An evening pause: Though this took place last week, on the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight, I can’t let it go by, especially because it is so nicely done. Trust me, for two flute players to play a duet with one several hundred miles up in space and traveling more than 17,500 miles per hour while the other is safely on Earth is not easy.
ISS plans week-long simulated Mars mission.
This is the right idea, but to really learn something NASA needs to commit to a year-plus long simulated mission.
Russian spaceship “Gagarin” arrives at ISS.
Astronauts in ISS take cover as Chinese space junk flies past.
Three astronauts were launched to ISS today in a Soyuz capsule the Russians have named Gagarin, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his flight on April 12.
The Daily Beast reports today that the last flight of the shuttle Endeavour has been delayed due to a schedule conflict with a Russian Progress freighter.
Note that this has not yet been confirmed by NASA.
Update from spaceref: NASA has rescheduled Endeavour’s launch for April 29.
Japan’s unmanned freighter undocked from ISS today.
Good news: Japan has reopened its space station control room following the earthquake.
The spaceport at Wallops Island, Maryland has unveiled its rocket assembly building to be used by Orbital Sciences in launching cargo to ISS.
The Russians have set the new date, April 5, for next manned Soyuz launch to ISS.
Three astronauts return safely to Earth in Soyuz capsule.
The 8.9 earthquake has shut down the Japanese space station mission control center, forcing NASA to take over monitoring Japanese ISS modules.
Putting ISS to use. Key quote:
Under consideration is using the entire station and its six-person crew as an analog for a deep-space human exploration vehicle en route to Mars. An internal team is studying the feasibility and value of such an exercise in the summer of 2012. “We might start with a small window, like a 30-day window, with actual time delays with what we’d expect with a Martian communications system,” Gerstenmaier says. “We may freeze our consumables on station, in the sense of saying that we’ve started our voyage to Mars, and see how well we do in our predictions.”
Discovery has undocked from ISS, for the last time.
The Leonardo cargo module was permanently installed on ISS yesterday.
The Soyuz fly-around of the space station to photograph it with the shuttle docked has been canceled.
The crash of the computer that runs the station’s robot arm stranded a spacewalking astronaut in space for about 20 minutes yesterday.
Take a gander at this spectacular image of the shuttle approaching ISS, taken by an amateur astronomer from the ground!
The beginning of the end: The shuttle Discovery docked successfully with the space station, its 13th and final visit to ISS.
