Here is the latest Space to Ground report from NASA on activities related to the International Space Station:
A selection of other recent NASA videos of interest:
** An overview of NASA’s ICON mission, which is set to be orbited in October via a Northrop Pegasus XL rocket air-launched from under a Lockheed L-1011 airliner:
Where does Earth’s atmosphere end and space begin? This and other questions soon will be answered by NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, satellite. Get ready to watch as the Pegasus countdown reaches T-Zero launching in early October from its carrier aircraft flying near the Kennedy Space Center.
** Guy Bluford Reflects on the 35th Anniversary of His First Space Flight
The spacewalkers’ first task was the deployment — by hand — of four CubeSats built by Russian students.
The cosmonauts carried with them two Tanyusha satellites, each about the size of a small toaster oven, built by students at Southwestern State University with demo payloads to study spacecraft autonomy technology and to measure the vacuum of space. Another pair of SiriusSat CubeSats, assembled by Russian schoolchildren and equipped with particle detectors, was also with the cosmonauts.
Prokopyev tossed the four nanosatellites into space by hand just outside the Pirs airlock, using a manual release method used on previous Russian spacewalks.
Here is a video of the hand-tossed orbital deployments plus views of the tiny satellites drifting away from the station:
Most of the rest of the nearly 8 hour long EVA involved installation of an antenna and related equipment for a German project to track animals wearing GPS transmitters:
Then the duo turned their attention to the installation of antennas and cables for a German-developed instrument package to track global animal movements. The equipment was placed outside the station’s Zvezda service module in a multi-step procedure that took a couple of hours longer than originally planned.
Called Icarus, the project aims to reveal changes in migratory routes, animal connections and other animal behavior. The antenna for Icarus was carried aloft in February, and a computer launched on a Russian Progress mission last year to help process the signals coming from tracking units tagged to animals on Earth.
“Icarus is a global collaboration of research scientists that are interested in life on the globe, and once we put together all the information on mobile animals, then we have a different and new understanding of life on Earth,” said Martin Wikelski, lead scientist on the Icarus project, director of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, and professor the University of Konstanz in Germany.
The Icarus project will start by tracking small animals, such as birds, bats and flying foxes, according to DLR, the German Aerospace Center. Tags fixed to the animals will transmit information on their migratory behavior — such as their GPS coordinates, acceleration and environmental data — up to a receiver on the space station.
The Japan space agency’s BIRDS project has launched university student-built CubeSats from the Kibo module on the International Space Station for several countries that have never before put spacecraft into orbit. The project is managed by the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) and is known officially as the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite project.
A view of the BIRDS-2 deployment as seen by German astronaut Alexander Gerst.
Birds-1 deployed scientific and technology demonstration CubeSats from Ghana, Mongolia, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Japan while BIRDS-2 deployed CubeSats for Bhutan, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
This video, narrated mostly in Japanese but with English subtitles, describes the Birds project and shows the two deployment events. An animation between 11:10 – 14:30 gives a clear depiction of how the ISS satellite deployment system works.
The astronauts who will fly on the first Boeing and SpaceX commercial crew missions to the International Space Station were introduced by NASA to the public earlier this month (see posting here). On Monday, SpaceX held a press event at the company’s HQ in Hawthorne, California where the astronauts who will fly on the Crew Dragon were presented and the Dragon and other hardware items were shown off as well. Here are some videos about the event:
