Space Arts, Space participation

ISS crew member Karen Nyberg invites crafters to join in making a grand astronomical quilt

I’ve mentioned before that astronaut Karen Nyberg, currently an ISS crew member, likes to sew as a hobby. (See posts here and here.)  She is now joining with Quilts.com and challenging other sewing enthusiasts to combine their  star themed quilt squares with the one she has made on the station : Astronomical Quilts Block Challenge – Quilts.com (pdf).

She describes sewing in microgravity in this video. At the end she describes the astronomical quilt project:

Here is a NASA announcement about here challenge:

NASA Astronaut Karen Nyberg Invites Quilters to Contribute a Star Block 

International Space Station Expedition 37 Flight Engineer Karen Nyberg of NASA, a lifelong lover of sewing, is inviting fellow crafters to join her in stitching together a global community space quilt.

Nyberg, who is in the final weeks of her mission aboard the orbiting laboratory, recently shared a star-themed quilt block she was able to complete during her limited free time in space.  She is now inviting quilters from the public to create their own star-themed quilt blocks to help celebrate her mission and passion for the quilting arts.

“Now that I’ve tried my hand sewing in space, I can say one thing with certainty: it’s tricky,” Nyberg said in a video sent down from the space station. “This is what I’ve made. It’s far from being a masterpiece, but it was made in space. I’m inviting all of you to create your own star-themed quilt block. We’ll be combining them with my block to create a quilt for next year’s 40th anniversary International Quilt Festival in Houston. I can’t wait to see what we make together.”

Nyberg’s complete video and other video clips of her quilting aboard the space station will be featured in a NASA exhibit at the 39th annual International Quilt Festival Thursday through Sunday, Nov. 3 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Sewing and quilting include many of the principles and technical skills used in developing equipment for spaceflight missions. The exhibit will include sewn samples from spacesuits and parachutes, a cargo transfer bag and other soft goods from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The deadline for submitting a block for the quilt is Aug. 1, 2014. For more information about where to send your block, visit: http://www.quilts.com

Nyberg and The International Quilt Festival will collaborate on having the squares stitched together for display at the 40th annual International Quilt Festival in 2014 and at other public displays. The Houston festival is the largest annual quilt festival in the world, attracting more than 60,000 guests annually.

Nyberg arrived at the space station with Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency in May. The trio is scheduled to return to Earth Nov. 10.

For Nyberg’s complete biography, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/np5ICw

For more information about Nyberg’s personal sewing hobbies visit: http://go.nasa.gov/CraftyKaren

For more about the 39th annual International Quilt Festival, visit: http://www.quilts.com

For more information about the International Space Station, onboard research and crew members, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

Astronomy, Space Science, SpaceCasts

Video: What’s Up for November 2013

NASA JPL’s video What’s Up for November 2013 gives a preview of what to see in the night sky in the coming month including Comet ISON. It starts with a a brief intro to the MAVEN spacecraft that is set to take off for Mars on Nov.18th :

Space Policy

Space policy roundup – Oct.31.13

Rick Boozer writes about lower cost alternatives to the SLS/Orion system that would allow NASA to start exploring deep space soon rather than much, much later: It’s Time to Send Americans to the Inner Solar System – Space.com.

Rick is the author of the  book The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé, which I’ve mentioned here several times. It’s available at Amazon. See also the post Alternatives to the Monster Rocket for beyond earth missions for more resources.

Other space policy/politics:

Living in Space, SpaceCasts

Chris Hadfield interview

Chris “Space Oddity” Hadfield gave an interesting interview on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air program today: Interview: Chris Hadfield, Author Of ‘An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth’ – NPR.

Mars, Space Science

JPL lets Curiosity drive on its own during trek towards Mount Sharp

Here’s an update on Curiosity‘s latest activities on Mars:

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Approaches ‘Cooperstown’

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, bringing the mobile laboratory to a good vantage point for pictures useful in selecting the next target the rover will reach out and touch.

When it drives autonomously, the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive. Prior to Monday, each day’s autonomous drive came after a segment earlier that day that was exactly charted by rover team members using images sent to Earth. The Sunday-Monday drive was the first time Curiosity ended an autonomous driving segment, then continued autonomously from that same point the next day.

The drives brought Curiosity to about 262 feet (about 80 meters) from “Cooperstown,” an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover’s arm. The moniker, appropriate for baseball season, comes from a named rock deposit in New York. Curiosity has not used its arm-mounted instruments to examine a target since departing an outcrop called “Darwin” on Sept. 22. Researchers used the arm’s camera and spectrometer for four days at Darwin; they plan to use them on just one day at Cooperstown.

Curiosity's view of "Cooperstown" outcrop
The low ridge that appears as a dark band below the horizon in the center of
this scene is a Martian outcrop called “Cooperstown,” a possible site for
contact inspection with tools on the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover 
Curiosity. Image Credit:  NASA/JPL-Caltech

Starting to use two-day autonomous driving and the shorter duration planned for examining Cooperstown serve to accelerate Curiosity’s progress toward the mission’s main destination: Mount Sharp.

In July, Curiosity began a trek of about 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers), starting from the area where it worked for the first half of 2013, headed to an entry point to Mount Sharp. Cooperstown is about one-third of the way along the route. The team used images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to plot the route and choose a few points of potential special interest along the way, including Darwin and Cooperstown.

“What interests us about this site is an intriguing outcrop of layered material visible in the orbital images,” said Kevin Lewis of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., a participating scientist for the mission who has been a leader in planning the Cooperstown activities. “We want to see how the local layered outcrop at Cooperstown may help us relate the geology of Yellowknife Bay to the geology of Mount Sharp.”

The team is using images taken from the vantage point reached on Monday to decide what part of the Cooperstown outcrop to investigate with the arm-mounted instruments.

The first day of the two-day drive began Sunday with about 180 feet (55 meters) on a southwestward path that rover drivers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., evaluated ahead of time as safe. The autonomous-driving portion began where that left off, with Curiosity evaluating the best way to reach designated waypoints ahead. The vehicle drove about 125 feet (38 meters) autonomously on Sunday.

“We needed to store some key variables in the rover’s non-volatile memory for the next day,” said JPL rover driver John Wright. Curiosity’s volatile memory is cleared when the rover goes into energy-conserving sleep mode overnight.

The stored variables included what direction the rover was driving when it ended the first day’s drive, and whether it had classified the next 10 feet (3 meters) in that direction as safe for driving. When it began its second day of driving, Curiosity resumed evaluating the terrain ahead for safe driving and drove 105 feet (32 meters), all autonomously.

This new capability enables driving extra days during multi-day activity plans that the rover team develops on Fridays and before holidays.

A key activity planned for the week of Nov. 4 is uploading a new version of onboard software — the third such upgrade since landing.  These upgrades allow continued advances in the rover’s capabilities. The version prepared for upload next week includes, for example, improvements in what information the rover can store overnight to resume autonomous driving the next day. It also expands capabilities for using the robotic arm while parked on slopes. The team expects that to be crucial for investigations on Mount Sharp.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project’s Curiosity rover.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Everyone can participate in space