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New batteries give a boost to space station

NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough flashes a smile for a selfie during a spacewalk at the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)

The International Space Station got a power upgrade today when spacewalkers hooked three new lithium-ion batteries into the electrical system.

NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson spent about six and a half hours outside the orbital outpost to do the installation.

For the past several days, the station’s crew has been using the Dextre robotic arm system to shift old nickel-hydrogen batteries into storage and get the new batteries ready for installation. The lithium-ion battery packs arrived at the station last month aboard a robotic Japanese cargo ship.

Each battery pack is about as big as a coffee table, weighs 400 pounds and is designed to last at least 10 years. They’re made by Aerojet Rocketdyne, and provide 50 percent more energy storage capability than the packs they replace.

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NASA backs two new missions to asteroids

Artist’s conceptions show the Lucy probe visiting a rocky asteroid at left, and the Psyche probe visiting a metallic asteroid at right. (NASA Illustrations)

Today is a great day for asteroid miners: NASA announced that it will provide full funding under its Discovery Program for two missions focusing on different types of asteroids.

A mission called Lucy will launch in 2021 to study a smorgasbord of asteroids, including one in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, plus six others among the swarms of space rocks caught in Jupiter’s orbit.

Another mission called Psyche will take off in 2023 to visit a type of asteroid that’s never been seen up close before: a huge metallic object called 16 Psyche that’s similar in composition to Earth’s core.

“This is what Discovery Program missions are all about – boldly going to places we’ve never been to enable groundbreaking science,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, said today in a news release.

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X-ray probe to study black hole fingerprints

An artist’s conception shows the accretion disk around an active black hole. (NASA Illustration)

NASA is committing $188 million to build and launch a space telescope to observe patterns in the X-ray radiation emanating from black holes, neutron stars and pulsars.

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, was chosen from a field of three finalists in NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program, the space agency said today.

IXPE’s triple-telescope detector system is designed to check the polarization of cosmic X-rays. Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director for NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, said the mission should “open a new window on the universe for astronomers to peer through.”

“We cannot directly image what’s going on near objects like black holes and neutron stars, but studying the polarization of X-rays emitted from their surrounding environments reveals the physics of these enigmatic objects,” Hertz said in a news release.

IXPE is due for launch in 2020.

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Boeing, SpaceX win more space taxi orders

Artwork shows a straight-on view of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi. (Boeing / NASA Photo)

NASA has awarded four more contracts to Boeing and to SpaceX for space taxi trips to and from the International Space Station – dependent on certification that the spacecraft are safe.

SpaceX is working on a crew-capable version of its Dragon capsule for NASA’s use, while Boeing is developing a capsule known as the CST-100 Starliner. Each company has already been given contracts for two flights; the contracts announced today brings the total trips to six for each.

The space taxis haven’t yet been tested in flight. SpaceX has scheduled an uncrewed demonstration flight of its Crew Dragon to the space station in November, followed by a crewed flight test in May 2018. Boeing’s schedule calls for an uncrewed flight in June 2018 and a crewed flight test in August 2018.

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How NASA uses the cloud on the final frontier

An open-source cloud computing project, known as OpenStack, was developed by NASA and Rackspace Inc. to standardize the data on NASA websites. (NASA Photo)

When one of NASA’s top geeks talks to the cloud-computing geeks at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference, you can bet the talk is not going to be just about outer space.

Tom Soderstrom, chief technology and innovation officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, took pains during tonight’s talk in Las Vegas to point out how the space agency was taking advantage of the cloud.

For example, he noted that NASA’s Surface Water Ocean Topography mission (known as SWOT) and the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission (aka NISAR) will be sending back a flood of Earth observation data within just a few years.

“It’s 100 terabytes per day, 100 gigabytes per second, all the time. Much too big for our data centers,” he told the audience. “So what are we going to do? We’re going to use cloud computing.”

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Asteroid plan faces scrutiny in Trump transition

In this artist’s conception, two astronauts make their way between their Orion capsule and a piece of an asteroid that’s been captured by a robotic spacecraft. (NASA via YouTube)

House Republicans are voicing renewed doubts about NASA’s plan to have astronauts study a piece of an asteroid – a turn of events that was expected for the transition to the Trump administration.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM, was a trademark space initiative for President Barack Obama but has drawn GOP criticism for years. Critics saw the mission as an ill-planned detour on the road to the moon or Mars.

As currently conceived, the mission calls for a robotic spacecraft to visit a near-Earth asteroid, pull off a piece and bring it back to lunar orbit for study by a crew of astronauts in the mid-2020s.

NASA says the mission would serve as practice for a crewed journey to Mars and could serve as a test for diverting killer asteroids in the future. But leading House Republicans voiced skepticism about the mission’s utility in a letter sent to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden today.

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Space station trip marks new high for women

At the age of 56, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is beginning a months-long tour of duty on the International Space Station. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls)

Today’s liftoff of a Soyuz spaceship heading for the International Space Station launched NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson into the history books as well.

The three-time spaceflier, who turns 57 in February, is now the oldest woman to go into space. Whitson took the title from NASA teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who had held the record since her 2007 space shuttle flight (when she was 55).

In a NASA interview conducted last year, Whitson joked that a documentary film crew was following her around mostly because she was “old and experienced.”

“All right, yes, I’m old,” she said.

The Iowa-born Whitson made her first trip to space in 2003, when she became the first woman to take command of the space station. She served a second orbital tour of duty in 2008, building up her total time in space to 377 days. That’s the record for a woman astronaut, and the record will be rising on every day she spends in orbit from now on.

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All systems go for testing Webb Telescope

Engineers conduct a white-light inspection on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in the clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. (Credit: Chris Gunn / NASA)

After years of busted budgets and stretched timelines, NASA says its $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope is ready for testing and on track for launch in 2018.

The telescope, seen as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is designed to capture images of the first galaxies ever formed and provide unprecedented data about planets circling distant stars.

“Today, we’re celebrating the fact that our telescope is finished, and we’re about to prove that it works,” Nobel-winning astrophysicist John Mather, the telescope’s senior project scientist, told reporters at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland today.

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NASA puts out call for lunar experiments

An artist’s conception shows a Moon Express lander in lunar orbit. (Credit: Moon Express)

NASA wants suggestions for experiments that can be sent to the moon on commercial spacecraft – and Moon Express, one of the companies building those spacecraft, wants to kick in up to $500,000 per experiment.

The experiments would be aimed at filling the “strategic knowledge gaps” for lunar exploration, NASA said in today’s request for information, which was timed to coincide with this week’s meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group in Columbia, Md.

The time frame for the proposed experiments – in the range of 2017 to 2020 – seems tailor-made for Moon Express, which is one of several teams going after the top award in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

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Space station trio gets warm reception

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins is all smiles as she is carried from the Soyuz landing site to a medical tent shortly after touchdown. The Soyuz sits in the background of the picture. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

Just a week after a fresh trio of spacefliers moved into the International Space Station, three other crew members returned to Earth tonight, closing out a 115-day stay in orbit.

NASA biologist-astronaut Kate Rubins, Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin and Japan’s Takuya Onishi touched down safely in their Russian Soyuz capsule at 8:58 p.m. PT today (9:58 a.m. local time Oct. 30) in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

A Russian-led recovery team hustled the crew out of the Soyuz amid near-freezing temperatures. All were reported in good health.

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