Space Shuttle Mission

The International Space Station population will grow to a record 13 today once the space shuttle Endeavour completes its orbital chase and docks at 12:55 p.m. CDT.

Today’s wake-up call, “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles, was chosen for Commander Mark Polansky. He and the rest of the shuttle crew – Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Chris Cassidy, Tim Kopra, Tom Marshburn, Canadian Julie Payette and Dave Wolf – were awakened at 6:03 a.m.

The astronauts aboard Endeavour will begin rendezvous preparations at 7:23 a.m. and perform the terminal initiation engine burn at 10:17 a.m. to begin the shuttle’s final approach. All of the tools the crew will use to accomplish the rendezvous checked out as expected Thursday.

Meanwhile, on the station, Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Mike Barratt are ready to document the condition of Endeavour’s heat protection tiles with photos as Polansky guides the shuttle through a slow back flip at a distance of 600 feet. Those digital images will be downlinked to Mission Control and evaluated along with data from Thursday’s 3-D scans of the shuttle’s reinforced carbon-carbon thermal protection materials.

Once docked, Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Roman Romanenko of Russia, Bob Thirsk of the Canadian Space Agency and Frank De Winne of the European Space Agency will join their Expedition 20 colleagues in opening hatches at 2:03 p.m. to begin 11 days of docked operations.

After a brief greeting and thorough safety briefing for the visiting crew, Kopra’s specially fitted seat liner will be transferred to one of the two Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station and he will become the newest Expedition 20 crew member. Wakata will be returning home aboard Endeavour after more than four months aboard the station.

Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video by NASA

NASA released Thursday newly restored video from the July 20, 1969, live television broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. The release commemorates the 40th anniversary of the first mission to land astronauts on the moon.

The initial video release, part of a larger Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project, features 15 key moments from the historic lunar excursion of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

A team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources for the restoration effort. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA's Sydney, Australia, video switching center, where down-linked television from Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson that had not been viewed for 36 years.

"The restoration is ongoing and may produce even better video," said Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11. "The restoration project is scheduled to be completed in September and will provide the public, future historians, and the National Archives with the highest quality video of this historic event."

NASA contracted with Lowry Digital of Burbank, Calif., which specializes in restoring aging Hollywood films and video, to take the highest quality video available from these recordings, select the best for digitization, and significantly enhance the video using the company's proprietary software technology and other restoration techniques.

Under the initial effort, Lowry restored 15 scenes representing the most significant moments of the three and a half hours that Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the lunar surface. NASA released the video Thursday at a news conference at the Newseum in Washington.

On July 20, 1969, as Armstrong made the short step off the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module onto the powdery lunar surface, a global community of hundreds of millions of people witnessed one of humankind's most remarkable achievements live on television.

The black and white images of Armstrong and Aldrin bounding around the moon were provided by a single small video camera aboard the lunar module. The camera used a non-standard scan format that commercial television could not broadcast.

NASA used a scan converter to optically and electronically adapt these images to a standard U.S. broadcast TV signal. The tracking stations converted the signals and transmitted them using microwave links, Intelsat communications satellites, and AT&T analog landlines to Mission Control in Houston. By the time the images appeared on international television, they were substantially degraded.

At tracking stations in Australia and the United States, engineers recorded data beamed to Earth from the lunar module onto one-inch telemetry tapes. The tapes were recorded as a backup if the live transmission failed or if the Apollo Project needed the data later. Each tape contained 14 tracks of data, including bio-medical, voice, and other information; one channel was reserved for video.

A three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time.

Inspects Heat Shield, Prepares for Station Docking By Shuttle Crew

Seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavour awakened at 7:03 a.m. to begin a day of heat shield inspections and preparations for Friday’s rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station.

The song “These Are Days” by the band 10,000 Maniacs emanated from speakers inside Endeavour’s crew cabin, a wake-up call targeted especially for Mission Specialist Tim Kopra.

Commander Mark Polansky and Pilot Doug Hurley will start their day with an Orbital Maneuvering System engine firing to refine Endeavour’s path toward the station. A second burn is planned at the end of the crew’s day. In addition, the crew will set up a camera in the shuttle’s docking tunnel, extend the Orbiter Docking System ring and check out the hand-held laser range-finder and other equipment that will be used to provide precise distance and approach information for the upcoming docking.

Mission Specialists Chris Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Dave Wolf, Kopra and Julie Payette of the Canadian Space Agency will focus on inspections of Endeavour’s heat shield using the shuttle’s robotic arm and the Orbiter Boom Sensor System.

Spacewalkers Wolf, Cassidy, Marshburn and Kopra also will begin checking out the space suits they will wear and the tools they will use on the mission’s five spacewalks.

Aboard the station, Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Michael Barratt, Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Roman Romanenko, Robert Thirsk of the Canadian Space Agency and Frank De Winne of the European Space Agency, will spend the day packing and preparing for the arrival of visitors. They’ll review photography procedures for documenting the condition of the shuttle’s heat protection tiles as it completes a rendezvous pitch maneuver during its approach to the station.

T-3 Hours and Holding; Tanking Complete

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the countdown to launch of space shuttle Endeavour on its STS-127 has entered a two-hour, 30-minute built-in hold at T-3 hours. This hold will last until 2:08 p.m. EDT.

Tanking operations are complete. with both propellants -- liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen -- now in stable replenish. The loading of the space shuttle's external tank began at 8:38 a.m. and proceeded smoothly throughout the three-hour process.

Weather at Kennedy remains at 60-percent chance for favorable weather for an early-evening liftoff at 6:03 p.m. The primary weather concerns for launch are the potential for showers and thunderstorms near the Shuttle Landing Facility.

Full countdown coverage will begin at 12:30 p.m. on NASA Television and NASA's Launch Blog.

STS-127 Mission Overview

The 16-day mission will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Astronauts will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will allow experiments to be exposed to space.

The STS-127 crew members are Commander Mark Polansky, Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Dave Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Tim Kopra and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette. Kopra will join the space station crew and replace Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. Wakata will return to Earth on Endeavour to conclude a three-month stay at the station.

Nasa Radar Tandem Searches For Ice On The Moon

With the Mini-RF instrument, a synthetic aperture radar flying aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, the space agency now has two powerful tools searching for ice on the moon.

This week operators powered up and began preparing Mini-RF (Miniature Radio Frequency) for its primary mission, to create detailed images of the moon’s darkest areas, scan the lunar surface for hints of water ice and demonstrate new communications technologies.

LRO, launched June 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., and reached the moon June 25. Its seven science instruments now are being checked out and brought online.

The LRO Mini-RF is a version of the radar already circling the moon on the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Since Chandrayaan-1 orbital operations began in late 2008, its Mini-RF, also known as Mini-SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), has mapped about 80 percent of both of the moon’s poles and provided images of areas never seen from Earth. Its second imaging period is set to begin in mid-August, opening the possibility of unique, joint measurements between Chandrayaan-1 and LRO that would enhance the hunt for ice.

“The Mini-RF team has reached a significant milestone, two payloads now in operation at the moon, “says Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF program, from NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. “Having two very complementary instruments orbiting the moon on two different spacecraft shows how truly international the exploration of the moon can be.”

Mini-RF sends radio pulses to the moon from the orbiting spacecraft and then precisely records the radio echoes that bounce back from the surface, along with their timing and frequency. From these data scientists can build images of the moon that not only show the terrain in areas they otherwise couldn’t see, such as the permanently-shadowed areas near the lunar poles, but also contain information on the physical nature of the terrain.

“We’re uncovering the moon’s coldest, darkest regions, looking into craters and at other mysterious areas that never receive sunlight, yet preserve materials from the solar system’s earliest days,” says Ben Bussey, Mini-RF deputy principal investigator from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. “The exploration potential of these regions is also significant, since any ice deposits we locate would be valuable to future human lunar explorers.”

The Mini-RF instruments were designed, built and tested by a team from across the United States. APL hosts the operations center and performed the final integration and testing on both instruments. They were developed and built by the Naval Air Warfare Center and several other commercial and government contributors, including Sandia National Laboratories, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. Instrument principal investigators Stewart Nozette (LRO) and Paul Spudis (Chandrayaan-1) are from the Universities Space Research Association’s Lunar and Planetary Institute. NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, manages the Mini-RF program.

Rover Engineers Test More Maneuvers

Mars Exploration Rover team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., prepare an experiment on July 13, 2009, for assessing how a test rover moves when embedded in loose soil and commanded to drive backward with wheels turned.

Engineers checking possible rover movements to get Spirit out of the "Troy" sand trap on Mars are evaluating how a comparable rover at JPL fares in a crablike backward drive, with all four corner wheels turned 60 degrees toward the right.

This is the fifth of 11 maneuvers on the current testing list. Others ahead are crabbing backward with wheels turned 20 degrees to the right, a tight forward right arc, a clockwise turn in place, a counterclockwise turn in place, crabbing forward with wheels turned to the left, and driving while steering. Some of the maneuvers might be repeated.

The team is learning how the test rover reacts to various motions in a test sandbox built to simulate Spirit's situation at Troy. The steps eventually sent as driving commands to Spirit may be a combination of some of the 11 maneuvers being tested.

Postponed of Launch of NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavour

Space shuttle Endeavour's launch to the International Space Station has been postponed until Sunday to give technical teams more time to evaluate lightning strikes at the launch pad that occurred during thunderstorms Friday. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:13 p.m. EDT.

Sensors indicted there were 11 lightning strikes within 0.35 miles, which is inside the launch pad's threshold. Teams have seen nothing so far that indicates anything has been affected.

The Mission Management Team will meet at 8 a.m. Sunday to evaluate the latest data. Fueling of the external fuel tank is scheduled to begin at 9:48 a.m. Sunday.

The 16-day STS-127 mission will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Astronauts will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will allow experiments to be exposed to space.

Ozone, Nitrogen Change the Way Rising CO2 Affects Earth's Water

Through a recent modeling experiment, a team of NASA-funded researchers have found that future concentrations of carbon dioxide and ozone in the atmosphere and of nitrogen in the soil are likely to have an important but overlooked effect on the cycling of water from sky to land to waterways.


The researchers concluded that models of climate change may be underestimating how much water is likely to run off the land and back into the sea as atmospheric chemistry changes. Runoff may be as much as 17 percent higher in forests of the eastern United States when models account for changes in soil nitrogen levels and atmospheric ozone exposure.


"Failure to consider the effects of nitrogen limitation and ozone on photosynthesis can lead us to underestimate regional runoff," said Benjamin Felzer, an ecosystem modeler at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "More runoff could mean more contamination and flooding of our waterways. It could also mean fewer droughts than predicted for some areas and more water available for human consumption and farming. Either way, water resource managers need more accurate runoff estimates to plan better for the changes."


Felzer and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., published their findings recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Biogeosciences.


Plants play a significant role in Earth’s water cycle, regulating the amount of water cycling through land ecosystems and how long it stays there. Plants draw in water from the atmosphere and soil, and they discharge it naturally through transpiration, the tail end of photosynthesis when water vapor and oxygen are released into the air.

The amount of water that plants give up depends on how much carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere. Studies have shown that despite a global drop in rainfall over land in the past 50 years, runoff has actually increased.





Water continually circulates from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back again to the ocean, as shown here in an interactive illustration of the basic “hydrological”, or water, cycle. In his study, Felzer shows the influence that CO2, nitrogen and ozone exposure also have on this cycle, factors often overlooked when considering the origins of and changes in runoff beyond those caused by rain and climate.

Credit: NASA JPL-Global Climate Change



Other studies have shown that increasing CO2 is changing how plant "pores," or stomata, discharge water. With elevated CO2 levels, leaf pores contract and sometimes close to conserve internal water reserves. This "stomatal conductance" response increases water use efficiency and reduces the rate of transpiration.

Plants that release less water also take less of it from the environment. With less water being taken up by plants, more water is available for groundwater or runs off the land surface into lakes, streams, and rivers. Along the way, it accumulates excess nutrients and pollutants before emptying into waterways, where it affects the health of fish, algae, and shellfish and contaminate drinking water and beaches. Excess runoff can also contribute to flooding.

Sometimes rising CO2 has the opposite effect, Felzer noted, promoting vegetation growth by increasing the rate of photosynthesis. More plant growth can lead to a thicker canopy of leaves with increased transpiration and less runoff. However, this effect has been shown to be smaller than the effect of reduced stomatal conductance.

Aware of these cycles, Felzer and colleagues used theoretical models to project various future scenarios for the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and what it would mean to the changing water cycle in forests east of the Mississippi River. They found that runoff would increase anywhere from 3 to 6 percent depending on location and the amount of the increase in CO2.

Felzer and colleagues also examined the role of two other variables -- atmospheric ozone and soil-based nitrogen -- in the changing water cycle. Excess ground-level ozone harms the cells responsible for photosynthesis. Reductions in photosynthesis leads to less transpiration and cycling of water through leaves and more water added to runoff.

In most boreal and temperate forests, the rate of photosynthesis is also limited by the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen in the soil. The less nitrogen in the soil, the slower their rate of photosynthesis and transpiration.


"The increase in runoff is even larger when nitrogen is limited and environments are exposed to high ozone levels," said Felzer. In fact, the team found an additional 7 to 10 percent rise in runoff when nitrogen was limited and ozone exposure increased.


"Though this study focuses on Eastern U.S. forests, we know nitrogen and ozone effects are also important in South America and Europe. One region has seen a net increase and the other a net runoff reduction," said co-author Adam Schlosser of the Center for Global Change Science at MIT. "Our environment and quality of life depend on less uncertainty on this front."

NASA Tests Rovers and Oxygen Production Technology in Hawaii

NASA has concluded nearly two weeks of testing equipment and lunar rover concepts in Hawaii. The islands’ volcanic terrain, rock distribution and soil materials provide a high-quality simulation of the moon's polar region. One of many field demonstrations developed by NASA’s Exploration Technology Development Program, these tests provides valuable information and help engineers and scientists spot complications that might not be obvious in laboratories.

The agency's In Situ Resource Utilization Project, which studies ways astronauts can use resources found at landing sites, demonstrated how people might prospect for resources on the moon and make their own oxygen from lunar rocks and soil. NASA's lunar exploration plan currently projects that on-site lunar resources could generate one to two metric tons of oxygen annually. This is roughly the amount of oxygen that four to six people living at a lunar outpost might breathe in a year.

ROxygen and PILOT, or Precursor ISRU Lunar Oxygen Testbed were two technologies that were tested. The two large, complementary systems might produce oxygen from soil on an outpost-sized scale.

A prototype system combines a polar prospecting rover and a drill specifically designed to penetrate the harsh lunar soil. The rover's system demonstrates small-scale oxygen production from regolith. A similar rover could search for water ice and volatile gases such as hydrogen, helium, and nitrogen, in the permanently shadowed craters of the moon's poles. Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh built the rover, which carries equipment known as the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE).

Other tested concepts include a NASA-developed robotic excavator known as Cratos; a new lunar wheel developed by Michelin North America of Greenville, S.C.; a lunar sample coring drill the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology in Canada developed for NASA with support from the Canadian Space Agency, or CSA; an excavator developed by Lockheed Martin of Denver; and a night vision camera called TriDAR for the rover's navigation and drill site selection. Neptec in Canada developed the camera with support from CSA. The tests were hosted by The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems, or PISCES, headquartered at the University of Hawaii, Hilo.

Additional instruments that were field tested will be used to improve understanding of minerals found on the moon. They include a Mossbauer spectrometer from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and the University of Mainz in Germany; an X-ray diffraction unit called mini CheMIN from NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; and a handheld Raman spectrometer CSA provided.

Preparation for the Next Test

Mike Seibert and Sharon Laubach, engineers on the Mars Exploration Rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, check the exact position of a test rover in preparation for the next test of a possible maneuver for Spirit to use on Mars. The test setup at JPL simulates the situation where Spirit is embedded in a patch of soft soil dubbed "Troy," in Mars' Gusev Crater. The July 7, 2009, preparation shown here preceded an assessment of straight-backward driving the next day, one of several possible maneuvers to be assessed in the test sandbox before further driving commands will be sent to Spirit.

Supersonic Technology Named Nasa Commercial Invention of 2008

The 2008 NASA Commercial Invention of the Year is a high temperature resin designed to create composites through low-cost manufacturing processes -- ideal for advanced aerospace vehicles.

Researchers at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., were able to create the unique material, which is ideal for the high temperatures of supersonic flight. The material, known as PETI-330, is used in the development of advanced composite fabrication technology for the agency's aeronautics supersonics program. PETI-330 is patented as "Composition of and Method for Making High Performance Resins for Infusion and Transfer Molding Processes."

In the late 1980s, NASA's High-Speed Research Program began to develop high performance, high temperature resins that could be used to fabricate carbon fiber reinforced composites. The resins potentially would be useful on advanced aerospace vehicle structures and aircraft engine components such as inlets and compressor vanes. A resin called PETI-5 was developed that met a number of the program's goals.

Continued research for a resin that would be useful for the fabrication of composites by low-cost manufacturing methods led to PETI-330. It is the first commercially available, off-the-shelf, high temperature resin that has processing characteristics useful for resin infusion, resin transfer molding and the vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding manufacturing processes.

The finished product of PETI-330 has the strength and high temperature properties ideal for large structures exposed to hot temperatures, offering a combination of processability, high temperature performance and toughness ideal for high performance aerospace vehicles. PETI-330 and the vacuum process are of interest to the aerospace industry because of a combination of weight reduction and manufacturing cost savings.

The inventors, John Connell, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Paul Hergenrother, all from Langley, will be honored at the 2010 NASA Project Management Challenge in Galveston, Texas. Ube America, a division of Ube Industries, Inc., licensed the technology from NASA.