What Is A Typical Day In The International Space Station Like?? I Cant Help But Express My Admiration

Answer Time with NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a NASA astronaut? On Thursday, Oct. 29, NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson will answer your questions! She’ll explain how it takes the NASA Village to help train for her mission to space, what the challenges of living in space are and what it’s like to be a NASA astronaut.

Enter your questions here. The Answer Time begins at 3 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 29.

Fun facts about NASA Astronaut Peggy Whitson:

Astronaut Whitson was selected as an Astronaut Candidate in April 1996, and started training in August of the same year.

After completing two years of training and evaluation, she served as the lead for the Crew Test Support Team in Russia from 1998 to 1999.

Astronaut Whitson completed two six-month tours of duty aboard the International Space Station.

She has accumulated 377 days in space between two missions, which is the most for any woman.

Astronaut Whitson has performed a total of six career spacewalks, adding up to 39 hours and 46 minutes! She is also one of only a handful of people to perform spacewalks in both Russian and US spacesuits.

She is scheduled to launch in late 2016 as part of the Expedition 50/51.

Firsts:

Science Officer of the International Space Station

Female Commander for the International Space Station

Female to serve as Chief of the Astronaut Office

Follow her on social media to see how it takes a NASA Village to train her for her upcoming mission: Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. 

The 2021 Perseid Meteor Shower Is Here!

Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 

The Perseids are at their peak this week!

The Perseid meteor shower, one of the biggest meteor showers of the year, will be at its brightest early in the morning on Thursday, August 12, 2021 and Friday, August 13, 2021. Read on for some tips on how to watch the night sky this week – and to find out: what exactly are the Perseids, anyway?

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Your best chance to spot the Perseids will be between 2 AM and dawn (local time) the morning of August 12 or 13. Find a dark spot, avoid bright lights (yes, that includes your phone) and get acclimated to the night sky.

Your eyes should be at peak viewing capacity after about 30 minutes; with a clear, dark sky, you could see more than 40 Perseids an hour! If you’re not an early bird, you can try and take a look soon after sunset (around 9 PM) on the 12th, though you may not see as many Perseids then.

Credit: NASA/MEO

If it’s too cloudy, or too bright, to go skywatching where you are, just stay indoors and watch the Perseids online!

Our Meteor Watch program will be livestreaming the Perseids from Huntsville, Alabama on Facebook (weather permitting), starting around 11 p.m. EDT on August 11 and continuing through sunrise.

So… why are they called the Perseids?

Because all of a meteor shower’s meteors have similar orbits, they appear to come from the same place in the sky – a point called the radiant. 

The radiant for the Perseids, as you might guess from the name, is in the constellation Perseus, found near Aries and Taurus in the night sky.

But they’re not actually coming from Perseus, right?

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Right! The Perseids are actually fragments of the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits within our solar system.

If you want to learn more about the Perseids, visit our Watch the Skies blog or check out our monthly “What’s Up” video series. Happy viewing!

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Parker Solar Probe is Go for Launch

Tomorrow, Aug. 11, we're launching a spacecraft to touch the Sun.

The first chance to launch Parker Solar Probe is 3:33 a.m. EDT on Aug. 11 from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch coverage on NASA TV starts at 3 a.m. EDT at nasa.gov/live.

After launch, Parker Solar Probe begins its daring journey to the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, going closer to the Sun than any spacecraft in history and facing brutal heat and radiation.

Though Parker Solar Probe weighs a mere 1,400 pounds — pretty light for a spacecraft — it's launching aboard one of the world's most powerful rockets, a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy with a third stage added.

Even though you might think the Sun's massive means things would just fall into it, it's surprisingly difficult to actually go there. Any object leaving Earth starts off traveling at about 67,000 miles per hour, same as Earth — and most of that is in a sideways direction, so you have to shed most of that sideways speed to make it to the Sun. All that means that it takes 55 times more launch energy to go to the Sun than it does to go to Mars. On top of its powerful launch vehicle, Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus gravity assists to shed sideways speed.

Even though Parker Solar Probe will lose a lot of sideways speed, it'll still be going incredibly fast as its orbit draws closer to the Sun throughout its seven-year mission. At its fastest, Parker Solar Probe will travel at 430,000 miles per hour — fast enough to get from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. in one second — setting the record for the fastest spacecraft in history.

But the real challenge was to keep the spacecraft from frying once it got there.

We’ve always wanted to send a mission to the corona, but we literally haven’t had the technology that can protect a spacecraft and its instruments from its scorching heat. Only recent advances have enabled engineers to build a heat shield that will protect the spacecraft on this journey of extremes — a tricky feat that requires withstanding the Sun’s intense radiation on the front and staying cool at the back, so the spacecraft and instruments can work properly.

The 4.5-inches-thick heat shield is built like a sandwich. There’s a thin layer of carbon material like you might find in your golf clubs or tennis rackets, carbon foam, and then another thin piece of carbon-carbon on the back. Even while the Sun-facing side broils at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the back of the shield will remain a balmy 85 degrees — just above room temperature. There are so few particles in this region that it's a vacuum, so blocking the Sun's radiation goes a long way towards keeping the spacecraft cool.

Parker Solar Probe is also our first mission to be named after a living individual: Dr. Eugene Parker, famed solar physicist who in 1958 first predicted the existence of the solar wind.

"Solar wind" is what Dr. Parker dubbed the stream of charged particles that flows constantly from the Sun, bathing Earth and our entire solar system in the Sun’s magnetic fields. Parker Solar Probe’s flight right through the corona allows it to observe the birth of the very solar wind that Dr. Parker predicted, right as it speeds up and over the speed of sound.  

The corona is where solar material is heated to millions of degrees and where the most extreme eruptions on the Sun occur, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which fling particles out to space at incredible speeds near the speed of light. These explosions can also spark space weather storms near Earth that can endanger satellites and astronauts, disrupt radio communications and, at their most severe, trigger power outages.

Thanks to Parker Solar Probe’s landmark mission, solar scientists will be able to see the objects of their study up close and personal for the very first time.

Up until now, all of our studies of the corona have been remote — that is, taken from a distance, rather than at the mysterious region itself. Scientists have been very creative to glean as much as possible from their remote data, but there’s nothing like actually sending a probe to the corona to see what’s going on.

And scientists aren’t the only ones along for the adventure — Parker Solar Probe holds a microchip carrying the names of more than 1.1 million people who signed up to send their name to the Sun. This summer, these names and 1,400 pounds of science equipment begin their journey to the center of our solar system.

Three months later in November 2018, Parker Solar Probe makes its first close approach to the Sun, and in December, it will send back the data. The corona is one of the last places in the solar system where no spacecraft has visited before; each observation Parker Solar Probe makes is a potential discovery.

Stay tuned — Parker Solar Probe is about to take flight.

Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

Unveiling the Center of Our Milky Way Galaxy

We captured an extremely crisp infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Spanning more than 600 light-years, this panorama reveals details within the dense swirls of gas and dust in high resolution, opening the door to future research into how massive stars are forming and what’s feeding the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s core.

Among the features coming into focus are the jutting curves of the Arches Cluster containing the densest concentration of stars in our galaxy, as well as the Quintuplet Cluster with stars a million times brighter than our Sun. Our galaxy’s black hole takes shape with a glimpse of the fiery-looking ring of gas surrounding it.

The new view was made by the world’s largest airborne telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Over a 22-hour period (May 2-3, 2017), strands of plasma at the sun’s edge shifted and twisted back and forth. In this close-up, the strands are being manipulated by strong magnetic forces associated with active regions on the sun. 

To give a sense of scale, the strands hover above the sun more than several times the size of Earth! The images were taken in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light. 

Learn more: http://go.nasa.gov/2qT2C4B

Credits: NASA/SDO

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Hi! When did you know that you wanted to become an astronaut?

As a kid, I thought being an astronaut was the coolest thing, but I never thought I’d be selected. While working at the CIA, I decided to go out and apply because I thought it was my last chance to actually apply.

What’s your favorite black hole fact that you like to share with people?

Question: would you rather be on the beach or would you rather gawk at it from space? For some, it’s a tough choice.

Astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Space Agency recently took this image of Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas. He and his three crew mates, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker, are currently living and working aboard the International Space Station for a six-month science mission. The crew launched on Nov. 15 from Kennedy Space Center and are conducting a number of scientific research, including Earth observation.

Every 90 minutes, the International Space Station completes one orbit around Earth. Because Earth rotates below them while they orbit, the crew get to see most of their beautiful blue marble of a planet from the unique vantage point of space. By photographing Earth from about 250 miles above the surface, astronauts can record phenomena such as storms in real time, and even provide input to ground teams. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

7 Things You Need to Know About Small Satellites

1. Small satellites is the umbrella term for describing any satellite that is the size of an economy-sized washing machine all the way down to a CubeSat, which you can hold in your hand.

2. CubeSats come in multiple sizes defined by the U, which stands for unit. Making it the Unit unit. 1U CubeSats are cubes 4 inches (10 cm) on a side, weighing as little as 4 pounds. A 3U CubeSat is three 1Us hooked together, resembling a flying loaf of bread. A 6U CubeSat is two 3Us joined at the hip, like a flying cereal box. These are the three most common configurations.

Photo courtesy of the University of Michigan 

3. CubeSats were developed by researchers at California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University who wanted a standardized format to make launching them into space easier and to be small enough for students to get involved in designing, building and launching a satellite.

4. Small satellites often hitch a ride to space with another mission. If there’s room on the rocket of a larger mission, they’re in. CubeSats in particular deploy from a p-pod – poly-picosatellite orbital deployer – tucked on the underside of the upper stage of the rocket near the engine bell.

5. Small sats test technology at lower costs. Their small size and the relatively short amount of time it takes to design and build a small satellite means that if we want to test a new sensor component or a new way of making an observation from space, we can do so without being in the hole if it doesn’t work out. There’s no environment on Earth than can adequately recreate space, so sometimes the only way to know if new ideas work is to send them up and see.

6. Small sats force us to think of new ways to approach old problems. With a satellite the size of a loaf of bread, a cereal box, or a microwave oven, we don’t have a lot of room for the science instrument or power to run it. That means thinking outside the box. In addition to new and creative designs that include tape measures, customized camera lenses, and other off-the-shelf parts, we have to think of new ways of gathering all the data we need. One thing we’re trying out is flying small sat constellations – a bunch of the same kind of satellite flying in formation. Individually, each small sat sees a small slice of Earth below. Put them together and we start to see the big picture.

7. Small sats won’t replace big satellites. Size does matter when it comes to power, data storage, and how precise your satellite instrument is. Small satellites come with trade-offs that often mean coarser image resolution and shorter life-spans than their bigger sister satellites. However, small sat data can complement data collected by big satellites by covering more ground, by passing over more frequently, by flying in more dangerous orbits that big satellites avoid, and by continuing data records if there’s a malfunction or a wait between major satellite missions. Together they give us a more complete view of our changing planet.

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What did the astronauts on the International Space Station see when they looked upon the Earth from orbit in 2017? See some of the top Earth observations from the year and download these pics, as chosen by our Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.   Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 55 years. Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 1.5 million photographs of the Earth. Today, the International Space Station continues this tradition of Earth observation from human-tended spacecraft. Operational since November 2000, the space station is well suited for documenting Earth features. The orbiting laboratory maintains an altitude of about 250 miles above the Earth, providing an excellent stage for observing most populated areas of the world. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.