Europe successfully launched its heaviest unmanned cargo freighter to ISS today.
The docking of the ATV freighter, dubbed Albert Einstein, will take place after ten days of checkout in orbit.
The next crew of astronauts to ISS blasted off today on a Soyuz rocket.
They are taking the fast route to ISS, which means they will dock less than six hours after launch. Update: As noted by Trent in the comments, the docking went like clockwork.
Dark matter, WIMPS, and NASA’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
This very nicely written article describing the scientific goals of AMS is even better in that it emphasizes strongly the uncertainties of the data and the theories behind it.
Great Britain’s first official astronaut has been picked for a five month mission on ISS in 2015.
Astronaut Michael Foale was born in Britain, but he flew on Mir as an American. Britain meanwhile had banned spending any government money on space exploration in the 1960s, and hadn’t changed that policy until about two years ago. If the reaction to Canadian Chris Hatfield’s ISS mission is any guide, this mission will liven things up a bit for space exploration in the old country.
Three astronauts safely returned from ISS today.
In replacing a pump during Saturday’s spacewalk it appears the astronauts have fixed the coolant leak.
The astronauts will replace a pump tomorrow on their spacewalk in the hope this will fix the leak in ISS’s solar panel cooling system.
The spacewalk has still not been approved, though it seems likely it will happen.
Update: As of this morning the spacewalk has been approved, set to begin at 8:15 am (Eastern).
Astronauts today spotted an ammonia coolant leak in ISS’s left-side power truss.
They are monitoring it, but have so far not made any decision about what to do about it, if anything.
This problem is a perfect illustration of why a flight to Mars is more complicated in terms of engineering than first appears. We might at this time be able to build that interplanetary spaceship (with the emphasis on the word “might”) but could its passengers maintain it millions of miles from Earth? Right now I’d say no. We need to learn how to build an easily repaired and self-sufficient spaceship. ISS is neither. It is also not a very good platform for testing this kind of engineering.
Update: The astronauts on ISS are preparing for a possible spacewalk on Saturday to deal with the problem. More details here.
The International Space Station has switched all its computers from Windows to Linux.
I love this quote:
“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”
I’ve been on Linux for almost six years, It crashes, but that is usually user error.
Real vs imagined human spaceflight.
He gets it. This was the same problem the Russians discovered when they were operating Mir.
The competition heats up: Russia has confirmed Sarah Brightman’s tourist flight to ISS, now scheduled for October 2015.
The first Cygnus/Antares demo flight to ISS has been delayed at least one month, to no earlier than August.
Overall, this delay is not a big deal. They want to swap out an engine to check a seal, plus they then have to coordinate the flight date with other missions to ISS.
