Space

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Astronauts David Wolf and Thomas Marshburn carried out a successful six-hour, 53-minute spacewalk Monday, moving critical spare parts to the International Space Station as a hedge against failures after the shuttle is retired next year.

Crewmates inside, meanwhile, repaired the toilet in the U.S. lab module after a malfunction Sunday.

The spacewalk got under way at 10:27 a.m. CDT and ended at 5:20 p.m. It was the 127th excursion devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began in 1998, the eighth so far this year and the second of five planned … Read more

Google Earth can now take you to the moon.

Timed with the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, the Internet giant on Monday released an addition to its Google Earth mapping software to provide images of moon landscapes and traces of human exploration there.

Called the Moon in Google Earth and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the software allows you to see topographical features on our closest celestial neighbor with the lunar equivalent of Google Street View. People can also see a gallery of the Apollo space missions and get information on every robotic spacecraft that has visited … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--The new toilet in the U.S. Destiny laboratory module aboard the International Space Station broke down Sunday, forcing the combined 13-member shuttle-station crew to share a single Russian toilet and one aboard the shuttle Endeavour until the problem is resolved.

"When you get a second, if you could put an out-of-service note on the WHC (waste and hygiene compartment) and advise the crew members that station crew members will have to use the (Russian toilet) and shuttle crew members on the shuttle until further notice," Hal Getzelman radioed from mission control.

European Space Agency … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Combining robotics with a five-hour 32-minute spacewalk, the Endeavour astronauts accomplished the primary goal of their space station assembly mission Saturday, successfully attaching a sophisticated experiment platform to the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.

In the first of five planned spacewalks, astronauts Dave Wolf and Tim Kopra prepped the Japanese Exposed Facility, or JEF, for removal from the shuttle's cargo bay and then went on to other tasks, including the successful deployment of a jammed external storage system.

Koichi Wakata and Douglas Hurley, meanwhile, operating the space station's robot arm, pulled the JEF platform out of … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Manually flying the shuttle Endeavour from the aft flight deck, commander Mark Polansky guided the 120-ton orbiter to a gentle docking with the International Space Station Friday as the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above northern Australia at five miles per second.

With Endeavour's arrival, the space station now boasts a record combined crew of 13--six full-time station crew members and seven shuttle astronauts. One of them, Timothy Kopra, officially joined the Expedition 20 crew a few hours later, replacing outgoing flight engineer Koichi Wakata.

"The crew is very happy to welcome Endeavour's crew … Read more

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we'll all be as excited about people landing on Mars as we were 40 years ago about the first moon landing. But don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, mission-to-Mars dreamers and wannabes will have to make do with Earth-bound exercises such as the European Space Agency's Mars500 program. Earlier this week, a group of six Mars500 participants emerged from a mission-to-Moscow mock-up meant to simulate part of what will eventually be a very long journey to the Red Planet.

The Euro-sextet ended their simulated Mars mission on Tuesday, after 105 … Read more

Forty years after the Apollo 11 voyage to the moon, NASA released photographs from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft Friday showing five of the six Apollo landing sites. Shadows cast by the Apollo descent stages are clearly visible and in some cases, the moon walkers' paths can be seen in the disturbed dust.

"We were very interested in getting our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill - and to see how well the cameras had come into focus," Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO's main camera, said in a … Read more

Forty years after the first humans walked on the moon, NASA is trying again to reach the Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

It's not just about retracing 40-year-old footsteps in the lunar dust, though. This time, NASA wants its moonshot to become an outpost and eventually a Mars shot too, if Congress and others can be persuaded to part with the necessary money.

The new attempt is well past the idea stage. Two spacecraft are freshly launched on scouting missions to map the moon and see whether permanently shaded areas in craters on its south pole really do contain … Read more

Post-launch photography of the shuttle Endeavour's external tank shows multiple areas of bare metal where thin strips of foam insulation peeled away during the climb to space, the result of an as-yet-unknown mechanism.

In at least two "events," debris hit Endeavour's heat shield tiles during the early stages of flight when the shuttle is most vulnerable to damage. But mission managers said Thursday there is no evidence yet of any serious problems that would prevent a safe re-entry.

"There is nothing that we have seen on the orbiter that causes us any concern," said … Read more