Discovery Docks At International Space Station

tewl writes: "Saw this on CNN. For all of those interested in the space program: 'The space shuttle Discovery gently latched onto the docking port of the International Space Station Friday afternoon (1:45 p.m. EDT) as the two spacecraft hurtled at 250 miles above Kazakhstan at a rate of 50 miles a second. "Houston, Discovery, we have capture," radioed one crew member. It was the fourth shuttle docking at the fledgling station. NASA is planning another 35 shuttle visits over the next five years to build the station, estimated to cost between $60 billion-$100 billion. When complete, in 2006, the 16-nation project will have the interior volume of a 747 jumbo jet and stretch the length of a football field.'"

Comments

Lots of computer problems this flight...

[chalsall]

I've been monitoring the NASA channel in the background with RealVideo, and there's been a lot of traffic back and forth about computer system and networking problems they've been having this trip. They keep having to reboot servers and bring the network up and down.

As they each describe directory paths, it's clear they're using Windows based machines. It also seems like they're using a human (on the ground) doing single-file-at-a-time transfer for e-mail rather than a proper MTA, and this can't happen when the machine is being used "in certain ways".

Bill McArthur has been spending a lot of time fighting with the systems so far, and this isn't the first time software problems have cropped up during flights -- a few back a software program refused to write log files until someone figured out the directory limit for files had been reached.

I have to wonder -- why the hell are they flying with such flaky systems? And why are all the systems running Windows? I'm not suggesting everything suddenly switch to Linux, but it would seem to make sense that the servers (at least) run something more stable than the ones currently flying have demonstrated themselves to be.

I don't know if this has been caused by the loss of the Ku-band (high-bandwidth), but regardless, perhaps it's time to form an Open Source project for space-flight software?

If it has the interior volume of a 747

[Lerc]

Why not just get a 747 and slap some huge rockets onto it and put it into orbit.

Then eveyone would have comfy seats too.

oh, baby

[dragonfly_blue]

There's something so.... sexy... about watching two giant space modules connecting in a zero-G environment.... raaaarrr.

Er, I knew I shoulda stayed away from those oysters at the work party last night. =P

Ham Radio on the Space Station

[Bruce Perens]

The last mission brought up the first ham radio payload. They won't activate it on this trip, but they've given out callsigns for a mission later this year. Hams will be able to work the station with as little as a walkie-talkie and a hand-held beam antenna. When astronauts aren't operating voice, the system will be set up for packet radio and will answer and acknowledge a contact automaticaly. More information is here. Between this and the soon-to-be-launched Million-dollar amateur radio satellite, built and financed by hams, we're going to see a lot more space ham activity.

Bruce

Debian Developer Involved

[Bruce Perens]

I forgot to mention - look here for a picture of Debian developer Bdale Garbee (on left, in foreground) in the clean room in Kouru, doing pre-flight testing on his GPS receiver experiment. The rest of the album is here. The GPS receiver on the satellite is built to operate both inside and outside of the orbits of the GPS transmitter satellite constellation - something GPS wasn't designed for. If it works, it will transmit precise coordinates of the satellite to the ground, so that accurate ephemerides can be made without ground observation, without inertial navigation, etc.

Some of the development systems for this experiment run Debian.

Check out the rest of the album. I found the emergency escape drills and the "spacesuits" worn while fueling the satellite with hazardous chemicals most interesting, after pictures of people I know :-) .

Thanks

Bruce

ISS Visibility

[Dr. Merkw�rdigliebe]

For those around the world who would like to actually see the ISS in the night sky, as it soars past high above:

ISS Naked-Eye Visiblity Data

It isn't very bright yet, but will be in the future. Perhaps the docked shuttle will add to it as well.