With the first in a series of three spacewalks successfully completed at the International Space Station, NASA has updated astronaut assignments for the remaining two spacewalks and will preview the third in an upcoming news conference on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
NASA Breaking News
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NASA Television and the agency’s website will provide live coverage of the fifth meeting of the National Space Council starting at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, March 26.
NASA Breaking News
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NASA astronaut Nick Hague completed the first spacewalk of his career on Friday, March 22, 2019. He and fellow astronaut Anne McClain worked on a set of battery upgrades for six hours and 39 minutes, on the International Space Station’s starboard truss.
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Expedition 59 Flight Engineers Nick Hague and Anne McClain of NASA concluded their spacewalk at 2:40 p.m. EDT. During the six-hour, 39-minute spacewalk, the two NASA astronauts successfully replaced nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion batteries for the power channel on one pair of the station’s solar arrays.
Astronauts were also able to accomplish several get-ahead tasks including removing debris from outside of the station, securing a tieback for restraints on the Solar Array Blanket Box, and photographing a bag of tools for contingency repairs and the airlock thermal cover that is opened and closed for spacewalks.
These new batteries provide an improved power capacity for operations with a lighter mass and a smaller volume than the nickel-hydrogen batteries. Next week, McClain and flight engineer Christina Koch are scheduled to venture outside on the March 29 spacewalk to work on a second set of battery replacements on a different power channel in the same area of the station. This would be the first-ever spacewalk with all-female spacewalkers.
Hague and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency are scheduled to conduct a third spacewalk April 8 to lay out jumper cables between the Unity module and the S0 truss, at the midpoint of the station’s backbone. This work will establish a redundant path of power to the Canadian-built robotic arm, known as Canadarm2. They also will install cables to provide for more expansive wireless communications coverage outside the orbital complex, as well as for enhanced hardwired computer network capability.
Space station crew members have conducted 214 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. This was the first spacewalk for both McClain and Hague. Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 55 days, 21 hours and 39 minutes working outside the station.
Keep up with the crew aboard the International Space Station on the agency’s blog, follow @ISS on Instagram, and @space_station on Twitter.
Mark Garcia
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Artist impression of ESEO flying over Europe – credit ESA
On Monday, December 3, 2018, the 50 kg ESA Education Office satellite ESEO was launched by Space-X on the Spaceflight SSO-A SmallSat Express mission.
Following the launch from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, ESEO separated from the launch vehicle and automatically activated the periodic transmission of its telemetry beacon. However, by the time out of a predefined period, having not received commands from the ground station, the spacecraft automatically entered into safe mode.
Some initial communications issues were experienced by ESEO in receiving commands from the ground stations in Forli’ (Italy) and Vigo (Spain), but they were resolved when the ESEO team of the Observatory of Tartu offered the possibility to use a ground station in Estonia. This is capable of transmitting with higher power, for a temporary contingent use. The Estonian ground station has been configured to be operated remotely by the ESEO MCC team, which involves students of the University of Bologna.
ESEO then started executing the commands transmitted from ground.
ESEO has now completed the LEOPS (Launch and Early OPerationS) phase of its mission, reaching the platform nominal mode and has begun the process of commissioning the whole satellite: firstly the platform functions, with the payloads functions following.
As part of this commissioning process, but subject to the successful completion of other preparatory tasks of the platform subsystems commissioning, it is anticipated that initial testing of the AMSAT communications payload will be carried out within the next few weeks.
AMSAT-UK will endeavour to provide some advance notice of these tests being undertaken, but the first step will be activation of the 1200 bps BPSK telemetry beacon on 145.895 MHz. The telemetry format matches previous FUNcube missions and data from this beacon will be forwarded to the FUNcube Data Warehouse using any of the FUNcube dashboards. However, to see the decoded values and graphical displays, please download the dedicated ESEO mission dashboard which is available at
https://download.funcube.org.uk/ESEO_Dashboard_v1177.msi
The payload has, additionally, a high speed, 4800 bps BPSK data format downlink and also a Mode L/V FM transponder both of which will be tested.
Further information about ESEO can be seen at
https://www.esa.int/Education/ESEO/ESEO_student_satellite_in-orbit_commissioning_has_started
m5aka
AMSAT-UK
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