Hasta La Gadget!

NASA is live-streaming a spacewalk right now, which involves two cosmonauts going out into the deep, dark space in order to fetch some equipment off the exterior of the International Space Station. One of those men is Flight Engineer Pavel Vinogradov, who is 59 years old and is now the oldest person ever to go out on a spacewalk.

Vinogradov is working with Flight Engineer and Cosmonaut Roman Romanenko to replace a broken reflector, as well as retrieve and install experiment equipment on the exterior of the station. Up until today, the oldest person to perform a spacewalk was now-retired NASA astronaut Story Musgrave, who was 58 when he helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993.

Vinogradov has been a cosmonaut for 20 years and today’s spacewalk is his seventh so far. is making his seventh spacewalk. His first-ever spacewalk took place in 1997 aboard Russia’s old Mir space station. Vinogradov will turn 60 aboard the space station this summer, as he’s been assigned for six months up on the ISS.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that Vinogradov’s partner during today’s spacewalk, Romanenko, is experiencing his first spacewalk ever. Romanenko, who is 41, follows in his father’s footsteps, Yuri Romanenko, who went to space in the 1970s and 1980s. The young Romanenko joked that he is “afraid of the darkness,” as the two cosmonauts stepped outside the ISS.

[via FOX News]

Cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov becomes world’s oldest spacewalker is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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NASA has decided on two “low-cost” missions that it plans on launching in 2017. The first project involves the MIT-led Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) project, and the second project involves the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), which will be mounted onto the International Space Station. NASA will spend a total of $255 million for both projects.

MIT’s TESS project will receive $200 million in funding. The TESS project will use an array of wide-field cameras to perform an all-sky survey. It will scan nearby stars for exoplanets. Its primary focus are planets that are similar in size to Earth. TESS will note when these planets transit their host stars from its perspective. George Ricker, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI), stated,

TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission. It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth.

NASA’s second project, NICER, will be mounted onto the International Space Station. It will observe and measure the variability of cosmic X-ray sources, also known as as X-ray timing. The goal for NICER is to allow scientists to better understand neutron stars by exploring the states of matter within the stars and exploring their interior and exterior compositions. The project will be drastically cheaper than the TESS project, costing NASA about $55 million to fund. NICER’s principal investigator is Keith Gendreau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. TESS’s George Ricker will also be a partner in the NICER Mission.

These projects are part of NASA’s Explorer program. These are frequent, low-cost investigations that are relevant to NASA’s astrophysics and heliophysics programs. The first program launched in 1958, which discovered the Earth’s radiation belts. Over 90 more missions have been launched since then. John Grunsfeld, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science in Washington stated,

With these missions we will learn about the most extreme states of matter by studying neutron stars, and we will identify many nearby star systems with rocky planets in the habitable zone for further study by telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

[via Space.com]

NASA chooses TESS and NICER projects for 2017 missions is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Chris Hadfield—CSA Astronaut, ISS Commander and the human explainer for all things space related—answers another question with his latest video: how do astronauts exercise with that zero gravity and all? Turns out, they do a lot of the same stuff we do: running on a treadmill, deadlifts, squats and more. Only their exercises require being carefully tied down by a harness. Plus, astronauts have to work out 2 hours everyday to maintain bone and muscle mass. More »