Tag: iss

ESA Officially Cuts Mars Mission Ties With Russia, Moscow Responds Angrily

The European Space Agency (ESA) has officially terminated cooperation with Russia on a mission to put a rover on Mars, with Russia’s space chief furiously responding by banning cosmonauts on the ISS from using a Europe-made robotic arm.

The ESA had previously suspended ties on the joint ExoMars mission, which had planned to use Russian rockets to put Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover on the red planet to drill for signs of life, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher tweeted on Tuesday that because the war and resulting sanctions “continue to prevail”, the agency would “officially terminate” ties with Russia on ExoMars and its landing platform.

 

 

The firebrand head of Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin issued an angry response.

“Has the head of the European Space Agency thought about the work of thousands of scientists and engineers in Europe and Russia which has been ended by this decision? Is he prepared to answer for sabotaging a joint Mars mission?” Rogozin said on Telegram.

“I, in turn, order our crew on the ISS to stop working with the European manipulator ERA,” he added.

Installed just a few months ago, the European Robotic Arm (ERA) is one of three such robots on the International Space Station, but it is the only one that can reach the Russian segment.

The 11-metre long robot, which looks like a pair of compasses, helps by moving payloads inside and outside the ISS, and can also transport spacewalkers “like a cherry-picker crane,” according to the ESA website.

The ExoMars launch had already been suspended once in 2020 due to the pandemic, then plans for a launch in September this year were called off due to the war in March.

Aschbacher said last month he is in “intense discussion” with the US space agency NASA to get the rover to Mars, adding that he was “very confident that we find a good partnership”.



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Boeing’s Starliner Capsule Uncrewed Test Flight Docks Successfully With International Space Station

Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule docked for the first time with the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, completing a major objective in a high stakes do-over test flight into orbit without astronauts aboard.

The rendezvous of the gumdrop-shaped CST-100 Starliner with the orbital research outpost, currently home to a seven-member crew, occurred nearly 26 hours after the capsule was launched from Cape Canaveral US Space Force Base in Florida.

Starliner lifted off on Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket furnished by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance (ULA) and reached its intended preliminary orbit 31 minutes later despite the failure of two onboard thrusters.

Boeing said the two defective thrusters posed no risk to the rest of the spaceflight, which comes after more than two years of delays and costly engineering setbacks in a program designed to give NASA another vehicle for sending its astronauts to and from orbit.

Docking with ISS took place at 8:28pm EDT (5:58am IST) as the two vehicles flew 271 miles (436km) over the south Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia, according to commentators on a live NASA webcast of the linkup.

It marked the first time spacecraft from both of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program partners were physically attached to the space station at the same time. A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has been docked to the space station since delivering four astronauts to ISS in late April.

Bumpy road back to orbit

Much was riding on the outcome, after an ill-fated first test flight in late 2019 nearly ended with the vehicle’s loss following a software glitch that effectively foiled the spacecraft’s ability to reach the space station.

Subsequent problems with Starliner’s propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne, led Boeing to scrub a second attempt to launch the capsule last summer.

Starliner remained grounded for nine more months while the two companies sparred over what caused fuel valves to stick shut and which firm was responsible for fixing them, as Reuters reported last week.

Boeing said it ultimately resolved the issue with a temporary workaround and plans a redesign after this week’s flight.

Besides seeking a cause of thruster failures shortly after Thursday’s launch, Boeing said that it was monitoring some unexpected behavior detected with Starliner’s thermal-control system, but that the capsule’s temperatures remained stable.

“This is all part of the learning process for operating Starliner in orbit,” Boeing mission commentator Steve Siceloff said during the NASA webcast.

The capsule is scheduled to depart the space station on Wednesday for a return-flight to Earth, ending with a airbag-softened parachute landing in the New Mexico desert.

A success is seen as pivotal to Boeing as the Chicago-based company scrambles to climb out of successive crises in its jetliner business and its space defense unit. The Starliner programme alone has cost nearly $600 million (roughly Rs. 4,670 crore) in engineering setbacks since the 2019 mishap.

If all goes well with the current mission, Starliner could fly its first team of astronauts to the space station as early as the fall.

For now, the only passenger was a research dummy, whimsically named Rosie the Rocketeer and dressed in a blue flight suit, strapped into the commander’s seat and collecting data on crew cabin conditions during the journey, plus 800 pounds (363kg) of cargo to deliver to the space station.

The orbital platform is currently occupied by a crew of three NASA astronauts, a European Space Agency astronaut from Italy and three Russian cosmonauts.

Since resuming crewed flights to orbit from American soil in 2020, nine years after the space shuttle program ended, the U.S. space agency has had to rely solely on the Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to fly NASA astronauts.

Previously the only other option for reaching the orbital laboratory was by hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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NASA’s International Space Station Lab Develops Ultracold Atomic Bubbles, Paves New Way for Quantum Research

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab aboard International Space Station (ISS) has come up with a discovery that can give a new direction to quantum research. In this lab, researchers have experimented with gas to form an exotic material. Gas, when cooled to nearly absolute zero (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273 degrees Celsius) formed small, round blobs. An article published on NASA’s website compares the formation of these bubbles to that of egg yolks with thin eggshells. The ultracold atomic gas bubbles form a hollow sphere. The largest bubbles are about 1 millimetre in diameter and 1 micron thick (that’s one-thousandth of a millimetre or 0.00004 inches).

NASA‘s Cold Atom Lab is the first-ever quantum physics facility at the International Space Station. The experiment did not require any assistance from astronauts. The lab is a tightly sealed vacuum chamber about the size of a minifridge. Researchers, at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), remotely controlled the magnetic fields in the lab to manipulate the gas to form different shapes. For the experiment, scientists took atom samples and cooled them to “within a millionth of a degree above absolute zero.”

The research was published in the journal Nature on May 18.

David Aveline, lead author of the study and a member of the Cold Atom Lab science team at NASA’s JPL in Southern California, noted, “These are not like your average soap bubbles. Nothing that we know of in nature gets as cold as the atomic gases produced in Cold Atom Lab. So we start with this very unique gas and study how it behaves when shaped into fundamentally different geometries. And, historically, when a material is manipulated in this way, very interesting physics can emerge, as well as new applications.”

Nathan Lundblad, the principal investigator of the new study, said, “Some theoretical work suggests that if we work with one of these bubbles that is in the BEC state, we might be able to form vortices – basically, little whirlpools – in the quantum material.” Lundblad is a professor of physics at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. The new study will help researchers to further delve into the quantum nature of matter.

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