Living And Working Aboard Station

My question is, is the IDA going to be a standard for spacecraft? Do we have standard ports already?

Spacewalk Friday: Installing a New "Parking Spot" on Station

This Friday, Aug. 19, two U.S. astronauts will install a new gateway for American commercial crew spacecraft at the International Space Station. 

Commercial crew flights from Florida’s Space Coast to the International Space Station will restore America’s human spaceflight launch capability and increase the time U.S. crews can dedicate to scientific research.

The adapter being installed (imaged below) was launched on a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft and arrived on orbit July 20. This ring is known as an International Docking Adapter, or IDA, and its main purpose is to provide a port for spacecraft bringing astronauts to the station in the future. Outfitted with a host of sensors and systems, the adapter is built so spacecraft systems can automatically perform all the steps of arrival and docking with the station without input from the astronauts. 

NASA astronauts Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins will perform the spacewalk to install the equipment this Friday, Aug. 19. This will be the fourth spacewalk in Williams’ career and the first for Rubins.

Four previous spacewalks…like the one below…helped set the stage for installation of this docking adapter. During those previous spacewalks, other crew members laid hundreds of feet of power and data cables outside the space station. 

On Wednesday, the robotics team using the Canadarm2 and its attached “Dextre” manipulator, will reach into the SpaceX Dragon trunk and pull out the docking adapter and position it for Friday’s spacewalk activities.

The morning of the spacewalk, while the astronauts are getting suited up, the robotic arm will position the docking adaptor near the port so that it will be ready for installation.

The two astronauts will venture outside the space station to install the first International Docking Adapter (IDA). This new adapter port will provide a parking space for U.S. Commercial Crew vehicles.

Watch LIVE!

Coverage of the spacewalk begins at 6:30 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 19; with the spacewalk scheduled to begin at 8:05 a.m. EDT. Stream live online HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Methodology:

Characters were counted by hand based on UESP quest writeups. Characters were only counted if they were questgivers or involved in multiple quests. Only characters from the main quest or faction questlines were counted. Any expansions or DLCs have not been included.

Due to the incomplete documentation for ESO quests, that game probably has more margin of error than others, though it should be balanced out due to how many NPCs were counted overall. I realize that this is an imperfect process, especially considering the very different ways that each game handles quests. I think the overall patterns hold, though, even if the percentages might be off a few points were someone to repeat the process.

You’ll also notice that Morrowind, Oblivion, and ESO have two main quest graphs. The latter is for including characters who are also encountered in the other parts of the game. For Morrowind this is questlines where you must speak to all the house leaders to become Hortator, in Oblivion it is the Aid for Bruma questline where you must speak to the counts/countesses to gain their support, and in ESO this is the Weight of Three Crowns quest where the faction leaders convene on Stirk. Daggerfall, meanwhile, randomizes most of its quest, and the overall graph counts the main quest and nobles quests.

Sample sizes are as follows: Daggerfall (23 total, 10 main quest), Morrowind (82 total, 16 main quest, 34 with hortator), Oblivion (36 total, 9 main quest, 15 with Bruma allies), Skyrim (59, 11 main quest), ESO (278 total, 6 main quest, 10 with Stirk).

Conclusions and interpretations under the cut.

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I saw them at MIT this year!

Riccardo Yulia

 Rumba Demonstrations

Why do we not discuss clouds more?

I mean look at that. That’s water.

Flying water.

FLYING

FUCKING

WATER

LIKE WHAT THE FUCK, WHY DO WE EVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS

WHAT IS THIS

HOW IS THIS EVEN

AND NOW THE FLYING WATER IS EATING A MOUNTAIN

GOD DAMN, WHAT

RoboAction

Painting series by Dragan Ilić features abstracted mark-making using an industrial robot, sometimes carrying and guiding the artist himself:

The artist constantly transposes into the third dimension his decade’s long-running conceptual practice based on the usage of pencils as the basic draftsman’s tool, starting primarily with the media of performance art, installation and sculpture in extended field. Gradually, over the years, his expressive and mechanical compositions have become even more advanced with the development of modules, diverse in shape and sizes, devices designed for the task of mounting and holding his drawing tools, which has led ultimately to the construction of an appropriate drawing machine. Construed for non-artistic purposes, these robots have been reshaped into special draftsmanship implements with which the author is capable of processing his ideas at far greater speed and with considerably greater precision. The metamorphosis of the artistic work is positioned at a point where human and machine activity intersects, resulting in an interaction that is essentially based on the need to transcend the limitations of the human body. 

More Here

Superhenge?

Last year, an international team of scientists mapping the underground landscape surrounding Stonehenge announced that they had located a massive stone monument that dwarfed its ancient neighbor. When archaeologists started excavating “Superhenge” earlier this month, however, they found something completely different.

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The 10 oldest cities in the world

"There’s a certain aesthetic attached to the oldest cities in the world: bustling souks beneath a bright blue sky, flowing garments made of whispery white cotton, stone masonry painted yellow by the sun."

"There’s a certain aesthetic attached to the oldest cities in the world: bustling souks beneath a bright blue sky, flowing garments made of whispery white cotton, stone masonry painted yellow by the sun."

This graphic shows how fast a rocket must go to leave every planet

Watch subsequent decades have a mass exodus from the tropics towards the poles

Population density, 3000 BC to 2000 AD

"The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a giant nuclear furnace. Where HYDROGEN is built into HELIUM..." Main reason I remember that, thank you They Might Be Giants

I started stoichiometry today and began with the difference between nuclear and chemical reactions. I drew this equation on the board and asked where this reaction takes place and why it’s important to life and the universe. Blank stares and crickets…the entire class of 45 first-year college students had no clue WTF I was talking about.

Do they even teach earth space science in high school anymore?