I mentioned here earlier the call by NASA’s Commercial Crew Program for artwork submissions for possible inclusion in a 2015 CCP calendar. The calendar can now be downloaded and printed:
The Photos To Space blog hosts the latest Carnival of Space.
The DreamUP! program created by NanoRacks and FISE ( Foundation for International Space Education) aims to get STEM projects onto the International Space Station:
DreamUp: NanoRacks Breaking New Ground in STEM Education
Houston, TX—December 19th, 2014 – DreamUp, powered by NanoRacks, is a nonprofit organization now providing a place for student project teams to raise required funds to fly a science experiment to the International Space Station (ISS).
The goal of DreamUp is to help students integrate into the commercial space community by delivering their experiments via NanoRacks to the U.S. National Laboratory onboard the ISS.
“Whether you are a large company or a high school student, space is complex…and although it isn’t quite as expensive as in the past, it’s still outside of the average student budget” says DreamUp Director Patricia Mayes. “Our platforms give access to the frontlines of space research and we see all of our educational payloads as a contribution to the space industry. We are thrilled to see NASA and the ISS Program Office supporting commercial and student research on Station.”
DreamUp allows junior high, high school, and undergraduate college students to take advantage of NanoRacks’ three standardized research platforms on the International Space Station by establishing an account for each team to hold donations towards the costs. These platforms include: NanoLabs, and the NanoRacks Platform-3 and Centrifuge. Find out more about NanoRacks’ standardized research platforms onboard the ISS.
The first team to join the revamped DreamUp program calls themselves “Chicks in Space.” This team, made up of three sisters, is on the search for more science than they receive in a regular school day. The sisters, Lillith, MaryAnn, and Adia, invented a microgravity plant growing chamber named ‘The Garden of E.T.O.N. (Extra Terrestrial Organic Nutrition). They placed as semi-finalists in a 2013 National STEM contest and now want to test their project on the ISS. The Garden of E.T.O.N. uses centrifuge to water the plants in space.
The girls have raised $1,200 out of a required $15,000 to get to space. To learn more about Chicks’ in Space experiment, check out their experiment.com page.
To further engage space youth, students across the world now have an opportunity to report where they spot the ISS flying over them, and tweet their story with the hashtag #ISSDreamUp for the chance to win a prize each month from DreamUp and NanoRacks.
For more information on DreamUp student projects and how to spot the ISS, please visit: www.unitedspaceschool.org/dreamup/
Download the full press release and further press inquiries, please contact Abby Dickes at 202 750 0914.
About NanoRacks, LLC:
NanoRacks LLC was formed in 2009 to provide commercial hardware and services for the U.S. National Laboratory onboard the International Space Station via a Space Act Agreement with NASA. NanoRacks’ main office is in Houston, Texas, right alongside the NASA Johnson Space Center. The Business Development office is in Washington, DC. The Company seeks to democratize outer space utilization by owning and marketing its own family of research equipment and by providing low-cost, high quality services in low-earth orbit and beyond.
To date over 200 payloads have been deployed by the Company on the International Space Station and our customer base includes the European Space Agency (ESA) the German Space Agency (DLR,) the American space agency (NASA,) US Government Agencies, Planet Labs, Urthecast, Space Florida, NCESSE, Virgin Galactic, pharmaceutical drug companies, and organizations in Vietnam, UK, Romania and Israel. Our customer base has propelled NanoRacks into a leadership position in understanding the emerging commercial market for low-earth orbit utilization.
Here is a compilation of time-lapse imagery of the earth shot from the ISS by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and set to a nice soundtrack:
The ESA Rosetta team has created a sequence of images showing the rotation of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:
As the incredible year of 2014 draws to a close, we have prepared a small treat for all of the readers of this blog who have followed Rosetta’s progress over the months, in particular those who like to download images and play with them.
We started our CometWatch in July, when Rosetta was still a few thousand kilometres away from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. We saw this curiously-shaped comet grow larger and richer in details as the spacecraft got closer and closer until rendezvous at 100 km on 6 August. The NAVCAM images released over that period provided a good overview of our approach to this amazing new world.
In September, as we drew closer to the comet, we had to switch to taking four-image mosaics in order to ensure that we could cover enough of it for navigation purposes. Since then, we have been publishing some of these four-image sets as montages and mosaics, as well as releasing the individual frames so that you could work with them and create your own mosaics. Some have been taken within 8 km of the surface of 67P/C-G, providing amazing views.
But to mark the end of this exciting year, instead of just one new image, montage, or mosaic, the last CometWatch release of the year is … a movie, featuring no less than 24 montages based on NAVCAM images taken between 19 November and 3 December 2014. A reduced version of the movie can be seen inline here, but the full-sized version is available if you click through.
These images were taken while Rosetta was in a 30-km orbit around the comet (see the second half of this video showing the trajectory of the spacecraft after 12 November). As usual, each montage comprises four individual images taken over a 20-minute period, at either around 11:00 UT (12:00 CET) or 23:00 UT (0:00 Next Day CET). At 30 km from the comet’s centre, the pixel scale is about 2.56 m/pixel.
The path of Rosetta after 12 November 2014. Credit: ESA
As Comet 67P/C-G rotates with a period of 12.4 hours, images taken at 12-hour intervals result in views that are slightly offset with respect to one another, as the comet will have completed slightly less than a full rotation in that time.
In addition, there is also the orbital motion of Rosetta with respect to the comet: over the two weeks over which the images were taken, Rosetta completed almost one full orbit at 30 km from the comet.
Taking these factors into account, we have ordered the images according to the apparent rotation phase in order to make a movie. In fact, we have sorted the images in an almost reverse chronological sequence, starting with a montage taken on 2 December, then working backwards one day at a time to 19 November. The last montage in the sequence, however, is from 3 December.
Given the limited time available to us in the run up to Christmas, this is all we have been able to do: a phase-ordered sequence of montages made into a movie. There has been no processing of the images apart from the removal of the basic instrumental signature.
But we know that you can do better, and as a thank you to everyone who has produced and shared dozens and dozens of excellent NAVCAM mosaics and images over the past few months, we’ve made the full set of 24 montages and of 96 individual 1024 x 1024 pixel frames available for download.
So, if you have the time over the holiday period, we invite you to create your own mosaics and perhaps even your own movies, and to share them on your social networks under the terms of the Creative Commons licence that applies to NAVCAM images (CC BY-SA IGO 3.0). Let us know about them in the New Year.
For those who want to know exactly where the spacecraft was at the moment when each image was taken and perhaps factor that into their movie-making, the so-called ‘SPICE’ files for Rosetta are available here, and the tools to read and process those files can be found here. Few parameters are already included in the filenames of the provided images, such as rotation phase, date and time (rot.phase_ESA_ROSETTA_NAVCAM_yymmddThh).
We hope you have enjoyed following our CometWatch in 2014 and we are looking forward to another exciting year as 67P/C-G gets closer and closer to the Sun. Rosetta will be there to monitor its changes and discover what it really means “to live with a comet”.