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Fierce Battle is Under Way to Nab Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour From NASA
By SCOTT MAYEROWITZ
A new space race is on and the competition is vicious. We’re not talking about putting a man or woman on the moon or Mars but museums duking it out over which one gets to house the retiring space shuttles.
Millions of dollars are at stake and the battle is shaping up to be one of the fiercest in museum history.
There are only two more missions of the space shuttle left. After that, NASA plans to give its three shuttles — Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — to museums for preservation.
The problem is that 21 institutions across the nation are seeking the three spacecraft.
“This is among the rarest of aerospace artifacts,” said Mike Bush, director of marketing at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, one of the 21 locations hoping to get a shuttle.
Museums are always looking for bigger and better exhibits to draw in new visitors. Art museums put on blockbuster shows featuring well-known artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse that help sell tickets and sell goods in the gift shop. For an air and space or science museum, landing a space shuttle would be the Holy Grail of attractions.
“There’s no doubt that an artifact like this can help build a little bit more [financial] sustainability,” said Susan Marenoff, executive director of New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, which is also seeking a shuttle.
NASA won’t say when it will select the museums, just that the shuttles would be delivered sometime after July of 2011.
“It’s a very alluring object,” said Robert Pearlman, editor and founder of collectSPACE, a news site for space history enthusiasts. “I can’t think of another comparable competition in the aviation and space world.”
Pearlman said millions of visitors are likely to pay admission costs to see the shuttles, especially during the first few years.
“It’s an icon. The space shuttle is instantly recognizable,” he said. “Certainly, it’s a draw on to its own. People will make a trip out of their way to see the vehicle.”
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by dvice
Who knew spaceflight felt like 5 milliamps of electricity behind your ears?
Apparently, that’s all it takes to trick the brain into simulating similar sensorimotor disturbances that an astronaut would experience during, say, reentry. It’s an incredibly disorienting time for astronauts as the body is trying to adjust from the near weightlessness of orbit to the regular ol’ forces exerted on us planet-side.
The Galvanic vestibular stimulation (or GVS) system, created by Dr. Steven Moore of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, is especially useful during training as it allows astronauts to prepare for the disorientation during a mission.
While piloting a shuttle in a simulator, for instance, several astronauts brought their craft down in textbook fashion, keeping the shuttle at a safe 204 knots. Using the GVS system while performing the same maneuver, however, the pilots became disoriented and drifted dangerously toward 210 knots, all the while experiencing difficulty angling their craft correctly.
It all sounds horrible, sure, and yet I want to slap some GVS electrodes behind my ears and pretend my couch is a space shuttle.
Here’s what an astronaut looks like all strapped in and wired up (click if you’d like to see it larger):
Via Gizmag
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By Joe Rao
The moon reaches full phase Tuesday. But as far as full moons go, it’s not the most impressive. In fact, it’s the smallest full moon of the year.
About 13 hours after it’s officially full, the moon will arrive at the point in its orbit farthest from Earth (called apogee), a distance of 252,518 miles (406,389 kilometers). The moon’s apparent angular size that night will be at a minimum in 2010.
Though the casual viewer may not notice the difference, the Aug. 24 moon will appear 12.3 percent smaller than the full moon of Jan. 30, which nearly coincided with perigee — the moon’s closest point in its orbit relative to Earth. [ Moon Mechanics]
Observing the moon
When is the best time to observe the moon with a telescope? Most astronomy neophytes might say during full phase, but that’s probably the worst time. The moon tends to be dazzlingly bright as well as appearing one-dimensional.
The intervals when the moon is at or just past first-quarter and last-quarter phases are when we get the best views of the landscape right along the moon’s sunrise-sunset line, or terminator. [ Skywatcher's Guide to the Moon] (The terminator can also be defined as that variable line between the illuminated portion and the part of the moon in shadow.)
Along with the fact that a half moon offers more viewing comfort to the eye than a full moon does, we can see a wealth of detail on its surface using a telescope with relatively small optical power (magnifications of 20 to 40 power), or even good binoculars. Around those times when the moon is half-lit or in the gibbous phase (as it will be next weekend), those features lying close to the terminator stand out in sharp, clear relief.
The moon was at first-quarter phase on Aug. 16 at 2:14 p.m. ET. That was the moment when its disk was exactly 50 percent illuminated. Lunar mountains became visible as the sun lit them from the right.
How bright it is
How does brightness of a half moon compare with that of full? Most would probably think it’s half as bright, but astronomers tell us the half moon of the first quarter is only one-eleventh as bright as full. This is due to the fact that it is heavily shadowed, even on its illuminated half. Believe or not, it isn’t until just 2.4 days before full that the moon actually becomes half as bright as when it’s full.
A full moon is almost completely illuminated, especially right around its center; the sun shines straight into all the microscopic crevices, and perhaps except for around the immediate edges, you will find no visible shadows at all.
Finally, have you ever noticed that when artists portray the moon, they invariably seem to show it as either a slender crescent or full? Half moons are shown far less frequently, and gibbous moons are rarely depicted at all. Ansel Adams’ famous photograph ” Autumn moon” is an outstanding exception, involving a waxing gibbous moon that Adams imaged from Yosemite National Park’s Glacier Point in California back in September 1948.
What ‘gibbous’ means
The word “gibbous” is derived from the Latin word “gibbus,” meaning “hump.” An unusual word to be sure, but in describing the moon between half and full, it’s the correct term.
The gibbous moon also is the most-seen phase, occurring for the half month between first and last quarter. Because it is in the sky for more than half the night, we’re more apt to see the gibbous moon.
In fact, it is even visible during the daytime hours. That will be the case just after sunrise on the weekend following the full moon. In contrast, the oft-pictured crescent moon is visible only during the early evening or early morning hours, and sometimes only briefly.
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By Lewis Page
The United States’ X-37B robot mini-shuttle spaceplane, which was launched into orbit on a classified mission in April, has changed its orbit. However the “secret space warplane” – as the X-37B has been dubbed by the Iranian government – has now been re-acquired by alert amateur skywatchers.
 Security by obscurity.
The new orbit of the X-37B (also referred to as OTV-1) is around 30km higher than before, and remains tilted approximately 40 degrees up from the Equator. Amateur watchers lost the little spaceplane between 29 July and 14-18 August, then spotted it again on 19 August and refined their information on the new orbit over subsequent days.
According to veteran sky-watcher Ted Molczan, who has located and tracked many secret spacecraft:
This small change of orbit may have been a test of OTV-1′s manoeuvring system, or a requirement of whatever payload may be aboard, or both. The new orbit appears to very nearly repeat every 6 days, instead of the 4 days of the previous orbit.
Satellite spotters have long played a game of cat and mouse with operators of secret spy satellites, picking the spacecraft up using home telescopes as they pass overhead and sharing information so as to work out orbital details and predict future passes.
The X-37B is a particularly interesting target for the skywatchers as its true purpose is unknown. The little unmanned spaceplane, whose payload bay has around the same carrying capacity as a large bed or a small pickup-truck, is launched inside a fairing atop a normal rocket stack.
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Posted by David W Freeman
 Is a zero-gravity workout for you? NASA frets about keeping astronauts fit in space. (NASA)
(CBS) If you thought working out on Earth was tough, try it on Mars.
Turns out astronauts on a Mars mission might lose about 40 percent of their muscle strength during the long voyage, leaving them as weak as 80-year-olds, according to a study published in the Journal of Physiology.
That could make it hard to perform even simple tasks, let alone move around on the Martian surface in bulky spacesuits, MSNBC reports.
And forget about palates or spin class.
Returning to Earth could be even more perilous, as the astronauts might be too weak to evacuate their spacecraft in the event of an emergency.
“Muscle wasting is a real concern,” study author Robert Fitts of Marquette University in Milwaukee, told USA Today. “Mars is a three-year trip.”
The distance between Earth and Mars depends on the positions of the two planets in their orbits. At its closest point, Maris is about 34 million miles from Earth.
Why would spaceflight cause muscle wasting? The problem is the zero gravity environment.
On Earth, muscles stay strong because people have to use their muscles to overcome the force of gravity. In zero G, the muscles don’t have much work to do – so they gradually grow weaker. The longer the time in space, the greater the loss of strength.
To conduct their study, Fitts took muscle tissue samples from nine astronauts and cosmonauts who had spent 180 days on the International Space Station. He found significant muscle atrophy even in the strongest astronauts.
In fact, the astronaut with the biggest muscles experienced the most severe deterioration.
NASA does what it can to keeps astronauts strong, requiring them to stick to demanding workout schedules while in space. But running while strapped to a treadmill just doesn’t seem to go very far.
Even on a journey of 34 million miles.
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By William Harwood
The International Space Station’s coolant system is back up and running normally after a challenging three-spacewalk repair job, astronauts said Thursday.
The fix allows the crew to power up science equipment and other systems that had to be shut down when an ammonia pump shorted out July 31.
In an interview with CBS News, the station’s three NASA astronauts–robot arm operator Shannon Walker and spacewalkers Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson–said the impromptu repair went well, despite unexpected problems.
“I think it was really NASA at its finest with all the teams on the ground and the folks up here working together to get this repair done in short order,” Walker said.
 From left, space station robot arm operator Shannon Walker and spacewalkers Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson discuss a three-spacewalk repair job.
(Credit: NASA TV) The pump failure shut down one of the space station’s two coolant loops, forcing the crew to implement a widespread powerdown to prevent equipment from overheating. Two spacewalks were quickly planned, one to remove the old pump and install a spare and another to reconnect four ammonia lines.
But Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson, faced with an unexpected leak, were unable to disconnect one of the coolant lines attached to the failed pump and the first spacewalk ended August 7 with the original pump module still in place.
Flight controllers then lowered pressure in the line to stop the leak and during a second spacewalk on August 11, Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson finally got the balky M3 connector to release. The old pump was removed and the replacement was installed during a third spacewalk on Monday.
The astronauts and flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston then re-activated coolant loop A and restored the station to normal operation.
Walker, Caldwell Dyson, and Wheelock discussed the repair work with CBS News space analyst William Harwood in a space-to-ground interview Thursday. Here is a transcript of the conversation (questions edited for length):
CBS News: Can you give us an update on coolant loop A and where things stand this morning?
Caldwell Dyson: Well, as far as we can tell, everything’s coming back up…We’ve got most of our lab back and our node 2 back, both JEM (Japanese Experiment Module) and Columbus are all back, so to us here on orbit things are looking better than normal.
CBS News: So all the black boxes, all the power converters, all the lab racks are back up and running?
Caldwell Dyson: Yeah, Shannon and Doug removed the last jumpers today and put the racks back so it’s all spic and span and it’s back to business as usual it seems.
CBS News: This coolant loop problem, you can really look at it two ways. You can say problems like this demonstrate how difficult it’s going to be to maintain station after the shuttle’s retired and you can’t bring big components back to Earth to be repaired. But you demonstrated a pretty impressive ability to respond in real time and deal with a pretty difficult challenge. How do you look at at?
Walker: I think you’re right on both accounts. It will be more difficult for the engineers who are designing the hardware and want to understand the failure modes of the hardware that we see up here since we won’t be able to bring things back, such as large ORUs (orbital replacement units) and large pumps. But it also demonstrates how we can respond in an emergency. I think it was really NASA at its finest with all the teams on the ground and the folks up here working together to get this repair done in short order.
CBS News: I assume, then, that you’re confident down the road that when things like this happen you guys are going to be up for that?
Wheelock: Yeah, I’d have to agree with Shannon that the confidence is real high now. It was a validation, really, of our teamwork, our training, everyone involved. The way everything came together, it was just a great lesson in teamwork and how to stick to it and really solve a problem. I think the confidence is real high now in the team as we press forward.
CBS News: Doug, they told us you and Tracy practiced a pump changeout back in 2009. Compared to shuttle-type training, where it’s all very specific and very detailed, you get more generic training on the station. How did that work out? How tough was it to get back up to speed on techniques and procedures for something like this?
Wheelock: Our training in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) back in Houston, in the pool, a lot of it is skills based … and those skills came in very handy. But when you get outside with the temperature changes and of course, with the pure vacuum out there, things don’t behave sometimes as they do on Earth. So we have to be ready for those things and we’re trained to troubleshoot those things and come up with some potential solutions. Some of them are more elegant than others, but we got it done. It was just a real lesson in how to take your skills and a little bit of creative thinking and ingenuity and get the job done.
CBS News: Shannon, how about you, getting up to speed on arm operations for something like this. You played a pretty critical role in all this.
Walker: Yeah, the arm ops were quite interesting because just like with the spacewalk operations, I was trained sort of generically and so I never saw these procedures until right before I needed to do them. In fact, on the second EVA, I did not get the final procedures until the day of (the spacewalk). So I really had to depend on my skills to be able to fly something that I had no prior knowledge of.
CBS News: Let me ask a couple of spacewalk questions. Tracy, these were your first spacewalks and I know it’s all work and no play out there, but what were your impressions when you had a moment to look around?
Caldwell Dyson: When I had a moment to look around, it was pretty awe-inspiring. You know, for the last four or five months I’ve been looking out our cupola window at the sunrises and sunsets and been brought to tears by the multitude of stars once the sun goes down. And I wondered just how I would feel when I went out there. For me, my first EVA was a culmination of 12 years of training and being here and watching and learning and having a huge desire to do that. And so the feeling I was having out there, being on structure, outside the space station, was as emotional as you can get in an EMU (spacesuit), looking out at the sunrise for the first time. It was, like I said, a culmination of so much desire and years of training, it was a feeling I’ll never forget.
CBS News: It almost sounds overwhelming. Is it ever difficult to focus on the work at hand?
Caldwell Dyson: I was kind of afraid that it would be, but to be honest when I had those moments where I could look out, it was when either Wheels was doing something and the ground was talking to him and I had a break or it was a moment I stole. It didn’t detract at all. It just added to the experience out there. I wish I had better words to describe it.
CBS News:I don’t know that anyone else could do any better. Doug, these were your fourth, fifth and sixth spacewalks, you’re an old hand at it. That first EVA when fairly smoothly until you got to M3. What were you thinking when you couldn’t release that quick-disconnect and then you saw an ammonia leak?
Wheelock: Well, it wasn’t a surprise. In fact, when I first started talking to Tracy before we went out I said don’t be surprised if things don’t go as planned because these 400- to 500-degree temperature changes in 45 minutes, when you’re dealing with pieces of metal and rotating parts and things like that that have locking collars, things like that, bales that throw, that things may not be as they seem and not act as we trained in the pool. And sure enough, we saw that.
I think the greatest thing I learned on my earlier EVAs is just to expect that, just take a deep breath, think about the different ways you can finesse the piece of hardware and listen to what your ground trainers are telling you and don’t give up trying. We kept at it. M3 became my giant through this whole thing that I had to face out there. We did it together and we needed both of us on either end of the line to find that sweet spot to mate it up and de-mate it as well. I don’t know, it sort of became the villain for us. We needed a villain to sort of fight against when we were out there and it became a real challenge for us. But we were able to rise to the challenge as a team.
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By Denise Chow
SPACE.com Staff Writer
NASA is steadily reviving systems on the International Space Station following a series of complicated spacewalks to repair its vital cooling system.
Flight controllers on Earth are reactivating some systems for the first time since July 31, when an ammonia coolant pump failure knocked out half of the space station’s cooling system. The station’s astronaut crew replaced the faulty pump in three spacewalks, with the most recent one on Monday.
“Essentially the coolant loop is operating and flowing ammonia again,” NASA spokesman Kyle Herring told SPACE.com. “This morning, they were in the process of bringing systems back online.”
During three spacewalks, NASA astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson removed the faulty ammonia pump and replaced it with one of four spares stored on the exterior of the International Space Station.
The coolant pump failure forced the station astronauts to turn off some experiments and systems, as well as leave others without backups, in order to prevent the orbiting laboratory from overheating. [Graphic: Space Station's Cooling System Problem Explained]
With the repairs complete, station flight controllers are methodically restarting many of the systems that were placed offline. These include the electrically-driven gyroscopes that help maintain the station’s attitude, and the second string of electronics for the space station’s robotic arm, Herring said.
“We were able to operate all the spacewalks on the single string, so it was not a factor,” Herring said. “The robotic arm works just fine on a single string, but of course, we always want to have redundancy available.”
Scientific research was stalled as well, though mission planners are taking a close look at what experiments may be salvaged in the weeks ahead.
“At that point, the planning team will start to see where they can reschedule all the activities, like experiment work, that had to be deferred,” Herring said.
At the moment, station managers predict that the space station should be fully operational – as it was before the incident occurred – by Thursday.
The space station is home to six astronauts; three Americans and three Russians. The station is slated to keep flying through at least 2020, so spare parts will be a major concern once NASA’s space shuttles stop flying next year.
NASA currently plans to fly two final shuttle missions (in November of this year and February 2011) before retiring its three-shuttle fleet for good. The possible addition of a third shuttle flight is being discussed in Congress.
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by http://news.softpedia.com
Officials of the Chinese government announce that engineers have just finished assembling the first module of the future Chinese Space Station (CSS).
According to the same sources, the unmanned Tiangong-1 module is currently scheduled for launch sometime in 2011, although a clear date has yet to be established.
Over the past couple of decades, China has turned its eyes to space more and more. A few years back it managed to conduct its first manned space mission.
Shortly afterwards, the first spacewalk featuring a Chinese astronaut took place, in 2008. Earlier this year, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced plans to build its own space station.
This construct, which will also feature military capabilities according to the announcement, will be made up of several modules, each of which will be launched individually.
The Tiangong-1 spacecraft is the first of these modules, the state-run Xinhua news agency reports. It also says that the next batch of Chinese astronauts is currently training to learn docking procedures.
These are very important steps in designing any orbital structures. The ISS and the Mir orbital facilities are/were all made up of several components, which had to dock to each other in order to form the larger structure.
This is not very easy to perform, but Chinese experts hope that they will be able to succeed in their endeavor.
Until then, more pressing concerns plague space officials, such as ensuring that the newly-completed module takes off on a Chinese Long March 2F carrier rocket, as planned.
The Tiangogn-1 module is currently scheduled to blast off to space in the first half of next year. It has a launch weight of 19,000 pounds (8,500 kilograms), officials documents indicate.
After the spacecraft launched, CNSA will also send an unmanned Shenzhou 8 vehicle to space, in a bid to demonstrate space docking capabilities.
If the two ships are mated successfully, then the Chinese would have a free hand in starting work on their first space station.
Launches will most likely take place from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, which is located in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, Space reports.
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By Paul Adams
Uncrating Robonaut NASA/Kim Shiflett
He has been crated up and shipped to Kennedy Space Center. At the Space Station Processing Facility there, he is going to be carefully packed into his SLEEPR — the Structural Launch Enclosure to Effectively Protect Robonaut.
At over 500 pounds, the packed-up Robonaut will be perhaps the heaviest cargo ever carried in a space cargo module, according to NASA.
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By prnewswire.com
HOUSTON, Aug. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The third spacewalk to restore full cooling capability to the International Space Station is scheduled for Monday, Aug. 16.
Expedition 24 Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson will venture outside to install a replacement pump and connect its electrical and fluid lines. The two NASA astronauts conducted the first two spacewalks to remove the failed ammonia pump from the station’s truss, or backbone.
The pump removed during Wednesday’s spacewalk failed on July 31, causing a loss of half of the station’s cooling system. Since then, the station has been operating normally while a second ammonia pump provides cooling for electronics.
NASA Television coverage will begin Monday at 5 a.m. CDT. Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson are scheduled to begin the spacewalk just before 6 a.m. Monday’s spacewalk will be the sixth for Wheelock and the third for Caldwell Dyson.
Approximately two hours after the conclusion of the spacewalk, NASA TV will broadcast a briefing from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The briefing participants will be Kirk Shireman, International Space Station deputy program manager; Courtenay McMillan, Expedition 24 spacewalk flight director; and David Beaver, Expedition 24 spacewalk officer.
Reporters may ask questions from participating NASA locations, and should contact their preferred NASA center to confirm participation. Johnson’s newsroom will be open for credentialed reporters to attend the briefing. Johnson also will operate a telephone bridge for reporters with valid media credentials issued by a NASA center.
Journalists planning to use the service must contact the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 15 minutes prior to the start of the briefing. Phone bridge capacity is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
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