OrbitalHub

The Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft carrying the Expedition 20 crew lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 6:34 AM EDT Wednesday. The Expedition 20 crew members are Roman Romanenko, Frank De Winne and Robert Thirsk.

Expedition 20 marks the start of six-person crew operations aboard the International Space Station. The Expedition 19 crew, already aboard the station, consists of Gennady Padalka, Michael Barratt, and Koichi Wakata.

Credits: NASA

Beginning in August 1961, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (later known as the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory) developed the Apollo Primary Guidance, Navigation, and Control System (PGNCS). The PGNCS was an inertial guidance system that allowed Apollo spacecraft to navigate during periods when communication with Earth was interrupted. Both the Apollo command module (CM) and lunar module (LM) were equipped with a PGNCS.

This summer, June 10-12, MIT is hosting a celebration to honor those who made the Apollo Program possible. The highlights of the event are the Giant Leaps Symposium, In Memoriam: Robert Seamans, and Tours of MIT space labs. For more information, you can visit the MIT website.

Credits: NASA

Carnival of Space #103 is hosted by Megan Watzke at The Chandra Blog.

This week the focus is on the STS-125 mission, which is the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. You can also read about a 1970-planned lunar base, space-based solar energy, naming asteroids, and much more.

Space Shuttle Atlantis and the STS-125 crew landed on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Sunday, May 24, 2009. During the 13-day mission, the STS-125 crew performed five spacewalks, servicing and upgrading Hubble. With the new upgrades, the Hubble Space Telescope has an improved discovery power, and it will continue to be operational for at least five years.

Read more about STS-125 on the Hubble Servicing Mission 4 page on NASA\’s website.

Apollo 10, the fourth manned mission in the Apollo program, was a dress rehearsal for a moon landing mission. The mission included an all-up test of the Lunar Module in lunar orbit. During the tests, on May 22, 1969, the Lunar Module came to within 15 km of the lunar surface.

The Apollo 10 crew consisted of Commander Thomas P. Stafford, Command Module Pilot John W. Young, and Lunar Module Pilot Eugene A. Cernan.

Credits: NASA

Understanding the Earth’s energy balance is important in order to anticipate changes to the climate. The Glory mission will make a significant contribution towards explaining the Earth’s energy budget.

There are two scientific objectives set for the Glory mission: mapping the global distribution, properties, and chemical composition of natural and anthropogenic aerosols, and the continued measurement of solar irradiance. Both will lead to a reliable quantification of the aerosol and Sun’s direct and indirect effects on Earth’s climate.

The Glory spacecraft uses Orbital’s LEOStar bus design. The structure of the bus consists of an octagonal aluminum space frame with two 750 W deployable solar panels and a 100 W body-mounted solar panel. Glory will have a launch mass of 545 kg.

Forty-five kilograms of hydrazine powers a propulsion module, which will provide orbital maneuvering and attitude control capabilities for the projected 36-month lifespan of the spacecraft. The spacecraft bus also provides 3-axis stabilization, X-band/S-band RF communication capabilities, payload power, command, telemetry, science data interfaces, and an attitude control subsystem to support science instrument requirements.

Credits: NASA

Three instruments will be mounted on Glory: the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM), and the Cloud Camera Sensor Package (CCSP).

The APS will map the global aerosol distribution by measuring the light reflected within the solar reflective spectrum region of Earth’s atmosphere (which is visible, near- infrared, and short-wave infrared light scattered from aerosols).

TIM will collect measurements of the total solar irradiance (TSI), which is the amount of solar radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere over a period of time. TIM consists of four electrical substitution radiometers (ESRs) that are pointed towards the Sun, independently of the position of the spacecraft. TIM was developed by the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). TIM inherited the design of an instrument flown on SORCE satellite, which was launched in 2003. A presentation of the TIM design and on-orbit functionality was published by Greg Kopp, George Lawrence, and Gary Rottman of LASP.

The CCSP will be used to distinguish between measurements done on clear or cloud- filled areas, as clouds can have a significant impact on the quality of the measurements. CCSP is a dual-band (blue and near-infrared) imager that uses non-scanning detector arrays similar to those used in star trackers.

Credits: NASA

Glory will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on top of a Taurus XL launch vehicle. The operational orbit is a 705 km, sun-synchronous, circular, 98.2 degree inclination, low Earth orbit (LEO). The launch date is set for Fall 2009.

Read more about Glory at the Glory Mission page on NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s website. A Glory Fact Sheet is also available on Orbital Sciences Corporation’s website.