Mar 20 2018

From The Space Library

---

Current revision

MEDIA ADVISORY M18-047 NASA to Preview Upcoming US Spacewalk, Provide Live Coverage

Two American astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station on Thursday, March 29, for a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk. Experts from NASA will preview this work in a briefing at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday, March 27, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Live coverage of the briefing and spacewalk will air on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

Participants in the March 27 briefing are:

• Kenneth Todd, International Space Station Operations integration manager
• Anthony Vareha, spacewalk flight director
• Grant Slusser, U.S. spacewalk 49 officer

Media who would like to participate in person must request credentials from the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 4 p.m. Monday, March 26. Media interested in participating by phone must contact the newsroom by 1:45 p.m. on the day of the briefing.

Expedition 55 Flight Engineers Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold will don spacesuits and exit the station’s Quest airlock about 8:10 a.m. March 29 to begin the 209th spacewalk in support of space station assembly, maintenance and upgrades. The excursion will be the seventh in Feustel’s career and the third for Arnold.

They will install wireless communications equipment on the station’s Tranquility module to enhance payload data processing for the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) experiment being flown to the station on a future SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. The experiment will measure the temperature of plants on Earth to better understand how much water they need and how they respond to stress.

The crew members also will swap out high-definition video cameras on the port truss of the station’s backbone and remove aging hoses from a cooling component on the station’s truss.

MEDIA ADVISORY M18-048 NASA to Launch Parachute Test off Virginia Coast March 27

NASA will test a parachute for possible future missions to Mars from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Tuesday, March 27. Live coverage of the test is scheduled to begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT on the Wallops Ustream site.

The launch window for the 58-foot-tall Terrier-Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket is from 6:45 to10:15 a.m. Backup launch days are March 28 to April 10.

The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will open at 6 a.m. on launch day for viewing the flight. The rocket launch is expected to be only seen from the Wallops area.

The rocket will carry the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The payload carrying the test parachute is expected to reach an altitude of 32 miles approximately two minutes into the flight. The payload will splash-down in the Atlantic Ocean 40 miles from Wallops Island and will be recovered and returned to Wallops for data retrieval and inspection.

The payload is a bullet-nosed, cylindrical structure holding a supersonic parachute, the parachute's deployment mechanism, and the test's high-definition instrumentation, including cameras, to record data.

ASPIRE is managed by JPL, with support from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA's Sounding Rocket Program is based at Wallops. Orbital ATK in Dulles, Virginia, provides mission planning, engineering services and field operations through the NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract. NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington manages the sounding rocket program for the agency.

Launch updates will be available via the Wallops Facebook and Twitter sites. Smartphone users can also download the “What’s Up at Wallops” app, which contains information on the launch, as well as a compass showing the precise direction for launch viewing.