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From: JSC Director News <jsc-director-news@lists.nasa.gov>
Date: December 17, 2013 3:05:02 PM CST
To: null <bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>
Subject: JSC Director News, December 2013
Having trouble viewing this email? View it online. Share on Facebook | Share on TwitterDecember 2013
Greetings:
Happy Holidays! I hope you are enjoying this holiday season and I want wish you well for the coming year. Thanks again for taking the time to read my e-news and to share it with your family and friends. Please continue to do so. Sharing NASA's news builds support for human space exploration across the U.S. and internationally and you are an important part of that effort.
NASA engineers continue troubleshooting an issue with one of the International Space Station's two external cooling loops affected by the Dec. 11 malfunction of a flow control valve in a cooling pump on the station's starboard truss. While the engineering evaluations continue, station program managers will have further discussions on potential contingency spacewalk planning that could result in multiple spacewalks to replace the pump module beginning as early this week.
Meanwhile, parallel work is ongoing to either enable Orbital Sciences Corp. to launch its Antares rocket and the Cygnus cargo craft from the Wallops Flight Facility, Va. Thursday night (Dec. 19) at 8:19 p.m. CST on its first commercial resupply mission to the space station or to mount the spacewalks to replace the pump module.
I also invite you to watch our new weekly web series 'Space to Ground,'available every Friday. It's a short wrap-up of the week's activities aboard the space station. Visit: http://go.nasa.gov/spacetoground
The heat shield that the Orion spacecraft will use for its first mission, Exploration Flight Test-1, slated for next year, arrived at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, on Dec. 4, transported by our Super Guppy aircraft. The shield is the biggest of its kind ever built, and its completion puts the Orion team in a good position to hit their target launch window this fall. The heat shield will have to protect Orion from temperatures of almost 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it returns to Earth at speeds of up to 20,000 miles per hour. That's faster than any spacecraft in the past 40 years.
You may have heard that JSC shipped its Morpheus prototype lander to KSC to test in their wide-open spaces. On Dec. 10, the team had a very successful first free flight of the vehicle. The 54-second test began with the Morpheus lander launching from the ground over a flame trench and ascending approximately 50 feet, then hovering for about 15 seconds. The lander then flew forward and landed on its pad approximately 23 feet from the launch point.
Be sure to follow our newest robot in the DARPA Disaster Response Robotics Challenge Dec. 20-21. During the challenge, robots will demonstrate capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments. Competing teams, including ones from JSC and the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, are expected to focus on robots that can use standard tools and equipment commonly available in human environments, ranging from hand tools to vehicles, with an emphasis on adaptability to tools with diverse specifications – all technologies that will advance humanoid assistants in space.
And, the Houston Technology Center and the Gulf Coast Regional Center of Innovation and Commercialization, in partnership with JSC are hosting a series of JSC Connect events in 2014. Each event will focus on a technology area of strategic interest to NASA's human spaceflight program, which may also have potential for non-aerospace applications, including telemedicine, energy storage and management, water quality and purification, RFID and robotics.
Talk with you next year!
Ellen Ochoa
JSC Director
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