The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
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.
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.
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| Image Credit-NASA-Chris Perry. |
Friday, January 10, 2014
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Monday, January 6, 2014
Sunday, January 5, 2014
ORBITING CARBON OBSERVATORY SPACECRAFT TESTED IN THERMAL CHAMBER
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2 spacecraft is moved into a thermal vacuum chamber at Orbital Sciences Corporation's Satellite Manufacturing Facility in Gilbert, Ariz., for a series of environmental tests. The tests confirmed the integrity of the observatory's electrical connections and subjected the OCO-2 instrument and spacecraft to the extreme hot, cold and airless environment they will encounter once in orbit. The observatory's solar array panels were removed prior to the test. OCO-2 is NASA's first mission dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide and is the latest mission in NASA's study of the global carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide is the most significant human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The mission will uniformly sample the atmosphere above Earth's land and ocean, collecting between 100,000 and 200,000 measurements of carbon dioxide concentration over Earth's sunlit hemisphere every day for at least two years. It will do so with the accuracy, resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of the regional-scale geographic distribution and seasonal variations of both human and natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions as well as the places where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored. Image Credit: Orbital Sciences Corporation/NASA/JPL-Caltech
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