On June 14, 2024, NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) last Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-U, started its journey from the Astrotech Space Operations facility to the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
GOES-U is the final weather-observing and environmental monitoring satellite in NOAA’s GOES-R Series. GOES-U will enhance meteorologists’ ability to provide advanced weather forecasting and warning capabilities. It also will improve detection and monitoring of space weather hazards using a new compact coronagraph instrument.
Spacewalk Cancelled Due to Spacesuit Cooling Unit Water Leak
NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps (center) is pictured assisting NASA astronauts Mike Barratt (left) and Tracy C. Dyson (right) inside the Quest airlock. Credit: NASA TV
U.S. spacewalk 90 was cancelled Monday at the International Space Station due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit on NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson’s spacesuit. Dyson and Mike Barratt set their suits to battery power at 8:46 a.m. EDT and opened the hatch to the space station’s Quest airlock before reporting the water issue. The crew is working with ground controllers to repressurize the crew lock section of the airlock before returning inside the station’s equipment lock.
Coverage continues on NASA+, NASA Television, YouTube, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. NASA will provide additional information on the space station blog.
The crew was scheduled to remove a faulty electronics box from a communications antenna on the starboard truss of the space station. The pair also intended to collect samples for analysis to understand the ability of microorganisms to survive and reproduce on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.
NASA Astronauts Preparing for Spacewalk Live on NASA TV
Expedition 71 Flight Engineers Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt, both NASA astronauts, pose for preflight portraits at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
NASA’s coverage is underway on NASA+, NASA Television, YouTube, the NASA app, and the agency’s website as two astronauts will conduct a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin after the crew sets their suits to internal battery power ahead of exiting the airlock. The spacewalk is set to last about six and a half hours.
NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt will exit the station’s Quest airlock to complete the removal of a faulty electronics box, called a radio frequency group, from a communications antenna on the starboard truss of the space station. The pair also will collect samples for analysis to understand the ability of microorganisms to survive and reproduce on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.
Dyson will serve as spacewalk crew member 1 and will wear a suit with red stripes. Barratt will serve as spacewalk crew member 2 and will wear an unmarked suit. U.S. spacewalk 90 will be the fourth for Dyson and the third for Barratt. It is the 271st spacewalk in support of space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.
An aurora streams below Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft docked to the forward port on the Harmony module as the International Space Station soared 266 miles above the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia. Photo credit: NASA/Matt Dominick
NASA and Boeing leadership are adjusting the return to Earth of the Starliner Crew Flight Test spacecraft with agency astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from the International Space Station. The move off Wednesday, June 26, deconflicts Starliner’s undocking and landing from a series of planned International Space Station spacewalks while allowing mission teams time to review propulsion system data. Listen to a full replay of the June 18 media briefing where NASA and Boeing leadership discussed the ongoing efforts.
“We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking. Additionally, given the duration of the mission, it is appropriate for us to complete an agency-level review, similar to what was done ahead of the NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 return after two months on orbit, to document the agency’s formal acceptance on proceeding as planned.”
A media telecon with mission leadership will follow the readiness review’s conclusion, and the agency will share those details as they are solidified. Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft remains cleared for return in case of an emergency on the space station that required the crew to leave orbit and come back to Earth.
Mission managers are evaluating future return opportunities following the station’s two planned spacewalks on Monday, June 24, and Tuesday, July 2.
“Starliner is performing well in orbit while docked to the space station,” said Stich. “We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions.”
Wilmore and Williams remain integrated with the Expedition 71 crew, assisting with station operations as needed and completing add-on in-flight objectives for NASA certification of Starliner.
“The crew’s feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and they know that every bit of learning we do on the Crew Flight Test will improve and sharpen our experience for future crews,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager, Boeing’s Starliner Program.
The crew is not pressed for time to leave the station since there are plenty of supplies in orbit, and the station’s schedule is relatively open through mid-August.
Sols 4222-4224: A Particularly Prickly Power Puzzle
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Sols 4222-4224: A Particularly Prickly Power Puzzle
This image was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4219 (2024-06-19 02:22:26 UTC).
Earth planning date: Friday, June 21, 2024
All our patient waiting has been rewarded, as we were greeted with the news that our drill attempt of “Mammoth Lakes 2” was successful! You can see the drill hole in the image above, as well as the first place we attempted just to the left. The actual drilling is only the beginning – we want to see what it is we’ve drilled. We’re starting that process this weekend by using our laser spectrometer (LIBS) to check out the drill hole before delivering some of the drilled material to CheMin (the Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction instrument) to do its own investigations.
The next step in a drill campaign is usually to continue the analysis with SAM (the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite), which tends to be quite power hungry. As a result, we want to make sure we’re going into the next plan with enough power for that. That meant that even though we’ve got a lot of free time this weekend, with three sols and CheMin taking up only the first overnight, we needed to think carefully about how we used that free time. Sometimes, when the science teams deliver our plans, we’re overly optimistic. At times this optimism is rewarded, and we’re allowed to keep the extra science in the plan. Today we needed to strategize a bit more, and the midday science operations working group meeting (or SOWG, as it’s known) turned into a puzzle session, as we figured out what could move around and what we had to put aside for the time being.
An unusual feature of this weekend’s plan was a series of short change-detection observations on “Walker Lake” and “Finch Lake,” targets we’ve looked at in past plans to see wind-driven movement of the Martian sand. These were peppered through the three sols of the plan, to see any changes during the course of a single sol. While these are relatively short observations – only a few minutes – we do have to wake the rover to take them, which eats into our power. Luckily, the science team had considered this, and classified the observations as high, middle, or low priority. This made it easy to take out the ones that were less important, to save a bit of power.
Another power-saving strategy is considering carefully where observations go. A weekend plan almost always includes an “AM ENV Science Block” – dedicated time for morning observations of the environment and atmosphere. Usually, this block goes on the final sol of the plan, but we already had to wake up the morning of the first sol for CheMin to finish up its analysis. This meant we could move the morning ENV block to the first sol, and Curiosity got a bit more time to sleep in, at the end of the plan.
Making changes like these meant not only that we were able to finish up the plan with enough power for Monday’s activities, but we were still able to fit in plenty of remote science. This included a number of mosaics from both Mastcam and ChemCam on past targets such as “Whitebark Pass” and “Quarry Peak.” We also had two new LIBS targets: “Broken Finger Peak” and “Shout of Relief Pass.” Aside from our morning block, ENV was able to sneak in a few more observations: a dust-devil movie, and a line-of-sight and tau to keep an eye on the changing dust levels in the atmosphere.
Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University
