Capcom 246

your window to space

CapCom Volume 24 Number 6 July/August 2014

The Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft’s docking probe is seen just after separation from the International Space Station.

This photo was among the first group of images downlinked from the station following the start of duty for the three Expedition 40 crew members, who will be joined by three more crew members in approximately two weeks. With Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA onboard, the Soyuz went on to land near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on 14 May, 2014. Wakata, Tyurin and Mastracchio returned to Earth after more than six months onboard the orbital outpost where they served as members of the Expedition 38 and 39 crews.

CapCom is published by Midlands Spaceflight Society www.midspace.org.uk Editor: Mike Bryce | President: David J Shayler | Secretary: Dave Evetts Honorary Member: Helen Sharman OBE

Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

space news roundup Russia, China negotiate joint exploration of Rosetta’s target Mars, Venus comet gets active “Combined efforts would help to reduce costs and time, and to achieve the objectives of the The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Russian and Chinese national programmes,” Russian Federal Space Agency deputy head says. target of Europe’s Rosetta mission, has begun to develop a dust coma. This can be Russia and China are negotiating joint projects of Mars and Venus exploration, Russian seen in a series of images taken by OSIRIS, Federal Space Agency deputy head Sergey Savelyev told ITAR-TASS on the sidelines of the the spacecraft’s scientific imaging system, International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg. between 24th March and 4th May. In the images, the dust that the comet is already “We have been engaged in an active dialogue since last year, and our Chinese partners emitting is clearly visible as an evolving have expressed interest in our proposals for joint implementation of large-scale scientific coma and reaches approximately 1300 projects,” he said. “Combined efforts would help to reduce costs and time, and to achieve the kilometres into space. objectives of the Russian and Chinese national programmes.”

“Negotiations are underway on the joint exploration of Mars and Venus,” Savelyev said. “We have held a number of meetings with experts and scientists on these projects, but there are no specific agreements yet. I think this year we will be more definite about how we are going to cooperate in this sphere.”

For a start, it was necessary to determine principles of joint work, terms and conditions of project implementation, alongside distribution of responsibility and authority, he said, adding that as soon as these things were ready, the countries’ space agencies would conclude an agreement.

ITAR-TASS News Agency http://en.itar-tass.com

NASA Announces Latest Progress in Hunt for Asteroids NASA is on the hunt for an asteroid to capture with a robotic spacecraft, redirect to a stable orbit around the moon, and send astronauts to study in the 2020s -- all on the agency’s human Path to Mars. Agency officials announced on Thursday recent progress to identify candidate asteroids for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), increase public participation in the search for asteroids, and advance the mission’s design.

NASA plans to launch the ARM robotic spacecraft in 2019 and will make a final choice of the asteroid for the mission about a year before the spacecraft launches. NASA is working on two concepts for the mission: the first is to fully capture a very small asteroid in open space, and the second is to collect a boulder-sized sample off of a much larger asteroid. Both concepts would require redirecting an asteroid less than 32 feet (10 meters) in size into the moon’s orbit. The agency will choose between these two concepts in late 2014 and further refine the mission’s design.

The agency will award a total of $4.9 million for concept studies addressing components of ARM. Proposals for the concept studies were solicited through a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) released in March, and selected in collaboration with NASA’s Space Technology and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorates. The studies will be completed over a six-month period beginning in July, during which time system concepts and key technologies needed for ARM will be refined and matured. The studies also will include an assessment of the feasibility of potential commercial partners to support the robotic mission.

NASA http://www.nasa.gov

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Alien world in Stevenage

A new simulated Martian landscape in the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage will be used to test the autonomous navigation systems on Europe’s first Mars rover.

The Mars Yard at Airbus Defence and Space, which is buildin the European Space Agency (ESA) ExoMars rover, is 30m by 13m, contains 300 tonnes of sand, a convincingly painted backdrop and is strewn with rocks to represent a realistic Martian environment.

UK Space Agency https://www.gov.uk/government/ organisations/uk-space-agency

Have a thirst for Space News? then why not try “Space:UK” This magazine is produced for the UKSpace Agency and primarily showcases the British space sector with added interesting articles on spaceflight. This publication is available for download as a .pdf free of charge through the Government Web Site. https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/space-sector-magazinespaceuk

Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

Five Things We’ll Learn from Orion’s First Flight Test This computer-generated art shows the launch abort system still attached and the jettison of the service module fairing panels.

Image: NASA

All the superlatives associated with Orion’s first mission this year – farthest a spacecraft for humans has gone in 40 years, largest heat shield, safest vehicle ever built – can be dazzling, no doubt. But the reason engineers are chomping at the bit for Orion’s first mission is the promise of crucial flight test data that can be applied to the design for future missions. Orion only has two flight test opportunities before astronauts climb aboard for the first crewed mission in 2021 – so gleaning the maximum information possible from Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 in December (and later, Exploration Mission-1 in 2017) is of the highest priority. Here are the top five things the engineers will be paying attention to: 1. Launch Abort System Separation – The launch abort system (LAS) is a key reason that Orion is intended to become the safest spacecraft ever built. In an emergency it could activate to pull the crew module and the astronauts it will carry away from the launch pad and the rocket in milliseconds. Hopefully it’s never needed, and since no crew will fly on EFT-1 the rescue system won’t be active.

But even when a launch goes perfectly, the 904-pound LAS jettison motor has to perform flawlessly. If it doesn’t get rid of the LAS 6 minutes and 20 seconds into the mission, there will be no landing – the LAS protects the crew module during ascent, but to do so, it blocks the parachutes that allow Orion to safely splashdown.

The Launch Abort System separation is just the first of 17 separations or jettisons that have to happen exactly as planned for the mission to be successful.

2. Parachute Deployment – For EFT-1, Orion will travel 3,600 miles above the Earth so that when it performs its deorbit burn, it will come screaming back into the Earth’s atmosphere at almost 20,000 miles per hour. Before it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, it needs to slow down to 1/1000th of its entry speed – a relatively gentle 20 miles per hour.

Earth’s atmosphere does its part to put on the brakes, but to make landing survivable, Orion relies on its parachute system – primarily two drogue parachutes and three massive mains that together would cover almost an entire football field. They’ve been tested on Earth; test versions of Orion have been dropped from airplanes with a multitude of failure scenarios programmed into the parachute deployment sequence in an effort to make sure that every possibly problem is accounted for.

But the sheer number of possible problems to be tested indicates how complicated the system is – each parachute must deploy at the exact right time, open to the exact right percentages in the exact right stages, and be cut away exactly as planned. And no test on Earth can exactly simulate what the spacecraft will really experience on its return from space.

The reason that Orion is traveling so far and coming back in so fast is to give the heat shield a good workout – the idea is to get as close as possible to the temperatures Orion would experience during a return from Mars. At the speed it will be traveling, the temperature should reach almost 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At that same temperature, a nuclear reactor would melt down.

Standing between the crew module and all that heat is no more than 1.6 inches of Avcoat, a material that’s designed to burn away rather than transfer the temperatures back to Orion. Some 20 percent of the Avcoat will erode during the spacecraft’s journey back to Earth, and although it’s not the first time the materials has been used for this purpose, at 16.5 feet wide, Orion’s heat shield is the largest ever built. Technicians filled with Avcoat each of the 320,000 honeycomb cells that make up the shield’s structure by hand, then machined them to the precise fractions of inches called for by the design. Getting it exactly right is all that will get Orion through one of the most dynamic periods of its mission.

4. Radiation Levels – Traveling 15 times farther into space than the International Space Station will take Orion beyond the radiation protection offered by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. In fact, the majority of EFT-1 will take place inside the Van Allen Belts, clouds of heavy radiation that surround Earth. No spacecraft built for humans has passed through the Van Allen Belts since the Apollo missions, and even those only passed through the belts – they didn’t linger.

Future crews don’t plan to spend more time than necessary inside the Van Allen Belts, either, but long missions to deep space will expose them to more radiation than astronauts have ever dealt with before. EFT-1’s extended stay in the Van Allen Belts offers a unique opportunity to see how Orion’s shielding will hold up to it. Sensors will record the peak radiation seen during the flight, as well as radiation levels throughout the flight, which can be mapped back to geographic hot spots.

5. Computer Function – Orion’s computer is the first of its kind to be flown in space. It can process 480 million instructions per second. That’s 25 times faster than the International Space Station’s computers, 400 times faster than the space shuttle’s computers and 4,000 times faster than Apollo’s.

But to operate in space, it has to be able to handle extreme heat and cold, heavy radiation and the intense vibrations of launches, aborts and landings. And it has to operate through all of that without a single mistake. Just restarting the computer would take 15 seconds; and while that might sound lightning fast compared to your PC, you can cover a lot of ground in 15 seconds when you’re strapped to a rocket.

3. Heat Shield Protection – Before the parachutes even get a chance to deploy, Orion has to make it safely through Earth’s atmosphere.

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NASA http://www.nasa.gov

Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

ISS MISSION REPORT George Spiteri

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst in Soyuz TMA-13M, the spacecraft that will carry him, Roscosmos commander Maxim Suraev and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman to the International Space Station on 28 May 2014.

Image: ESA http://www.esa.int

Expedition Forty is in its first weeks. The orbiting outpost is under the new command of US astronaut Steve Swanson and his crew of US Flight Engineer Reid Weisman, Russian Flight Engineers Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Artemyev and Maxim Surayev and Germany’s ESA crewmember Alexander Gerst. Wakata, Mastracchio and Tyurin returned safely to Earth in mid-May.

at 2336 BST, Wakata, Tyurin and Mastracchio undocked their Soyuz TMA-11M/37S vehicle from the Rassvet Module, signalling the official start of Expedition Forty. With Tyurin in command of Soyuz the Descent Module landed at 0258 BST on 14th May (0758 local time) 90 miles south east of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan completing a flight of 187 days 21 hours 43 minutes.

The privately funded SpaceX-3 unmanned Dragon vehicle was launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 2025 BST on 18th April (1525 local time) from Florida on the third Commercial Resupply Mission (CRS-3) to the ISS.

With the Station under temporary three person operations, Swanson used the robotic arm to unberth and release Dragon from the complex at 1426 BST on 18th May. Packed with 3,563 pounds of scientific samples and cargo, the commercial vehicle splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, 310 miles west of Baja, California less than six hours later at 2005 BST (1205 local time) to complete SpaceX’s mission at the ISS. It was later discovered that Dragon had taken in significant amounts of sea water but officials insisted that the returned scientific experiments hadn’t been contaminated.

Dragon was grappled by the Station’s robotic Canadarm2 at 1214 BST on 20th April and berthed to Harmony’s Earth facing port nearly three hours later at 1506 BST, delivering nearly 5,000 pounds of supplies for the crew, including a pair of legs for Robonaut2 the Station’s humanoid robot.

The hatches to Dragon were opened on 21st April with Swanson being first to enter the spacecraft to begin unloading the vehicle.

Progress M-21M/53P was undocked from the Zvezda Module at 0958 BST on 23rd April and conducted two days of engineering tests on the upgraded Kurs NA docking system before re-docking to Zvezda at 1313 BST on 25th April.

Following the failure of a back-up Multiplexer-Demultiplexer (MDM) on the S0 Truss on 11th April, Mastracchio and Swanson left the Quest airlock at 1456 BST on 23rd April for a one hour 36 minute unplanned EVA to remove and replace the MDM. The MDM is crucial for various external Truss operations such as external coolant loops, the Solar Alpha Rotary Joints (SARJ) and the mobile rail cart. Ground controllers conducted a successful diagnostic test on the MDM which was up and running and providing a redundant capability for Truss systems.

Skvortsov celebrated his 48th birthday on 6th May with Russian Mission Control at Korolev, outside Moscow sending him greetings, adding it was “great to be working” with you on your birthday”.

Wakata relinquished command of the Station to Swanson in the traditional hand-over ceremony on 12th May. The following day

Soyuz TMA-13M/39S with veteran Max Surayev and American and German rookies Reid Wiseman and Alexander Gerst respectively was launched at 2057 BST on 28th May (0157 29th May, Baikonur time). Soyuz docked four minutes ahead of schedule to the Station’s Rassvet Module nearly six hours later at 0244 BST on 29th May to return the complex to a six person complement. Before launch the crew were asked if the crisis in Ukraine had affected their relationships? The crew responded with a symbolic group hug, receiving a round of applause from the assembled reporters.

Progress M-21M/53P was undocked a second time at 1429 BST on 9th June and burnt up in the atmosphere as planned later that day.

On 10th June the crew reported smoke from the Zvezda Module, smoke detectors weren’t tripped and the crew was directed to press the manual fire alarm button to prevent the ventilation system from spreading the smoke to other modules. Readings were taken, the crew didn’t don their masks as a precaution and the smoke dissipated. The preliminary cause of the smoke appears to have been an electric heater used to heat water that is dispensed.

As of 13th June, Swanson, Skvortsov and Atremyev have been in space for 80 days whilst Surayev, Wiseman and Gerst have been in orbit for 17 days.

GS

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Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

ASTRONAUT NEWS Rob Wood

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Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

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Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

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Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

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Midlands Spaceflight Society: CapCom: Volume 24 no 6 July/August 2014

Astronauts Watch the World Cup Aboard the International Space Station NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Steve Swanson and ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst take a break to watch ten minutes of live World Cup matches between science experiments while living and working aboard the International Space Station.

At the start of the World Cup, the crew sent down a special message to wish good luck to all the players and teams as they compete in World Cup 2014 in Brazil until the final match July 13. The astronauts have trained for years to work together as a unified crew, but the U.S. astronauts and their German crewmate are feeling a little friendly competition: their home countries will play against each other for a chance to advance out of Group G of the World Cup matches. USA and Germany face off on June 26 at Arena Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil.

Image Credit: NASA

Midlands Spaceflight Society Contact Dave Evetts, Secretary, Midlands Spaceflight Society 124 Stanhope Rd, Smethwick B67 6HP Tel. 0121 429 8606

http://www.nasa.gov/station

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Contributions to CapCom The Editor welcomes contributions for CapCom. Articles on any aspect of space exploration are considered. Articles in Word format or text files should be sent by email to capcom.editor@midspace.org.uk.

The Society is not responsible for individual opinions expressed in articles, reviews or reports of any kind. Such opinions are solely those of the author. Material published in CapCom does not necessarily reflect the views of the Society. Any comments directly concerning the magazine should be addressed to the Editor via the email address above.

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All copy intended for the September/October 2014 issue should be emailed to the editor by

Friday 08 August 2014