Category: space.com

WASHINGTON — NASA has given Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) formal approval for the company’s first cargo mission to the International Space Station in late 2020.

SNC announced Feb. 7 that it had received “authority to proceed” on that mission using the company’s Dream Chaser vehicle. The mission will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in late 2020.

The mission is the first of six in the company’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract it won in 2016 to transport cargo to and from the ISS. SNC received a CRS-2 contract along with current CRS providers Orbital ATK and SpaceX.

“While we won the contract a couple of years ago, the contract still needed to be validated by a task order,” said Mark Sirangelo, executive vice president of SNC’s Space Systems business area, in a Feb. 7 speech at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference here. That order, he said, is the “biggest step” to date on the program.

That flight will be a “full scale, fully operational mission,” he said, even though it will represent the first orbital flight of the Dream Chaser. Orbital ATK and SpaceX, who developed their Cygnus and Dragon spacecraft, respectively, under earlier NASA Space Act Agreements, flew demonstration missions before starting their operational CRS cargo flights.

Dream Chaser, which SNC had been developing for NASA’s commercial crew program, will be able to transport up to 5,500 kilograms of cargo to the station. The lifting body vehicle can return up to 2,000 kilograms of cargo from the station, making a runway landing at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility or other airports to enable rapid access to experiments or other time-sensitive cargo after landing.

SNC is currently building that first flight vehicle, with hardware under development now in advance of a critical design review planned for the middle of this year. Company officials said earlier reviews identified no “showstoppers” that would prevent hardware production even ahead of that review.

“We are now moving forward quite rapidly on our CRS-2 program,” Sirangelo said.

A Dream Chaser engineering test article completed a glide flight in November at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. NASA later confirmed that the flight met all the requirements for a milestone in an earlier commercial crew Space Act Agreement with SNC.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

You can now take a walk in NASA’s original astronaut shoes, or at least a pair inspired by them, if you are among the very lucky few.

Heddels, an online resource for well-made clothing, has announced the “Mercury All American,” a sneaker made with the athletic shoe brand PF Flyers. The limited-edition footwear honors PF’s role in Project Mercury, the United States’ first human spaceflight program, which was established 60 years ago.

“Tens of thousands of people and hundreds of companies were involved in the gargantuan effort to put an American into space. PF Flyers and its original parent company B.F. Goodrich were two such businesses,” wrote David Shuck, Heddels’ managing editor, in an article about developing the Mercury All American. “While the astronauts wore B.F. [pressure] suits in the air, they had on PF Flyers on the ground, helping them truly run faster and jump higher than anyone in history.” [Evolution of the Spacesuit in Pictures (Space Tech Gallery)]

B.F. Goodrich produced the silvery spacesuits worn by the Mercury astronauts. PF Flyers, B.F.’s footwear brand, made military athletic shoes of the same style worn by the likes of Alan Shepard and John Glenn as they prepared for their missions.

Heddels and PF Flyers’ Mercury All American blends the two divisions’ legacies by incorporating the spec materials used by B.F Goodrich into a silhouette similar to that of the shoes worn by Mercury astronauts in training.

The $380 Mercury All American is limited to just 21 pairs — the same number of spacesuits that B.F. Goodrich delivered to NASA. Heddels is running a free raffle through Sunday (Feb. 11) for the opportunity to purchase the shoes.

NASA’s original Mercury astronauts in B.F. Goodrich silvery spacesuits. From the left: Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Gordon Cooper and Scott Carpenter.

Credit: NASA

Shoe shine

“The concept was to make a shoe that was a microcosm of Project Mercury itself,” explained Shuck, “incorporating as many materials and designs from the original program as possible.”

The high-top sneaker features an aluminized nylon Nomex upper, a high-visibility orange lining, a heel pull-tab, nickel-alloy eyelets and paracord laces.

“I felt the key to this whole thing was giving the shoes the look and feel of a piece of the spacesuit. The suit itself was made of a heat resistant aluminized nylon. The most heat resistant nylon material available at the time was Nomex,” wrote Shuck.

The silvery material is more than just shiny. Like the spacesuits, the shoes’ twill can withstand heat upwards of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius).

The orange liner material was inspired by the pressure garments’ brightly colored satin interior used to help recovery crews spot the astronauts after splashdown. The Mercury boots had olive nylon straps and webbing, which Heddels replicated in the heel tape and loop.

The nickel alloy eyelets, through which the parachute cord laces are threaded, are a nod to the Rene 41 alloy shingles that covered the Mercury space capsule.

The Mercury All American even has its own take on NASA’s emblem, a red and blue “P.F. Flyers” patch reminiscent of the space agency’s insignia.

Heddels and PF Flyers’ Mercury All American sneakers are made from aluminized nylon, nickel alloy and parachute cord, among other materials original to the Mercury spacesuits and capsule.

Credit: Heddels

Limited landing

The price of producing the Mercury All American out of all authentic materials was that the shoe was destined to be a limited edition only.

“In conceiving this project, both PF Flyers and I imagined a large production run of shoes,” wrote Shuck. “But as the details came in and we became enamored with the Nomex material, the retail cost began to rise.”

“Materials designed to be blasted into space are generally quite expensive, even if they are 60 years old,” he noted.

Heddels will conduct a random drawing of 21 raffle entries on Monday (Feb. 12) to choose who is eligible to purchase the Mercury All American.

Because of the small production run, Shuck said they were able to customize the packaging for the shoes.

“We considered boxes that looked like the portable air conditioners the astronauts carried with them to the launch pad, until we saw these images of wooden NASA shipping crates,” he wrote. “And then learned you can ship wooden boxes through the mail.”

The Mercury All American will be packaged in a parachute-inspired ripstop nylon drawstring shoe bag and shipped inside a screw-secured wooden shipping crate. Accompanying the shoes will be a brochure about the shoes in the same style as NASA’s 1970s informational pamphlets.

Heddels and PF Flyers are not the first to draw inspiration from space exploration for shoes. In 2015, Adidas offered trainers based on the look and feel of NASA’s spacesuits. A year earlier, General Electric and JackThreads produced an Apollo moon boot-inspired limited-edition sneaker.

Nike has also looked to space for its footwear, including a Mission Control-themed set in 2013, a sneaker styled after the space shuttle pressure suit in 2012 and a Buzz Aldrin-endorsed pair celebrating the first moon landing in 2010.

See more photos of Heddels and PF Flyers’ Mercury All American shoes at collectSPACE.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

With the help of a supermassive black hole and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a group of researchers say they have made the first ever detection of planets outside the Milky Way galaxy. 

Finding planets in our galaxy is hard enough; finding them in more distant galaxies is even more challenging, the researchers said.

“Even in the Milky Way, exoplanets are difficult to detect,” Xinyu Dai, an astronomer at the University of Oklahoma and a co-author on the new study, told Space.com by email. “Galaxies are much farther away from us, so it will be orders of magnitude more difficult to detect planets in other galaxies.” [Exoplanets: Worlds Beyond Our Solar System]

A central “lens” galaxy and four projections of the background quasar RX J1131-1231.

Credit: Xinyu Dai/Eduardo Guerras/University of Oklahoma

Dai and his co-author, Eduardo Guerras, used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the environment around a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy located 3.8 billion light-years away from Earth. The galaxy is home to a quasar, an extremely bright source of light thought to be created when a very large black hole accelerates material around it. But the researchers said the results of their study have revealed the presence of planets in a galaxy that lies between Earth and the quasar. 

Furthermore, the scientists said results suggest that in most galaxies, there are about 2,000 free-floating planets for every star. That means there could be trillions of planets traveling, starless, in the galaxy that lies between the quasar and the Milky Way.

Worlds beyond the Milky Way

When Dai and Guerras turned Chandra toward the quasar RX J1131-1231, they were hoping to use a natural magnifying glass predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — a procedure known as gravitational lensing or microlensing — to learn more about the black hole that produced the quasar. As light from a more distant galaxy — in this case, the one containing the quasar — traveled around a smaller galaxy in the foreground, gravity magnified the light from the quasar galaxy, making it easier for astronomers to see features that might otherwise be too distant to observe. 

“The original purpose of the observations was to study the environment of the supermassive black hole,” Dai said.

As Dai and Guerras examined the four images created by quasar lensing, they noticed that each one was a little bit different from the others. Light from the background quasar splits into four paths, creating four images of the quasar. If the galaxy were a single block of equally distributed mass, each path of light would have shifted equally. But galaxies are much messier, with stars clustered tightly in some regions and spread more thinly in others. After factoring in the extent to which stars could distort the results, the researchers concluded that the unexplained variations could come from gravitational lensing caused by planets in the (closer) lensing galaxy. (Microlensing is already used as a technique to find exoplanets in our galaxy.) 

Over the past decade, Chandra has observed the quasar 38 times, and the researchers found planet-like signatures throughout those observations. While the differences could come from “hotspots” in the accretion disk around the black hole, previous research (which Dai participated in) concluded that this was unlikely. 

By examining how the individual images produced by the lensing galaxy shifted, the researchers were able to estimate how many free-floating worlds might be responsible for the effect. While the number of estimated planets varied depending on how large the individual worlds might be, the researchers estimated that there could be as many as 2,000 free-floating worlds for every star in the foreground galaxy. These worlds most likely formed with the planetary system but were hurled out of it by another gas giant, much like Jupiter cleaned out the young solar system.

Each planet would be somewhere between the size of Earth’s moon and the size of Jupiter. But most of the booted worlds probably aren’t that small. At larger sizes, there could be about one free-floating Jupiter-sized world for every 10 stars, a number consistent with estimates of free-floating planets in the Milky Way, Dai said.

The researchers were able to estimate only the number of worlds floating without stars, not those orbiting suns. That’s because the gravitational force of orbiting worlds is dramatically overshadowed by their much-larger stars, the researchers said.

“The exact number of planets in their analysis depends on specific assumptions, and the uncertainties are large,” Przemek Mróz, a researcher at the University of Warsaw in Poland, told Space.com by email. Mróz, who was not part of the new study, said he thinks the study is solid, but that the question of precisely how many planets could be floating in the galaxy is hard to answer. Examining similar variations in other galaxies should help to refine that number, Mróz said.

“Observations of other lensed quasars will help to study planet populations in other galaxies,” Mróz said.

In addition to studying gravitational lensing, Mróz is also a member of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), based at the University of Warsaw, which uses microlensing to hunt down dark matter. Because the experiment uses stars inside the Milky Way as lenses, OGLE has identified several exoplanets in our galaxy. 

The new research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

More to come

Most Milky Way planets beyond Earth’s solar system have been identified using a couple of different methods. The bulk of the very first exoplanets to be discovered were “hot Jupiters,” whose masses and close orbits tugged at their stars, causing the stars to wobble slightly. This allowed researchers to identify the planets via what’s known as the radial velocity method. 

Then, instruments like NASA’s Kepler space telescope found a wealth of worlds using the transit method, which takes advantage of how planets block the light from their star as they cross between it and Earth.

But other worlds have been spotted in the solar system via microlensing, though on a far smaller scale than what was done in the new study. Instead of using a quasar, astronomers applying this method usually examine two stars that temporarily line up with one another as seen from Earth. Gravity from the foreground star splits the light from the background into two beams that go around the foreground, or lens star, creating two lensed images. If the lens star boasts a planet that travels through one of those beams of light, the planet’s gravity bends the stream and temporarily produces a third image of the source star. Because the stars are closer to Earth and within the Milky Way, their planets can be separated out in a way that isn’t possible on the larger, galactic scales used by Dai and Guerras. The characteristics of this light can reveal the planet’s mass, orbit and the length of its year. [VIDEO: Gravitational Microlensing – How Planets Are Found Using This Technique]

While researchers can re-examine planets found via transit and radial velocity, the rare and random nature of the lineup of two stars means that worlds found by microlensing are one-time deals. Still, scientists have used the method to discover planets located much farther away than those found via the other two methods. In 2006, astronomers using microlensing spotted a planet located 22,000 light-years away from Earth, orbiting a star near the center of the Milky Way.

By adding a quasar to the mix, Dai and Guerras have become the first to spot exoplanets outside of the galaxy. But they probably won’t be the last, they said. The pair already noted two other lensed quasars that show similar behavior.

“Microlensing is somehow unique, because it doesn’t require detection of any light from a planet host star or the planet itself. It only uses light from a background object,” astronomer Radoslaw Poleski, a microlensing researcher at the Ohio State University, told Space.com. 

“This makes microlensing the only technique that can detect planets in other galaxies in the foreseeable future,” Poleski said.

Poleski and Mróz recently suggested that microlensing could be used to spot planets in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located near the Milky Way, using future instruments, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in Chile. Instead of relying on a quasar, however, Poleski and Mróz’s research suggested that researchers could use light from a background star to identify individual planets around stars in the dwarf galaxy.

“We estimate that the LSST will be able to find at least several microlensing events in the [Small Magellanic Cloud] annually, and planetary signals should be observed in some of them,” Mroz said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd at @NolaTRedd, Facebook or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Being an astronaut is a tough job. Not only do they work long hours in a confined spot, but their entire body deteriorates in microgravity. Astronauts spend more than an hour exercising every day. Yet they still see declines in muscle mass. After six months in space, astronauts usually need help walking when they return to Earth. It takes months of physiotherapy to get back to normal.

If astronauts fly to Mars in the 2030s as proposed, muscle problems will be a big deal. How can an astronaut set up a habitat after spending months and months in a spacecraft, flying to the Red Planet? What if they fall and break a bone? How will living in the lighter gravity of Mars affect their ability to live normally on Earth, after they come home?

NASA is still working on the answers to these questions. But there’s one potential aid: Perhaps astronauts could take a medication to reduce muscle deterioration. It’s already being tested on the International Space Station with mice. Forty rodents, each equipped with a special skin implant that automatically delivers medication, flew to the orbiting complex aboard a Dragon spacecraft in December. Half the mice came home in January, and the other half will return home this month. Testing is in progress on the experiment — called Rodent Research 6 — to see how well the mice reacted to the drug.

In an interview, principal investigator Alessandro Grattoni cautioned that the device isn’t approved yet by the Federal Drug Administration, so it will be several years before astronauts can test it. But he expects that’s plenty of time to get the device ready for possible Mars missions, as long as the development money is available.

Administering medication “is cumbersome for the astronauts,” said Grattoni, chair of the nanomedicine department at Houston Methodist Research Institute. “Sending a device that does the work for an astronaut … would be beneficial,” he added.

That’s not the only benefit. The device would work for people with wasting muscle diseases, perhaps for patients forced to rest in bed for months after a surgery. It also is being approved right now to administer medication for HIV prevention, where a single missed dose could mean a lifetime of unpleasant consequences. Grattoni expects the HIV version of the implant will be approved in as soon as three years, after its clinical testing finishes.

His team is also working on a newer version of the rodent implant experiment that should fly to the space station in 2019. This version will allow for medication injection by remote control. On Earth, Grattoni said, this version of the device will be very helpful for patients living in remote communities. After a phone consultation with a doctor in a big city, the doctor could adjust the medication dosage using Bluetooth or an Internet connection.

RELATED: ‘Bone Glue’ Experiments on the ISS Test Possible Treatment for Osteoporosis

For both astronauts and patients, Grattoni’s device provides several other benefits. Medication is administered continuously and smoothly, avoiding the spikes that can lead to people experiencing nasty side effects. No one can forget to take their dose. And the device, which is like a membrane, doesn’t need to be replaced very often. Patients will instead only need to go to the doctor’s office every 6 months to 12 months to get a medication refill. That will be especially handy on a Mars mission, which could take 18 months to two years to complete.

Grattoni said, “This a very exciting new development that offers promise for treatment.”

Originally published on Seeker.

You can’t see them or feel them, but millions of airborne viruses are wafting around you each day, and billions more microbial travelers are descending everywhere on Earth, after riding air currents around the world.

For the first time, scientists have analyzed the vast quantities of viruses that are swept up and swirling about in the atmosphere, sometimes traveling thousands of miles from their point of origin before seeing the planet’s surface again. To do that, researchers looked at a boundary layer in the atmosphere — the free troposphere, which lies below the stratosphere but is still high enough to be beyond the reach of weather systems.

At this height, approximately 8,200 to 9,840 feet (2,500 to 3,000 meters) above sea level, viruses hitch rides on air currents and on particles of soil or vapor from sea spray, and travel much farther than would be possible at lower elevations. The scientists discovered a deluge of airborne microbes, finding that a single square meter of the planet’s surface could be showered with hundreds of millions of viruses — and tens of millions of bacteria — in a single day. [Tiny Grandeur: Stunning Photos of the Very Small]

“Every day, more than 800 million viruses are deposited per square meter above the planetary boundary layer — that’s 25 viruses for each person in Canada,” study co-author Curtis Suttle, a virologist and professor with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement.

However, this virus “rain” has nothing to do with flu season. Viruses — clusters of genetic material in a protein envelope that can’t reproduce on their own — have been around for at least 300 million years and are abundant on Earth (as well as in your body, as part of your microbiome).

In fact, viruses are the most abundant microbes on the planet, the study authors reported. The total estimated number of viruses is so staggeringly large that if all Earth’s viruses were collected together they would cover an area spanning 100 million light-years, the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology reported in 2011.

Some viruses, such as influenza and Ebola, do sicken people, but manyinfectonly bacteria. Though it’s unknown exactly how many types of viruses there are, approximately 320,000 types of viruses infect mammals alone, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal American Society for Microbiology.

Scouring the skies

To track the invisible microbial highways in the sky — and find out how many viral passengers they carried — the authors of the new study ascended platforms in Spain’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, and collected samples from the atmosphere at altitudes of about 9,840 feet (3,000 m) above sea level, scooping up free-floating microbes and those attached to airborne dust and water vapor.

When the scientists separated and analyzed the microbial hitchhikers, they found that not only were billions of microbes showering Earth’s surface on a daily basis, but that viruses could be up to 461 times more abundant than bacteria. In the samples, viruses were attached to more of the organic, lighter particles than bacteria were, hinting that viruses could stay airborne longer and thereby travel greater distances, the study authors reported.     

Their findings also answer a long-standing mystery as to why genetically similar virus populations could be found in areas that are separated by great distances, a discovery that dates to decades ago, Suttle said in the statement.

“Roughly 20 years ago we began finding genetically similar viruses occurring in very different environments around the globe. This preponderance of long-residence viruses travelling the atmosphere likely explains why,” he said.

“It’s quite conceivable to have a virus swept up into the atmosphere on one continent and deposited on another,” he said.

The findings were published online Jan. 29 in the Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology.

Original article on Live Science.

Yesterday’s successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket also sent an unusual payload into space: a cherry-red Tesla Roadster “manned” by a dummy named Starman and equipped with cameras that provided gorgeous views of Earth against the backdrop of space.

But flat-Earthers aren’t buying it.

“People who believe that the Earth is a globe because ‘they saw a car in space on the Internet’ must be the new incarnation of ‘It’s true, I saw it on TV!’ It’s a poor argument,” tweeted The Flat Earth Society, an organization dedicated to spreading the (incorrect) notion that the Earth is not round. “Why would we believe any privately held company to report the truth?” the organization added.

Trust no one

Flat-Earth conspiracy theorists have a long history of mistrusting the government when it comes to space. On forums devoted to the belief that the Earth is a flat disk, “NASA” often gets mocked as standing for “Never A Straight Answer,” and astronauts’ attempts to answer the common flat-Earth call of “show me the curve” are regularly dismissed as hoaxes and lies.

Now, Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company has apparently joined the ranks of the hoaxers and liars, the flat-Earthers say. On Twitter, flat-Earth accounts posted about “FakeX” and insisted that photos of Starman against a round Earth were Photoshopped. On Starman’s live YouTube feed, chatters trolled one another with taunts about how the video proved flat-Earthers wrong, or was part of a vast conspiracy, depending on who was doing the trolling — flat-Earth opponents or believers.     

In the thread following The Flat Earth Society’s tweet, the person in charge of the feed referred most challengers to the organization’s Wiki page, where members posit that the planet is a flat disk with the North Pole at the center and an ice wall (what most people know as Antarctica) skirting the edge.

Believe your eyes

It’s impossible to say how many people actually believe that the Earth is flat — especially online, where trolls and true believers are difficult to distinguish. The Flat Earth Society lists 555 members, and the organizer of a flat-Earth conference that took place in November 2017 in North Carolina told Live Science that about 500 people attended.

Experts in conspiracy belief say that, despite their strange insistence on ignoring more than 2,000 years of scientific observation, flat-Earth theorists may be fairly similar to believers in other conspiracies: They tend to be drawn to these beliefs out of the sense of control and special knowledge they confer, and the believers tend to like black-and-white versions of the world in which clear “bad guys” try to pull the wool over the eyes of the “good guys.”

Some flat-Earth believers are motivated by their interpretations of the Bible as saying the Earth is flat. (The organizer of November’s flat-Earth conference is a Christian creationist.) Others simply don’t trust anything they can’t see with their own eyes. There’s a name for this, the Zetetic method,which holds personal sensory experiences above all other forms of information gathering. Starting from this mindset, nothing NASA or Musk releases can be considered trustworthy; only going into space to find the curve with one’s own eyes counts.

Unfortunately, that’s not so easy to pull off.

Original article on Live Science.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a multi-nation construction project that is the largest single structure humans ever put into space. Its main construction was completed between 1998 and 2011, although the station continually evolves to include new missions and experiments. It has been continuously occupied since Nov. 2, 2000.

As of January 2018, 230 individuals from 18 countries have visited the International Space Station. Top participating countries include the United States (145 people) and Russia (46 people). Astronaut time and research time on the space station is allocated to space agencies according to how much money or resources (such as modules or robotics) that they contribute. The ISS includes contributions from 15 nations. NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia) and the European Space Agency are the major partners of the space station who contribute most of the funding; the other partners are the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Current plans call for the space station to be operated through at least 2024, with the partners discussing a possible extension until 2028. Afterwards, plans for the space station are not clearly laid out. It could be deorbited, or recycled for future space stations in orbit.

Crews aboard the ISS are assisted by mission control centers in Houston and Moscow and a payload control center in Huntsville, Ala. Other international mission control centers support the space station from Japan, Canada and Europe. The ISS can also be controlled from mission control centers in Houston or Moscow. [Photos: Space Station’s Expedition 32 Mission]

Finding the space station in the sky

The space station flies at an average altitude of 248 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. It circles the globe every 90 minutes at a speed of about 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h). In one day, the station travels about the distance it would take to go from Earth to the moon and back. 

The space station can rival the brilliant planet Venus in brightness and appears as a bright moving light across the night sky. It can be seen from Earth without the use of a telescope by night sky observers who know when and where to look. You can use our Satellite Tracker page powered by N2YO.com to find out when to see the space station. 

Crew composition and activities

The ISS generally holds crews of between three and six people (the full six-person size was possible after 2009, when the station facilities could support it). But crew sizes have varied over the years. After the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 that grounded flights for several years, crews were as small as two people due to the reduced capacity to launch people into space on the smaller Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The space station has also housed as many as 13 people several times, but only for a few days during crew changeovers or space shuttle visits.

The space shuttle fleet retired in 2011, leaving Soyuz as the only current method to bring people to the ISS. Three astronauts fly to the space station in Soyuz spacecraft and spend about six months there at a time. Sometimes, mission lengths vary a little due to spacecraft scheduling or special events (such as the one-year crew that stayed on the station between 2015 and 2016.) If the crew needs to evacuate the station, they can return to Earth aboard two Russian Soyuz vehicles docked to the ISS.

Starting in 2019 or 2020, the commercial crew vehicles Dragon (by SpaceX) and CST-100 (by Boeing) are expected to increase ISS crew numbers because they can bring up more astronauts at a time than Soyuz. When the U.S. commercial vehicles are available, demand for Soyuz will decrease because NASA will purchase fewer seats for its astronauts from the Russians.

Astronauts spend most of their time on the ISS performing experiments and maintenance, and at least two hours of every day are allocated to exercise and personal care. They also occasionally perform spacewalks, conduct media/school events for outreach, and post updates to social media, as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, an ISS commander, did in 2013. (However, the first astronaut to tweet from space was Mike Massimino, who did it from a space shuttle in May 2009.)

The ISS is a platform for long-term research for human health, which NASA bills as a key stepping stone to letting humans explore other solar system destinations such as the moon or Mars. Human bodies change in microgravity, including alterations to muscles, bones, the cardiovascular system and the eyes; many scientific investigations are trying to characterize how severe the changes are and whether they can be reversed. (Eye problems in particular are vexing the agency, as their cause is unclear and astronauts are reporting permanent changes to vision after returning to Earth.)

Astronauts also participate in testing out commercial products – such as an espresso machine or 3D printers – or doing biological experiments, such as on rodents or plants, which the astronauts can grow and sometimes eat in space. 

Crews are not only responsible for science, but also for maintaining the station. Sometimes, this requires that they venture on spacewalks to perform repairs. From time to time, these repairs can be urgent — such as when a part of the ammonia system fails, which has happened a couple of times. Spacewalk safety procedures were changed after a potentially deadly 2013 incident when astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet filled with water while he was working outside the station. NASA now responds quickly to “water incursion” incidents. It also has added pads to the spacesuits to soak up the liquid, and a tube to provide an alternate breathing location should the helmet fill with water. 

NASA is also testing technology that could supplement or replace astronaut spacewalks. One example is Robonaut. A prototype currently on board the station is able to flip switches and do other routine tasks under supervision, and may be modified at some point to work “outside” as well. [Infographic: Meet Robonaut 2, NASA’s Space Droid]

Records in space

The ISS has had several notable milestones over the years, when it comes to crews:

• Most consecutive days in space by an American: 340 days, which happened when Scott Kelly took part in a one-year mission to the International Space Station in 2015-16 (along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko). The space agencies did a comprehensive suite of experiments on the astronauts, including a “twin study” with Kelly and his Earth-bound former astronaut twin, Mark. NASA has expressed interest in more long-duration missions, although none have yet been announced.
• Longest single spaceflight by a woman: 289 days, during American astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 2016-17 mission aboard the space station.
• Most total time spent in space by a woman: Again, that’s Peggy Whitson, who racked up most of her 665 days in space on the ISS.
• Most women in space at once: This happened in April 2010 when women from two spaceflight missions met at the ISS. This included Tracy Caldwell Dyson (who flew on a Soyuz spacecraft for a long-duration mission) and NASA astronauts Stephanie Wilson and Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger and Japan’s Naoko Yamazaki, who arrived aboard the space shuttle Discovery on its brief STS-131 mission.
• Biggest space gathering: 13 people, during NASA’s STS-127 shuttle mission aboard Endeavour in 2009. (It’s been tied a few times during later missions.)
• Longest single spacewalk: 8 hours and 56 minutes during STS-102, for an ISS construction mission in 2001. NASA astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms participated.
• Longest Russian spacewalk: 8 hours and 13 minutes during Expedition 54, to repair an ISS antenna. Russian astronauts Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov participated. 

Structure

The space station, including its large solar arrays, spans the area of a U.S. football field, including the end zones, and weighs 861,804 lbs. (391,000 kilograms), not including visiting vehicles. The complex now has more livable room than a conventional five-bedroom house, and has two bathrooms, gym facilities and a 360-degree bay window. Astronauts have also compared the space station’s living space to the cabin of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

The International Space Station was taken into space piece-by-piece and gradually built in orbit using spacewalking astronauts and robotics. Most missions used NASA’s space shuttle to carry up the heavier pieces, although some individual modules were launched on single-use rockets. The ISS includes modules and connecting nodes that contain living quarters and laboratories, as well as exterior trusses that provide structural support, and solar panels that provide power. 

The first module, the Russia Zarya, launched on Nov. 20, 1998, on a Proton rocket. Two weeks later, space shuttle flight STS-88 launched the NASA Unity/Node 1 module. Astronauts performed spacewalks during STS-88 to connect the two parts of the station together; later, other pieces of the station were launched on rockets or in the space shuttle cargo bay. [Rare Photos: Space Shuttle at Space Station]. Some of the other major modules and components include:

• The truss, airlocks and solar panels (launched in stages throughout the ISS lifetime; docking adapters were launched in 2017 for new commercial spacecraft)
• Zvezda (Russia; launched in 2000)
• Destiny Laboratory Module (NASA; launched 2001)
• Canadarm2 robotic arm (CSA; launched 2001). It was originally used only for spacewalks and remote-controlled repairs. Today it also is regularly used to berth cargo spacecraft to the space station – spacecraft that can’t use the other ports.
• Harmony/Node 2 (NASA; launched 2007)
• Columbus orbital facility (ESA; launched 2008)
• Dextre robotic hand (CSA; launched 2008)
• Japanese Experiment Module or Kibo (launched in stages between 2008-09)
• Cupola window and Tranquility/Node 3 (launched 2010)
• Leonardo Permanent Multipurpose Module (ESA; launched for permanent residency in 2011, although it was used before that to bring cargo to and from the station)
• Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (private module launched in 2016)

Spacecraft for the space station

Besides the space shuttle and Soyuz, the space station has been visited by many other kinds of spacecraft. Uncrewed Progress (Russia) vehicles make regular visits to the station. Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle and Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle used to do visits to the ISS as well, until their programs were retired. 

NASA began developing commercial cargo spacecraft to the space station under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, which lasted from 2006 to 2013. Starting in 2012, the first commercial spacecraft, SpaceX’s Dragon, made a visit to the space station. Visits continue today with Dragon and Orbital ATK’s Antares spacecraft under the first stage of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program. Dragon, Antares and Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser all have received CRS-2 contracts expected to cover flights between 2019 and 2024.  

The International Space Station is the largest structure in space ever built by humans. Let’s see how much you know about the basics of this science laboratory in the sky.

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Additional reporting by Space.com Reference Editor Tim Sharp.

The seven Earth-size planets around the distant star TRAPPIST-1 are “tugging” on each other as they travel around their parent star.By carefully observing those tugs, scientists were able to gather information about the planets’ composition, and found that some of the TRAPPIST-1 worlds could have as much as 250 times more water than the amount in all of Earth’s oceans, according to a new study.

Figuring out the composition of these planets is important in determining whether they could support alien life. But it’s tricky to analyze them. For starters, the system is 39 light-years away, and sending a spacecraft there is impossible with today’s technology. To put TRAPPIST-1’s distance into perspective, a spacecraft at the outer edges of the solar system, like the Voyager 1 probe, would still have to travel for over 73,000 years just to get to Proxima b, which is only about 4 light-years from Earth.

Therefore, researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland have taken creative steps to understand what each TRAPPIST-1 world looks like. The TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets are packed in a tight orbit around their dim parent star, and are so close to one another, all of their orbits would fit inside Mercury’s orbit of the sun. As the planets — which are namedTRAPPIST-1b, c, d, e, f, g and h —travel tightly, their gravity can make slight changes to the others’ orbits. An international team of scientists, led by Simon Grimm of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, was able to detect this phenomenon. [Photographing an Exoplanet: How Hard Can it Be?]

“In the TRAPPIST-1 system, the planets are so close together that they perturb each other,” Grimm said in a statement from the University of Bern. “This causes a slight shift in the times of each transit.” (A “transit” refers to when the planet appears to pass in front of its parent star as seen from Earth. Thousands of exoplanets have been detected and studied using the transit method.) By simulating the planetary orbits of TRAPPIST-1 with an algorithm until the computational model matched what astronomers had observed in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the team could estimate the masses of the planets. From the mass data, the team could then deduce the planets’ individual densities and compositions.

Intriguingly, they found that each of the five lightest planets could have about 250 times more water than the amount in Earth’s oceans according to a statement from NASA. Up to 5 percent of their composition could be water, whereas only 0.02 percent of Earth is water.

TRAPPIST-1c, d and e lie close to the star’s “habitable zone,” or the region where a star receives enough radiation that water might be able to exist as a liquid on its surface. TRAPPIST-1b, the innermost planet, and TRAPPIST-1c likely have rocky interiors and atmospheres denser than Earth’s, according to the study. Of all the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets, TRAPPIST-1d is the lightest, at about 30 percent Earth’s mass. This may mean it has a large atmosphere, an ice layer or an ocean, but scientists cannot yet discern that. TRAPPIST-1e is likely a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere. TRAPPIST-1f, g and h are so distant from their parent star that their surfaces are probably covered in ice.

“We were able to measure precisely the density of exoplanets that are similar to Earth in terms of their size, mass and irradiation, with an uncertainty of less than 10 percent, which is a first and a decisive step in the characterisation of potential habitability,” said Brice-Olivier Demory, a professor at the Center for Space and Habitability and co-author of the study, which was published in late January 2018 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e yielded another interesting finding: It is the most similar to Earth in the amount of radiation it receives from its parent star, its size and its density. And liquid water could exist on its surface.

The discovery of TRAPPIST-1

This chart shows artistic concepts of the seven planets of TRAPPIST-1. It also compares them with Earth, by providing their orbital periods, distances from their star, radii, masses, densities and surface gravity.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

TRAPPIST-1 is a cool dwarf star that Belgian researcher Michaël Gillon observed about two years ago with the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. He made a list of 50 dwarf stars, and because they are small and dim, a planet passing in front of one of them would be more easily seen from Earth. On about the 30th try, he observed the first transit of the planets around TRAPPIST-1, named after the telescope. By taking more measurements with the Himalayan Chandra Telescope in India, and with subsequent observations using the Spitzer Space Telescope, Gillon got a good sense of how often the seven planets orbited their parent star. [Exoplanet Tour: Meet the 7 Earth-Size Planets of TRAPPIST-1]

The size of the planet can also be estimated by looking at how much less radiation Earth sees from the star when a planet passes in front of it, according to a statement from the University of Bern. But with the transit method, scientists can’t discern how dense the planet is. And density is important, because it can offer clues as to what a planet is made of.

But that’s where the close orbits of TRAPPIST-1 become especially handy. Because the planets are packed together, they slightly alter the timing of one another’s ”years.” Those variations in orbital timing are then used to estimate how heavy a planet is. When this mass is calculated and compared to the planet’s estimated radius, the researchers can figure out the density.

This artist’s rendition shows what the surface of a planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We now know more about TRAPPIST-1 than any other planetary system apart from our own,” said Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California and co-author of the new study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. “The improved densities in our study dramatically refine our understanding of the nature of these mysterious worlds.”

There is still much to learn about the TRAPPIST-1 system. Knowing a planet’s density doesn’t necessarily tell scientists what it’s like on the surface of those planets. For example, the moon and Mars have the same density, but their surfaces are very different, according to the NASA statement.More precise findings about the TRAPPIST-1 planets’ atmospheres and compositions can be obtained from upcoming projects, like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2019.

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A long-lost-but-recently-rediscovered NASA satellite appears to have a fully charged battery and is “in good shape” overall, the agency said in an update about the craft yesterday (Feb. 5).

On Jan. 20, amateur astronomer Scott Tilly picked up transmission signals from what appeared to be NASA’s Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite, which the agency lost contact with in 2005. NASA confirmed the probe’s identity on Jan. 30 and is now investigating the spacecraft remotely to see how healthy it is. 

“The next step is to attempt to turn on the science instruments — but this could take some time,” NASA said in a statement. This is because the agency needs to re-create the original 12-year-old software used to operate the instruments. “Additionally, as computers have evolved greatly in that time, work is being done to find a machine that can run the instrument commanding software,” according to the statement. [In Photos: Spotting Satellites and Spaceships from Earth]

IMAGE was launched in March 2000 for a planned two-year mission. It exceeded its lifetime and was operating through 2005, when NASA lost contact unexpectedly and the mission ended. 

This view of an aurora over the South Pole in 2003, caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun, is based on data from the IMAGE satellite. The data is laid over a digital animation of Earth.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman

Now, NASA engineers are starting to understand what went wrong with the spacecraft. On Thanksgiving Day 2004, IMAGE underwent an unexpected reboot and lost one set of its redundant hardware. (Satellites usually have redundant hardware that are called “A side” and “B side,” allowing controllers to continue a mission even if one set fails, according to NASA.) While it appears the A side of the electronics initially failed following the 2004 reboot, the A side is now transmitting, but the B side is not. Engineers are trying to figure out why the spacecraft rebooted again and began transmitting, and why only one side of the onboard electronics is working. 

“The ultimate cause of the [recent] reboot is still not known,” NASA officials added.

Imaging the magnetosphere

Earth’s plasmasphere and plume as measured by IMAGE’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager.

Credit: Sandel, B. R., et al., Space Sci. Rev., 109, 25, 2003

Meanwhile, NASA recently paid tribute to IMAGE’s important discoveries about Earth’s space weather. During its operational lifetime, the mission used an imaging technique called energetic neutral atom, or ENA, to make large-scale observations of Earth’s magnetosphere, or the region around the planet where charged particles are controlled by magnetic field lines.

ENA works by exploiting fundamental physics. When electrically charged particles (such as ions) crash into neutral particles, the electrically charged particles can “steal” electrons from the neutral atoms, “becoming neutral themselves,” NASA said in another statement. Then the new neutral atoms keep flying into space in the same direction in which they flew when the collision occurred.

IMAGE would record these particle movements at a large scale to see how plasma (a gas with free- floating charged particles and charged atoms) flowed around the Earth. One of IMAGE’s discoveries was confirming a “plasmaspheric plume” around Earth. This is a backflow of plasma particles that flow toward the sun from the Earth’s dayside. Models predicted this movement before, but IMAGE was the first spacecraft to see it, according to the statement.

An illustration of Earth’s plasmasphere, reconstructed from IMAGE data.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman

“It’s as if you’re driving in a convertible,” said Thomas Moore, the mission scientist for IMAGE, as well as the lead for the spacecraft’s Low Energy Neutral Atom (LENA) Imager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in the statement. “The air is rushing against the car in one direction, but your hair will blow towards the windshield.”

NASA officials they are “starting to recreate” a small control center that will command the satellite and assess the functionality of the instruments. 

“Should any of the instruments be functional, NASA will convene a panel of external scientists to assess the science potential in the context of constrained budgets for operating spacecraft,” according to the statement. 

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.