All-female spacewalk set for Friday

Japan to participate in US moon landing plan

LONDON, Oct 17, (RTRS): US astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will make history on Friday when they conduct the first ever all-female spacewalk to replace the power source on the International Space Station (ISS).

The pair will exit the ISS at 7:50 am EDT (11:50 GMT) to fix the station’s faulty battery charge/discharge unit (BCDU) over a period of more than five hours.

An all-woman spacewalk was canceled in March due to one woman’s ill-fitting suit, leading to her replacement by a male colleague.

“Our achievements provide inspiration to students around the world, proving that hard work can lead you to great heights, and all students should be able to see themselves in those achievements,” a NASA spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

The spacewalk will be broadcast in its entirety from 6:30 am EDT (10:30 GMT) on National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA) Television and on the agency’s website.

Impacted

Koch and Meir are replacing the BCDUs after they failed to provide increased power to the ISS, though this has not significantly impacted the crew or its mission.

According to NASA, BCDUs regulate the charge for batteries that draw energy from the station’s solar collectors to provide power as the station orbits at night.

Koch, who is also set to complete the longest single spaceflight by a woman as she remains in orbit until February 2020, said gender milestones like the spacewalk were especially significant.

“There are a lot of people who derive motivation from inspiring stories from people who look like them, and I think that it’s an important aspect of the story to tell,” she told a NASA briefing in Houston this month.

“What we’re doing now shows all the work in the decades prior from all the women that worked to get us where we are today,” Meir added.

Koch, who was slated for the earlier spacewalk, will be making her fourth walk and will become the 14th woman ever to walk in space. Friday will mark Meir’s first spacewalk. The ISS has seen more than 200 spacewalks since 1998.

The March spacewalk was called off because astronaut Ann McClain needed a medium spacesuit but only a large was available. Due to safety issues with the fit she did not participate.

“We must never accept a risk that can instead be mitigated,” she said on Twitter after the event. “Safety of

has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn.” (AP)

William, Kate visit glacier:

Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate on Wednesday visited a melting glacier in the Hindu Kush mountain range not far from Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, witnessing first hand the impact of climate change their trip is seeking to highlight.

They flew by helicopter to the northern tip of the Chiatibo glacier, where a climate change expert explained how it was retreating.

It is one of around 7,000 of Pakistan’s 7,200 glaciers that meteorological officials say show signs of melting, citing data gathered LAS VEGAS, Oct 17, (RTRS): When astronauts orbit the moon or live on its surface in the decade ahead, they will probably be doing so inside inflatable space lodges now in development.

Dozens of NASA officials and veteran astronauts are wrapping up a review of five space habitat mockups built by different companies. The mockups offer the US space agency ideas for an ideal Gateway – the planned research outpost in lunar orbit that will house and transfer astronauts to the surface of the moon. “The whole point is to define what we like and what we don’t like about these different habitats,” NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, principal investigator for the testing campaign, told Reuters.

He and his team were making a final inspection recently in Las Vegas, Nevada at the headquarters of Bigelow Aerospace, a space habitat company founded by hotel chain billionaire Robert Bigelow.

US Vice-President Mike Pence in March told NASA to land its first crew of astronauts on the moon by 2024. That accelerated timeline spawned the space agency’s Artemis program, which calls for privately built lunar landers, robotic rovers and Lunar Gateway – a modular space station in orbit around the Moon with living quarters for astronauts, a lab for science and ports for visiting spacecraft.

“Gateway is an opportunity to test all these structures in a deep space environment... as a prelude to going to Mars,” Bigelow told reporters. “Potentially we think that for the rest

the crew and execution of the mission come first.”

At the time the cancellation drew widespread criticism, including from former US first lady Hillary Clinton and global activism group March for Science. Woman spacewalks date to July, 1984 when Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first to do so. Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov conducted history’s first spacewalk in 1965.

While Friday’s event is a long time coming, NASA said it was not purposefully planned.

“It is something that was bound to happen eventually, and the increase in female astronauts in space for the past of this century, the expandable architecture is where it’s at.”

Bigelow’s B330 habitat, launched from Earth compacted inside a rocket, is made of a fabric-like material designed to shield inhabitants from deep-space radiation and highspeed space debris. Once docked alongside other Gateway modules in lunar orbit, the habitat unfurls into a two-story, 55-foot-long (16-meterlong) outpost that up to six astronauts could stay in.

The lunar space habitat and colonization program is expected to cost over a billion dollars through 2028.

Four other companies are doing mockups: Boeing Co, Northrop Grumman, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Lockheed Martin.

Each of the companies received a chunk of the $65 million that NASA allotted in 2017 to develop the prototypes. The space agency’s proposed funding for 2020 includes $500 million to kickstart development of an initial version of Gateway.

The companies are giving NASA ideas – such as where to place astronaut toilets, how big the beds should be and how many windows the station should have. Those will inform a blueprint that NASA is due to release in the coming months.

NASA wants the habitats to include exercise equipment, a small kitchen, noise-cancelling sleep stations that also block out light and “a reliable and easy-to-use toilet that’s in a location that minimizes the potential for cross contamination with science and meal preparation activities,” Gernhardt told Reuters.

year is providing another window of opportunity,” its spokeswoman said.

“Fifty percent of the 2013 astronaut candidate class are women,” she noted, “and of the 11 members of 2017 astronaut candidate class still in training, five are women.”

TOKYO:

Also:

Japan has decided to participate in a US plan for putting astronauts back on the moon by 2024 and the government will officially inform the United States within this year, the Kyodo News agency reported on Thursday.

The decision was made by the Cabinet Office’s space policy committee, the news agency said.

hat, similar to one gifted to William’s mother Princess Diana during her visit to the area in 1991. They were also given an album of photos of Diana during her visit.

William highlighted the visit to the glacier and the challenge of climate change, a major theme of their five-day trip, in a speech the previous evening at a reception hosted by the British High Commission at Pakistan’s national monument in the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan’s northern glaciers and those throughout the Hindu Kush and Himalaya region, are an important water store for 250 million people, and another 1.6 billion rely on rivers originating in the mountains, putting many communities at risk as global temperatures rise. (RTRS)