Media are invited to a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 2, celebrating the renaming of NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, after the West Virginia native and storied NASA icon.
NASA Breaking News
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The Expedition 59 crew is going into the weekend preparing to split up on Monday amidst an array of ongoing human research. The orbital residents are also working on power upgrades and filming a virtual reality experience today.
Astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques are in their final weekend aboard the International Space Station. They will ride back to Earth on Monday with Commander Oleg Kononenko inside the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft. Their Soyuz vehicle undocks at 7:25 p.m. EDT and lands in Kazakhstan at 10:47 p.m. (8:47 a.m. Tuesday Kazakh time). NASA TV will broadcast all the homecoming activities live.
Kononenko will hand over station command to cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin in a ceremony slated for Sunday at 3:35 p.m. live on NASA TV. Ovchinin officially becomes commander of Expedition 60 when the homebound trio’s Soyuz undocks Monday. NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague are continuing their stay aboard the orbiting lab.
McClain and Saint-Jacques participated in one final study today exploring behavior, performance and cognition in space. The duo practiced grappling a cargo craft during a robotic simulation for the Behavioral Core Measures study. McClain also prepared a CubeSat for deployment next week. Saint-Jacques recorded a science video demonstrating Newton’s second and third laws in microgravity.
Hague joined McClain during the morning setting up the CubeSat hardware inside Japan’s Kibo laboratory module. In the afternoon, he partnered up with Koch and upgraded power electronics hardware in the Harmony module.
Finally, all six crewmembers gathered in the Zvezda service module at dinnertime and videotaped their activities with a 360-degree camera. The crew has been filming a variety of immersive, cinematic experiences throughout their mission to share with audiences on Earth.
Mark Garcia
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IARU was represented at the meeting of CEPT Project Team A (responsible for some aspects of the CEPT position for WRC-19), held in Prague from June 17-21.
The IARU Region 1 website reports:
Of particular interest were discussions on two proposed Agenda items for WRC-23, concerning the sharing of the 1240-1300 MHz band with the Galileo navigation system and the proposal from France to study a range of frequencies, including the 144 MHz amateur band, for future aeronautical applications.
The output from PTA does not carry forward the Galileo proposal, but it is likely that further discussions will take place prior to the Conference Preparatory Group meeting in August. Meantime work on this issue will also continue in other specialist CEPT forums. IARU will continue to support this approach and it believes this will be the most efficient method for developing the sharing guidance required to protect Galileo operations in a timely manner.
Regarding new aeronautical frequencies (including 144-146 MHz), the proposal was not strongly opposed by administrations and has been carried forward to the higher level CEPT Conference Preparatory Group (CPG) meeting in August for final adoption.
IARU views with grave concern any proposal to include the 144 MHz band in the proposed aeronautical agenda item and will be making every effort to fully protect amateur radio interests and seek the support of regulators in this regard.
The band 144-146 MHz is allocated globally to the amateur and amateur satellite services on a primary basis. It is the only globally harmonised VHF band for the amateur and amateur satellite service. As such it is an important and widely used part of the amateur spectrum with a vast installed base of both terrestrial/maritime amateur users and systems and operational satellite stations including the International Space Station (ISS).
This heavily used band supports a large number of repeater stations, segments for weak-signal long distance terrestrial and EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) communications, satellite and ISS usage, data services, as well as conventional terrestrial and tropospheric communications. The Primary status of the band has also enabled a number of amateur aeronautical uses including on manned flights and high-altitude balloons. Supporting all of this is a wide variety of commercial and experimental equipment, ranging from ultra-low noise preamplifiers for sensitive receivers, software defined radios and transmitting systems that can deliver high EIRP levels when needed to overcome high loss propagation paths.
Given the propagation to/from an aircraft at altitude, it is entirely possible that harmful interference to sensitive amateur and amateur satellite receivers will be caused over a 1,000 km radius of a single aircraft.
IARU will shortly be providing a brief to Member Societies and other interested parties, asking them to discuss the French proposal with their administrations well in advance of the August CEPT-CPG meeting.
It is possible that France will seek to introduce into other Regional Telecommunications Organisations (RTO) the same proposal to study the 144-146 MHz band for aeronautical use. IARU will provide a brief shortly to enable representations to be made to administrations in countries under those RTOs for protection of this amateur spectrum allocation.
Source: IARU Region 1 http://iaru-r1.org/
Download the documents from the CEPT SPG Project Team A meeting in Prague June 17-21 from
https://cept.org/ecc/groups/ecc/cpg/cpg-pt-a/client/meeting-documents/?flid=5624
France proposes 144-146 MHz for Aeronautical Mobile Service
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2019/june/france-proposes-144-146-mhz-for-aeronautical-mobile-service.htm
1240-1300 MHz band discussed by CEPT WGFM and CPG/PTA
https://amsat-uk.org/2019/05/31/1240-1300-mhz-band-discussed-by-cept-wgfm-and-cpg-pta/
Could a new licence class help counter threats at VHF and above?
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2019/june/could-a-new-licence-counter-threats-at-vhf-and-above.htm
m5aka
AMSAT-UK
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The electric motors for X-57’s Mod II vehicle and their propellers were powered up and spun together for the first time as part of an integrated spin test.
NASA Image of the Day
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Three Expedition 59 crewmembers are reviewing the procedures they will use on their way to Earth after undocking from the International Space Station early next week. In the midst of the departure preparations, the six orbital residents also had time set aside for biomedical science and physics research aboard the orbiting lab.
Commander Oleg Kononenko will lead astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques back to Earth on Monday inside the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft after 204 days in space. The trio spent the afternoon practicing their Soyuz undocking, atmosphere reentry and landing procedures. The homebound crew also familiarized themselves with the g-forces and the physical sensations they will experience when they penetrate Earth’s atmosphere 100 kilometers above Earth’s surface.
McClain continued more biomedical tests Thursday as she submitted breath samples for the Marrow fat and blood cell study. Saint-Jacques injected control samples inside the new Bio-Analyzer to demonstrate the rapid analysis of blood, urine and saliva samples in microgravity.
Flight Engineer Christina Koch is in the midst of a ten-and-a-half month mission on the station, conducting scientific research and station maintenance. Today, she explored the possibility of producing high-grade fiber optic cables made possible only in microgravity. Fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who is staying in space until October, nourished and collected samples of microalgae grown inside the Photobioreactor. The study is demonstrating biological processes that may support hybrid life support systems in space.
Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin will lead Expedition 60 after the Expedition 59 trio departs Monday. He and Kononenko continued training to use a specialized Russian suit that counteracts the upward fluid shifts in the human body caused by microgravity. Ovchinin also checked inventory and configured hardware aboard Russia’s Progress 72 resupply ship.
Mark Garcia
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