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Post by Admin on Jun 10, 2020 19:58:31 GMT
Nasa Earth from space! 24/7 Live Views from the International Space Station, Earth seen from cameras aboard the International Space Station. Watch the Earth roll Captured from the International Space Station. SpaceX’s historic Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has sparked renewed interest in the orbiting laboratory. Although it orbits Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles, did you know that you can still see the space station with the naked eye? You just have to be in the right place at the right time, and thanks to the fact that it’s moving at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph), orbiting Earth around 16 times a day, sooner or later you’re going to have a chance to watch it pass overhead. We can see the space station because it reflects the light of the sun. But the reflection isn’t bright enough to make it visible during the daytime, so the best times are usually around dawn or dusk. Depending where you are and the time that the station comes close, sightings can happen from anywhere between once in a month to several times in a single week. You just have to get lucky. NASA says it’s easy to spot, describing it as looking like “a very bright star moving across the sky.” There are several ways to find out when the space station is heading your way, giving you the best possible chance of seeing it high above. First, you can check NASA’s tracking map that indicates where the ISS is right now, as well as its path 90 minutes previously and 90 minutes ahead. This will give you a good idea of whether the satellite is coming close. Second, you can type the name of your location in NASA’s online “sighting opportunities” tool to surface upcoming chances to see the station in your area. And third — and this is the most efficient way — you can sign up to a free NASA service for email or text alerts that tell you when the station will be passing overhead. You usually get plenty of notice, and the alert offers specific information about where in the sky to look. As long as there’s no cloud cover, you’re guaranteed to get a good look at it as it moves at speed across the sky. If you’re interested, you can also take a look inside the space station thanks to these tools that offer a virtual exploration of the areas inhabited by visiting astronauts.
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Post by Admin on Jun 12, 2020 23:05:25 GMT
Nasa Astronauts at work! 24/7 Live Views from the International Space Station, Earth is seen from cameras aboard the International Space Station. Watch the Earth roll Captured from the International Space Station. SpaceX is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 rocket with its ninth batch of Starlink communication satellites bringing the aerospace company one step closer to reaching its goal of providing global internet coverage from space, reports News 6 partner Florida Today. Currently scheduled to liftoff no earlier than 5:21 a.m. Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 40, these are things to know for tomorrow's launch: • Densely packed together in the payload fairing are 58 Starlink communications satellites and three PlanetLab spacecraft, making this the first SpaceX SmallSat Rideshare Program launch. • Upon success of this mission, SpaceX will have launched over 500 Starlink satellites. • Weather forecast is 70% "go." • In the event of a delay or scrub, weather drops slightly to 60% “go” for a Sunday launch. • Approximately eight minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 rocket's first-stage booster will target an automatic landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. • The booster supporting this mission previously flew for SpaceX's CRS-19 and CRS-20 missions to the International Space Station. • SpaceX's goal is to have almost 12,000 satellites operating in low-Earth orbit, with plans to launch an additional 30,000 satellites in the future. • Part of the goal of creating the Starlink broadband constellation is to help fund Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars.
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Post by Admin on Jun 15, 2020 19:18:08 GMT
A 2014 Mars photo that has strangely resurfaced in tabloids this month does not show a femur amidst the rubble of the Red Planet. Like all such photos to date, the object you see is just a plain old Mars rock. And NASA debunked it six years ago. The image was taken using the Curiosity Rover's MastCam on 14 August 2014, and rapidly spread among conspiracy theorists as proof Mars once harboured life, prompting the space agency to set the record straight. "Seen by Mars rover Curiosity using its MastCam, this Mars rock may look like a femur thigh bone. Mission science team members think its shape is likely sculpted by erosion, either wind or water," wrote a NASA spokesperson in a brief blog post. "If life ever existed on Mars, scientists expect that it would be small simple life forms called microbes. Mars likely never had enough oxygen in its atmosphere and elsewhere to support more complex organisms. Thus, large fossils are not likely." Seeing patterns in random configurations isn't a new phenomenon. You probably do it every day without realising - whether it's a face in your power outlet or a pawprint in the soap scum on your shower door. This phenomenon is called pareidolia, and it's thought to occur when some parts of the brain process visual information and jump to conclusions before the rest of your brain catches up. Here on Earth, most people recognise their pareidolia for what it is, but for some reason - perhaps because we can't go there and poke the objects in question - pareidolia on Mars is fertile territory for conspiracy theorists. Many rocks have sparked flights of fancy about signs of ancient life or even full-blown civilisations on Mars. The most famous, perhaps, was the picture of a region called Cydonia, taken in 1976, thought to show a massive sculpture of a face (later, high-resolution images showed it was... just a rock formation).
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Post by Admin on Jun 18, 2020 22:49:07 GMT
The Starship, SpaceX's giant Mars-bound rocket, could help the firm get its Starlink internet constellation online. The ship, currently under development at the Boca Chica facility in Texas, is designed to transport over 150 tons or 100 people into space at a time. A new visualization, shared Monday by a Twitter user called "Neopork85," imagines what this ship would look like if it was tasked with sending up to 240 Starlink satellites at once. The capability could be a big boost for the nascent Starlink constellation, designed to offer high-speed, low-latency internet with the use of a transceiver the size of a pizza box. It reaches these high speeds by using a large number of satellites, orbiting just 550 kilometers from the Earth's surface. SpaceX has sent up nine batches of around 60 satellites each, the first one in May 2019, but it has applied for permission to launch up to 42,000 satellites. Starship could help it move faster. When Musk unveiled the ship's predecessor in September 2017, he explained that it would be able to cover Falcon 9's missions as well as more ambitious ones to Mars and beyond. Where the Falcon 9 can lift over 50,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit, the Starship can lift over 220,000 pounds at once. "Neopork85"'s visualization, shown below, demonstrates how these would stack into place:
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Post by Admin on Jul 1, 2020 23:51:20 GMT
Early Wednesday, NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Robert Behnken conducted a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station to replace lithium ion batteries for one of the station's power channels. Wednesday's spacewalk began at 7:13 a.m. ET and concluded at 1:14 p.m. ET. It lasted for six hours and one minute. Both astronauts are veteran spacewalkers. This was the eighth venture outside for both Cassidy and Behnken, according to NASA. Behnken, along with NASA astronaut Doug Hurley, launched from the United States and joined Cassidy on the space station on May 31. They were aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon during the Demo-2 mission. These spacewalks are the culmination of a series of power upgrades that began in January 2017 to replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium ion batteries. This spacewalk, similar to one that took place last Friday, was focused on replacing batteries for one of the power channels on the far starboard truss of the station. Because the astronauts accomplished some of the tasks for this spacewalk last week, they also worked on tasks scheduled for later spacewalks, routed power and ethernet cables and laid the groundwork for future power system upgrades. These cables will provide better views on future spacewalks, according to NASA. These power system upgrades, however, are nothing like replacing batteries in your remote. The new batteries each have a mass of 428 pounds. For this spacewalk, Cassidy was crew member I and wore a spacesuit showing red stripes, while Behnken served as crew member II in a suit with no stripes. Hurley and Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner helped Cassidy and Behnken into their spacesuits. Hurley operated the station's robotic arm to support the astronauts outside the station.
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