NASA

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NASA

• International Space Station
• Why Explore Space?
• Michael GriffinAdministratorNational
  Aeronautics and Space Administration
• As NASA resumes flights of the space shuttle to
  finish building the International Space Station,
  many are questioning whether the project the
  most complex construction feat ever undertaken
  is worth the risk and expense.

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• I have been asked, and asked myself, this
  question many times during my career,
  particularly when the United States lacked a plan
  to go beyond the space station to other
  destinations in the solar system. The issue was
  addressed eloquently in the report of the
  Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which
  examined the 2003 loss of the shuttle and its
  crew. That report pointed out that for the
  foreseeable future, space travel is going to be
  expensive, difficult and dangerous. But, for the
  United States, it is strategic. It is part of
  what makes us a great nation. And the report
  declared that if we are going to send humans into
  space, the goals ought to be worthy of the cost,
  the risk and the difficulty. A human spaceflight
  program with no plan to send people anywhere
  beyond the orbiting space station certainly did
  not meet that standard. President Bush
  responded to the Columbia report. The
  administration looked at where we had been in
  space and concluded that we needed to do more, to
  go further. The result was the Vision for Space
  Exploration, announced nearly three years ago,
  which commits the United States to using the
  shuttle to complete the space station, then
  retiring the shuttle and building a new
  generation of spacecraft to venture out into the
  solar system. Congress has ratified that position
  with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, making
  the Vision for Space Exploration the law of the
  land.
  
  
  
  
  
  

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• I have been asked, and asked myself, this
  question many times during my career,
  particularly when the United States lacked a plan
  to go beyond the space station to other
  destinations in the solar system. The issue was
  addressed eloquently in the report of the
  Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which
  examined the 2003 loss of the shuttle and its
  crew. That report pointed out that for the
  foreseeable future, space travel is going to be
  expensive, difficult and dangerous. But, for the
  United States, it is strategic. It is part of
  what makes us a great nation. And the report
  declared that if we are going to send humans into
  space, the goals ought to be worthy of the cost,
  the risk and the difficulty. A human spaceflight
  program with no plan to send people anywhere
  beyond the orbiting space station certainly did
  not meet that standard. President Bush
  responded to the Columbia report. The
  administration looked at where we had been in
  space and concluded that we needed to do more, to
  go further. The result was the Vision for Space
  Exploration, announced nearly three years ago,
  which commits the United States to using the
  shuttle to complete the space station, then
  retiring the shuttle and building a new
  generation of spacecraft to venture out into the
  solar system. Congress has ratified that position
  with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, making
  the Vision for Space Exploration the law of the
  land.

4

• Today, NASA is moving forward with a new focus
  for the manned space program to go out beyond
  Earth orbit for purposes of human exploration and
  scientific discovery. And the International Space
  Station is now a stepping stone on the way,
  rather than being the end of the line. On the
  space station, we will learn how to live and work
  in space. We will learn how to build hardware
  that can survive and function for the years
  required to make the round-trip voyage from Earth
  to Mars. If humans are indeed going to go to
  Mars, if we're going to go beyond, we have to
  learn how to live on other planetary surfaces, to
  use what we find there and bend it to our will,
  just as the Pilgrims did when they came to what
  is now New England where half of them died
  during that first frigid winter in 1620. There
  was a reason their celebration was called
  "Thanksgiving."

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• The Pilgrims had to learn to survive in a strange
  new place across a vast ocean. If we are to
  become a spacefaring nation, the next generation
  of explorers is going to have to learn how to
  survive in other forbidding, faraway places
  across the vastness of space. The moon is a
  crucially important stepping stone along that
  path an alien world, yet one that is only a
  three-day journey from Earth. Using the space
  station and building an outpost on the moon to
  prepare for the trip to Mars are critical
  milestones in America's quest to become a truly
  spacefaring nation. I think that we should want
  that. I want that. I want it for the American
  people, for my grandchildren, for my
  great-grandchildren. Throughout history, the
  great nations have been the ones at the forefront
  of the frontiers of their time. Britain became
  great in the 17th century through its exploration
  and mastery of the seas. America's greatness in
  the 20th century stemmed largely from its mastery
  of the air. For the next generations, the
  frontier will be space.Other countries will
  explore the cosmos, whether the United States
  does or not. And those will be Earth's great
  nations in the years and centuries to come. I
  believe America should look to its future and
  consider what that future will look like if we
  choose not to be a spacefaring nation.

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Latest News

• Station Recovers From Power Loss
• Mission control teams are working to assess
  systems affected by a power loss aboard the
  International Space Station early Sunday morning.
  The station's three crew members were not in any
  danger, but it did turn an off-duty day into a
  full work shift. About 1 a.m. EST, one of the
  power channels of the P4 solar array electrical
  system went down because of a glitch with a
  device known as a direct current switching unit.
  It controls power distribution from the solar
  array to the battery systems and other hardware.
  The glitch resulted in a temporary loss of
  communications, and shut down some equipment,
  including a few science facilities and heating
  units and control moment gyroscope 2. The
  station never lost orientation control, but it
  operated most of the day with two of four gyros.
  Control moment gyroscope 3 previously had been
  powered down. Flight controllers restored power
  to nearly all affected systems and equipment by
  Monday morning. They are still investigating what
  caused the glitch, but they believe it was an
  isolated event.

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Record Setting Spacewalks

• Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer
  Suni Williams finished a 6-hour, 40-minute
  spacewalk Thursday. Their completed tasks will
  allow for the attachment of a cargo platform
  during the STS-118 mission this summer and
  relocation of the P6 truss during STS-120 later
  this year. The crew now begins to review
  Russian procedures for the next spacewalk on Feb.
  22. Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail
  Tyurin will work on an antenna on the Progress 23
  cargo ship docked at the aft port of the Zvezda
  service module. The three spacewalks from the
  Quest airlock in U.S. spacesuits and a Russian
  spacewalk on Feb. 22 will be the most ever done
  by station crew members during such a short
  period and will mark five spacewalks in all for
  Expedition 14, a record for any expedition.

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Station Crew Conducts Three Back-to-Back
Spacewalks

• The third spacewalk in nine days by International
  Space Station Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and
  Flight Engineer Sunita Williams wrapped up on
  Thursday, Feb. 8. The three spacewalks, from
  the Quest airlock in U.S. spacesuits, and a
  Russian spacewalk scheduled for Feb. 22 will be
  the most ever done by station crew members during
  an increment, said Mike Suffredini, station
  program manager. The three spacewalks are
  termed EVAs 6, 7, and 8 because there were five
  previous station spacewalks from the U.S. airlock
  Quest during increments, times when no shuttle
  was present.

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Season's Greetings to All Onboard the Space
Station, and to All a Good Mission

• While stockings were hung by chimneys with care
  and children were snug in their beds across the
  globe, Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight
  Engineers Sunita Williams and Mikhail Tyurin
  voyaged around the world in space.
• Like millions around the world, for the crew of
  Expedition 14, this holiday season was met with
  bundles of joy, cheer and a special delivery. The
  winter festivities brought to the station crew
  more than 7,000 electronic postcards with warm
  wishes from those celebrating on Earth below.
  From Mesa, Ariz. to London, England, here are
  some of the greetings that reached the trio who
  celebrated this holiday season orbiting 230 miles
  above their home on Earth.

10
Progress Docks with Space Station

• A new Progress docked to the International Space
  Station at 959 p.m. EST Friday with more than
  2.5 tons of fuel, oxygen, other supplies and
  equipment aboard. The station's 24th Progress
  unpiloted cargo carrier brings to the orbiting
  laboratory more than 1,720 pounds of propellant,
  about 110 pounds of oxygen, and 3,285 pounds of
  dry cargo a total of 5,115 pounds.
• P24 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
  Kazakhstan Wednesday at 912 p.m. It reached the
  station after a flight of just over two days.
  The spacecraft used the automated Kurs system
  to dock at the Pirs Docking Compartment.
  Expedition 14 flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin
  stood by at the manual Toru docking system
  controls, should his intervention have become
  necessary. Expedition 14 crew members,
  Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria, Tyurin and Flight
  Engineer Sunita Williams, finished filling P24's
  sister cargo carrier ISS Progress 22, with trash
  and other discards for its Jan. 16 undocking from
  Pirs and subsequent destruction on re-entry.
• After its unloading P22 was used as a storage
  area for a while. Many items brought to the
  station aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on
  STS-121 in July eventually found a temporary home
  there until crew members could put them in more
  permanent places. ISS Progress 23 remains at
  the aft compartment of the Zvezda Service Module.
  It is scheduled to undock in April. The
  Progress is similar in appearance and some design
  elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings
  crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat
  while they are there and returns them to Earth.
  The aft module, the instrumentation and
  propulsion module, is nearly identical. But the
  second of the three Progress sections is a
  refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the
  Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo
  module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where
  the crew is seated on launch and which returns
  them to Earth, is the middle module and the third
  is called the orbital module.

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Spacewalkers Tee Off on Science, Mechanics

• Two International Space Station crew members
  wrapped up a 5-hour, 38-minute spacewalk from the
  Pirs docking compartment airlock at 1255 a.m.
  EST Thursday. The spacewalk included a golf
  shot that merited a high-flying birdie rating.
• Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin was the lead
  spacewalker, EV1, and Commander Mike
  Lopez-Alegria was EV2. They wore Russian Orlan
  spacesuits. Golf was the first major spacewalk
  activity. Lopez-Alegria put the tee on the ladder
  outside Pirs. Tyurin set up a camera and then
  stepped up and addressed the ball for his
  one-handed shot. Lopez-Alegria helped secure
  Tyurin's feet. The golf was a commercial
  activity sponsored by a Canadian golf company
  through a contract with the Russian Federal Space
  Agency. The ball left the station toward the
  right side instead of to the rear, a substantial
  slice. The ball weighs just 3 grams, a tenth of
  an ounce or about three times the weight of a
  dollar bill, compared to 1.62 ounces for a
  standard golf ball. At that weight it was
  unlikely to damage any station components if the
  shot had gone awry. The ball will have a short
  stay in orbit, perhaps three days. Inspection
  of a Kurs antenna on the Progress 23 unpiloted
  cargo carrier that docked at the aft end of the
  station's Zvezda Service Module Oct. 26 was the
  next task. Final latching of the spacecraft to
  the station was delayed by more than three hours
  because Mission Control Moscow was not sure the
  antenna was completely retracted. Tyurin and
  Lopez-Alegria moved to the rear of Zvezda and
  photographed the antenna. It was still fully
  extended, so Tyurin used a screwdriver to release
  a latch and tried to retract the antenna. Russian
  flight controllers also tried to retract it by
  activating a drive. Neither succeeded, and the
  task was abandoned. Next they relocated a WAL
  antenna, which will guide the unpiloted European
  cargo carrier to docking with the station. That
  vehicle, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, is
  scheduled to make its first flight next year. In
  its previous position the antenna interfered with
  a cover for a Zvezda booster engine.
• Then the two installed a BTN neutron experiment,
  which characterizes charged and neutral particles
  in low Earth orbit. Atop Zvezda, its readings
  during solar bursts should be of special interest
  to scientists. Two thermal covers from the BTN
  were jettisoned before the spacewalkers returned
  to the Pirs airlock. A final scheduled task, an
  inspection of bolts on one of two Strela
  hand-operated cranes on the docking compartment,
  was postponed. The scheduled 6 p.m. EST start
  of the spacewalk was delayed because of a cooling
  issue in Tyurin's suit. Tyurin got out of the
  suit and straightened a suspect hose which
  apparently had become kinked. A balky hatch
  further delayed start of the spacewalk. This
  was the first spacewalk during Expedition 14, the
  sixth for Lopez-Alegria and the fourth for
  Tyurin.
• If you've ever burned your dinner, you know how
  startling a smoke alarm can be. Now, imagine
  you're 220 miles away from Earth in an orbiting
  lab when the alarm sounds. Fires are no
  laughing matter on Earth, but in space they could
  be even more devastating."If a chair is on fire
  in your home, you have time to get out. In a
  spacecraft, you don't," said NASA scientist Dr.
  David Urban. "You have to detect smoke in an
  early pre-fire state, so you can stop it before
  it starts."
• Urban and a team of scientists and engineers at
  NASA's Glenn Research Center are developing a
  space station experiment to help engineers design
  smoke detectors that are sensitive enough to
  catch fires early, but not so sensitive that they
  cause false alarms.
• This may not sound like a major challenge. After
  all, household smoke detectors are mass produced
  and inexpensive. But detecting smoke in space
  isn't quite so simple. Smoke detectors work by
  looking for particles in the air that are about
  the same size as the particles normally found in
  smoke. However, a 1996 NASA Glenn study showed
  that smoke particles in space are bigger than
  those on Earth. "Smoke particles form
  differently in microgravity than they do on the
  ground," said William Sheredy, project manager
  for the Smoke Aerosol Measurement Experiment
  (SAME). "When smoke is created in microgravity,
  the particles have more time to gather together,
  producing larger particles or particle chains
  than in normal gravity."So far, nobody knows
  exactly how big those particles are. That's why
  the NASA Glenn team created SAME. This space
  station experiment will burn samples of materials
  normally found in space -- like Teflon, silicon,
  cellulose and Kapton -- and then measure the size
  of the particles in the smoke. Engineers will use
  this information to design the next generation of
  spacecraft smoke detectors.As NASA often does,
  the team used several commercial parts to build
  the experiment. One of those parts, the P-Trak,
  was made by Minnesota company TSI. Designed to
  measure air quality, this small handheld device
  is capable of counting individual smoke
  particles. It's also the perfect size and weight
  for a space station experiment. There's just one
  catch It wasn't designed for space.
• P-Trak works by passing air through a heated
  chamber of vaporous alcohol. When the air is
  cooled, the alcohol condenses around dust
  particles much like water condenses on a cold
  glass. This makes the particles large enough that
  an optical sensor can detect them as they scatter
  light from a laser beam. "We were concerned
  because gravity assists in the circulation of the
  alcohol inside the device," Sheredy said. "We
  weren't sure it would work properly in the
  absence of gravity."So the scientists modified
  the device by carving tiny grooves inside its
  chambers to improve the flow of alcohol in
  microgravity. Of course, the scientific method
  requires every theory to be tested, and this
  experiment was no exception.Before they could
  use the device in SAME, the team had to be sure
  the modification would work. To do so, they
  created another space station experiment called
  the Dust and Aerosol Measurement Feasibility Test
  (DAFT), to test the modified P-Trak.In
  September, astronaut and Expedition 13 Flight
  Engineer Jeff Williams operated DAFT on the
  station. Urban, Sheredy and other DAFT team
  members watched in real time as Williams called
  in the recordings to Payload Communications. The
  results showed that the commercial particle
  counter works in space."It was really exciting.
  For people who work on projects like we do, days
  like this are highlights in our careers," said
  Sheredy. "From beginning to end, DAFT took about
  3.5 years, and it all came down to about six
  hours of operation."Those crucial six hours
  brought the team one step closer to understanding
  the nature of space smoke and improving NASA's
  detectors. They look forward to another career
  highlight next summer when their primary
  experiment, SAME, is scheduled to travel to the
  station aboard the space shuttle.

12
Hockey Star Ovechkin Receives Tyurin Autographed
Photo

• Before he was sent to live and work on the
  International Space Station for six months,
  Expedition 14 Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin
  autographed his crew photo for another famous
  Russian. Now, the photo has reached its intended
  recipient National Hockey League star Alexander
  Ovechkin.
• While Tyurin orbited aboard the station some 220
  miles above Earth, Ovechkin was presented with
  the framed photo following practice with his
  Washington Capitals teammates. Ovechkin was
  thrilled to receive the photo from a
  cosmonaut."Very important people for any
  country," said Ovechkin, "Russia or
  U.S."Ovechkin was pleased to learn that before
  Tyurin took up engineering as a career, he had
  wanted to grow up to be a hockey player.