William Harwood – Page 50 – Spaceflight Now

Three space station fliers set for landing Friday

December 10, 2015 William Harwood

In a rapid-fire crew exchange, three space station fliers return to Earth Friday morning, landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan just four days before their replacements blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome a few hundred miles away, boosting the lab’s crew back to six.

Timeline: Cygnus cargo ship’s trip from launch pad to space station

December 2, 2015 William Harwood

Based upon an on-time launch Thursday, this is the timeline for Cygnus from liftoff through capture by the space station’s robotic arm.

Spacewalkers reconfigure station cooling system

November 6, 2015 William Harwood

Space station commander Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren carried out a busy but mostly trouble-free spacewalk Friday, routing ammonia coolant back to the prime radiator used by one of the lab’s solar arrays and bypassing a secondary radiator that was activated three years ago to help pinpoint a coolant leak.

Kelly, Lindgren set for second spacewalk

November 5, 2015 William Harwood

Space station commander Scott Kelly and flight engineer Kjell Lindgren are gearing up for their second spacewalk in nine days Friday, a planned six-and-a-half-hour excursion to reconfigure the ammonia cooling system used by one of the lab’s sets of solar arrays.

Solar wind blasting away Martian atmosphere

November 5, 2015 William Harwood

The solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles blasted away from the sun, is slowly but surely stripping away Mars’ atmosphere and likely played a major role in turning the red planet from a habitable world in the distant past into the dry, frozen wasteland seen today, scientists said Thursday.

NASA marks 15 years of space station occupation

November 2, 2015 William Harwood

The International Space Station’s first three-man crew moved in on Nov. 2, 2000, 15 years ago Monday, the first of 45 expeditions to date that have logged a decade and a half of continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit.

Station astronauts complete tedious spacewalk

October 28, 2015 William Harwood

Space station commander Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren carried out a tedious seven-hour 16-minute spacewalk Wednesday, installing cables needed for a new docking mechanism, mounting insulation panels on a physics experiment to improve cooling and lubricating the latching mechanism of the station’s robot arm.

Station astronauts gearing up for spacewalk Wednesday

October 27, 2015 William Harwood

Expedition 45 commander Scott Kelly and flight engineer Kjell Lindgren have switched their spacesuits to battery power to begin planned six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk Wednesday outside the International Space Station.

Initial Pluto flyby science results published

October 16, 2015 William Harwood

The first scientific review of data collected during the New Horizons flyby of Pluto describe a small world with a thin but surprisingly complex atmosphere and a variety of surface features, ranging from ancient impact craters to geologically recent glaciers and other structures that reflect widespread resurfacing.

Looking for ET in the waters of Mars and Europa

September 30, 2015 William Harwood

The discovery of intermittent flows of liquid water on Mars, announced with great fanfare Monday, makes the red planet the leading candidate for the near-term discovery of extraterrestrial life in the form of fossilized microbes or even existing microorganisms, NASA’s chief scientist told lawmakers Tuesday.