February 05, 2010, 9:57 PM — Blasting two significant spaceships into orbit will keep NASA engineers hopping in the next few days. First up: The Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is set for a 4:39 am launch on Sunday Feb. 9. Then sometime before 10:30 am on Feb. 9, the launch of the sun exploring satellite, Solar Dynamics Observatory will blast off.
For Endeavour, its fuel cells were loaded today at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and other final preparation are being made for its 13-day mission. The mission will feature the installation of the 21ft long, 14ft wide, 27,000lb life support module known as Tranquility to the International Space Station.
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The “room with a view” module which was built for NASA by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, under contract to the European Space Agency -- will bump out the room for crew members and many of the space station's life support and environmental control systems including include air revitalization, oxygen generation and water recycling. A waste and hygiene compartment and a treadmill also will be relocated from other areas of the station, NASA stated.
Tranquility will be linked to the Earth-facing side of the ISS’ Unity node. The new node will provide an additional docking point for space shuttles and other crew vehicles visiting the station in the future.
NASA says the Cupola node could be considered the ultimate observation deck as the small, dome-shaped module has seven windows -- six around the sides and one on top -- that can be shuttered when not in use to protect them from micrometeoroids and the harsh space environment. The windows are made of fused silica and borosilicate glass panes, with temperature-sensing elements and window heaters, NASA said.
Just under ten feet in diameter, the module will accommodate two crew members and portable workstations that can control station and robotic activities. The multi-directional view will allow the crew to monitor spacewalks and docking operations, as well as provide a spectacular view of Earth and other celestial objects, NASA stated.
Twitter of course will play a big part in the mmission. Astronaut Mike Massimino will be accepting questions for the crew from the public via his Twitter account until Thursday, Feb. 11. Send your tweets to Endeavour's crew to Massimino's Twitter account, @astro_Mike, or add the hashtag #askastro to tweets.
The next shuttle, Discovery, is slated to blast off in March with a payload of scientific gear and a spare ammonia tank assembly, NASA said.
Meanwhile, final provisions are being made for the launch of the SDO, which NAS says will scrutinize the Sun and ultimately send back “a prodigious rush of pictures” about sunspots, solar flares and a variety of other never-before-seen astrophysical activities.
The satellite will deliver high resolution images of the Sun ten times better than the average High-Definition television to help scientists understand more about the Sun and its disruptive influence on services like communications systems on Earth. Specifically, NASA says the SDO will beam back 150 million bits of data per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s almost 50 times more science data than any other mission in NASA history. It's like downloading 500,000 iTunes a day, NASA stated.
The satellite will also be placed in what NASA called a unique orbit. Unlike a geostationary orbit, which would keep the spacecraft above the same area of Earth all the time, the satellite will trace a figure-eight path above Earth, NASA said.
Such an orbit will let SDO watch the sun almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for at least five years with only brief interruptions as Earth passes between SDO and the sun, NASA said. To gather data from SDO’s instruments, NASA has set up a pair of dedicated radio antennas near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The orbit will also let high resolution images be recorded every three quarters of a second, providing in-depth information about the Sun’s complex magnetic fields and space weather generated by solar flares and violent eruptions from the Sun’s atmosphere known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), NASA stated.
