Monthly Archives: September 2020

NASA and Boeing outline schedule of Starliner test flights

NASA and Boeing announced an updated schedule of test flights of the company’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle that would allow it to begin operational missions to the International Space Station at the end of 2021. In an Aug. 28 statement, NASA said it had scheduled a second uncrewed test flight, known as Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2, for no earlier than December. That mission will be a repeat of the original OFT mission flown last December, which was cut short by technical problems that prevented the spacecraft from approaching and docking with the ISS.

The NASA statement confirmed recent comments by agency officials on the schedule for OFT-2. “The Boeing folks are working hard for their re-flight to be done by the end of the year, maybe early January,” Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. The problems with the original OFT mission prompted a joint review by NASA and Boeing. That led to 80 recommendations involving testing and simulation, software requirements, process and operational improvements, software updates, and knowledge capture and modifications to Starliner hardware.

Assuming OFT-2 launches on the current schedule and is successful, NASA and Boeing will move on to the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, with NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann and Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson. The CFT mission is scheduled for no earlier than June 2021.

Commercial crews and private astronauts will boost International Space Station’s science

A golden age may be coming for human spaceflight research as more astronauts than ever fly to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard commercial crew vehicles and through private companies, NASA officials said during an online conference Thursday (Aug. 27). “We’re going to have more people on the International Space Station than we’ve had in a long time, and [research and development] throughout is actually going to increase,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in opening pre-recorded remarks for the ISS Research & Development conference. Bridenstine was referring to a new era of human spaceflight that opened on May 30, when SpaceX launched its first-ever crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight. Demo-2 sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS for two months, ending on Aug. 2 when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule made the first American ocean splashdown from orbit since 1975. Demo-2 was made possible by more than a decade’s worth of work across several presidential administrations. The goal was to spur the development of private American spaceships to fill the shoes of NASA’s space shuttle fleet, which retired in 2011 after 30 years of service.

The space shuttle typically ferried crews of seven astronauts to and from the space station. Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the only orbital crewed vehicle available for the past nine years until Crew Dragon came online, can carry just three people at a time. Crew Dragon and Boeing’s delayed (but forthcoming) CST-100 Starliner capsule will carry four astronauts apiece on their operational ISS missions for NASA. (Both companies won multibillion contracts from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in 2014.) “For commercial crew vehicles, we’re continuing to work with the teams,” Montalbano added, saying the agency is aiming for a “steady cadence” between SpaceX and Boeing to send astronauts to the space station to perform science and research. The first operational SpaceX crewed mission is set to fly in late October, and NASA is accelerating crew announcements for future flights — such as when it recently named astronaut Jeanette Epps to the first operational Boeing Starliner mission to the space station, which is expected to launch next year.

Mars dust devil! Curiosity rover spots Red Planet twister

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has spotted a dust devil swirling through the parched Red Planet landscape. Curiosity photographed the dust devil on Aug. 9, capturing a spectral feature dancing along the border between dark and light slopes inside Mars’ 96-mile-wide (154 kilometres) Gale Crater. It’s no surprise that these dry whirlwinds, which we also get here on Earth, are cropping up inside the crater these days, Curiosity team members said. “It’s almost summer in Gale Crater, which puts us in a period of strong surface heating that lasts from early spring through mid-summer,” Claire Newman, an atmospheric scientist at the Arizona-based company Aeolis Research, wrote in a mission update on Wednesday (Aug. 26). (Gale lies about 4.5 degrees south of the Martian equator.)

“Stronger surface heating tends to produce stronger convection and convective vortices, which consist of fast winds whipping around low pressure cores,” Newman wrote. “If those vortices are strong enough, they can raise dust from the surface and become visible as ‘dust devils’ that we can image with our cameras.” Dust devils are typically quite faint, so Curiosity photos often must be processed before the features are visible, Newman added. But the Aug. 9 whirlwind showed up even in the raw, unprocessed rover imagery.