International Space Station

NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy are preparing for a six hour spacewalk to fix the latest ammonia coolant leak on the International Space Station.  Read More

Given a set of problems related to space exploration and a 48-hour deadline, 9,000 people in 80 locations around the world created over 600 solutions. The International Space Apps Challenge, sponsored by NASA and other international space agencies, offered up massive amounts of data and other resources to teams of hackers who responded with creative solutions. The public now has the chance to view these solutions online and vote for their favorites on each project's official page. Gizmag set out to find the best projects related to data visualization and education, space exploration and satellite inventiveness, green technology, and remotely-operated vehicles.  Read More

Since the early days of space travel, a consistent complaint has been bad coffee. Now a group of freshman engineering students at Rice University has developed a simple approach to alleviating this problem.  Read More

Take the little floating ball that gave Luke Skywalker so much trouble during lightsaber practice, slap a pair of huge welder’s goggles on it and you start to get a picture of NASA’s latest foray into flying robots. Currently being tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS), MIT Space Systems Laboratory’s SPHERES-VERTIGO system is a free-flying robot with stereoscopic vision that is part of a program to develop ways for small satellites to autonomously create 3D maps of objects such as asteroids or disabled satellites.  Read More

Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket lifted off Sunday at 5:00 PM EDT (21:00 GMT) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA”s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The launch was the first from the pad at Wallops and also the first flight of Antares, which carried a "mass simulated payload" equivalent to the mass of a spacecraft into Earth orbit.  Read More

A manned Soyuz spacecraft set a record for traveling to the International Space Station (ISS), arriving six hours after launch instead of the usual two days. Soyuz 34 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, March 28 at 4:43 p.m. EDT (08:43 GMT) and docked with the ISS at 10: 28 PM EDT (03:28 GMT). It was able to catch up and match trajectories with the ISS in only four orbits using new techniques previously tested in ISS rendezvouses with Russian unmanned Progress cargo ships.  Read More

Today at 8:56 AM EST, the Spacex Dragon CRS-2 mission berthed with the International Space Station (ISS). The unmanned cargo ship was captured using the station’s robotic arm at 5:31 AM by ISS Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Tom Mashburn of NASA before being secured to the Earth-facing port of the station’s Harmony module.  Read More

SpaceX has announced that its Dragon spacecraft’s docking with the International Space Station (ISS) has been rescheduled for 6:01 AM EST (11:01 GMT) Sunday, March 3. SpaceX managers and NASA gave clearance today for the rendezvous, which will see the craft captured by NASA Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn using a robotic arm.  Read More

At a teleconference today (Mar.1) at 3:00 PM EST (2000 GMT), SpaceX and NASA confirmed that the malfunction of three of the four thruster pods of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft has been corrected. Though the cause of the failure remains unknown, a note received during the conference from Dragon mission control stated that all four pods are working nominally with two of the pods preparing to come online this afternoon.  Read More