actually being wrapped toward the front of the craft in addition to being significantly blue-shifted. NASA Glenn leads the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, NASA's primary effort to produce near-term, credible, and measurable progress toward the technology breakthroughs needed to revolutionize space travel and enable interstellar voyages. NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio.

OBSERVATION FROM THE SPACE STATION