NASA TV to Broadcast Space Station Spacewalk Feb. 16
Two cosmonauts will conduct a six-hour spacewalk Thursday, Feb. 16, to continue outfitting the International Space Station. NASA Television will broadcast the spacewalk beginning at 13:45 UT. Expedition 30 Russian Flight Engineers Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov will move one of the two Strela cranes from the Pirs docking compartment to begin preparing for its replacement next year with a new laboratory and docking module. The 46-foot crane will be relocated to the Poisk module for future assembly and maintenance work. The duo also will install five debris shields on the Zvezda service module and, if time permits, a small experiment on the forward section of the module, an experiment sample pack on Poisk and support struts on the Pirs ladder. Source
Later today the International Space Station will perform a debris avoidance manoeuvre. At 17:10 CET (16:10 GMT) Russian mission controllers will fire the Zvezda service module engines to boost the Station's orbit in order to avoid a 10cm piece of debris from an Iridium satellite. Read more
Dutch Prime Minister 'phones' André Kuipers in space
The Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, and students from the Technical University of Delft recently enjoyed speaking with ESA astronaut André Kuipers about life on the International Space Station during a live event. Read more
The Unity connecting module was carried into orbit as the primary cargo of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-88, the first Space Shuttle mission dedicated to assembly of the station. On December 6, 1998, the STS-88 crew mated the aft berthing port of Unity with the forward hatch of the already orbiting Zarya module. (Zarya was a mixed Russian-US funded and Russian-built component launched earlier aboard a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.) This was the first connection made between two station modules. Read more
STS-88 First Shuttle to the International Space Station
The orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) was Thursday elevated by 1.8 km by Russia's Mission Control Centre. The orbit was raised to 428.4 km to "create favourable conditions" for an upcoming docking Read more
Mission Control Notifies Station Crew of Possible Conjunction
Mission Control notified the Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station that it may have to take shelter early Wednesday because of a possible close call with a piece of space junk. The object is a piece of debris about 10 centimetres in diameter from the Chinese Fengyun 1C weather satellite that was destroyed in 2007. Predictions indicate the object may come within 850 meters of the station. Source
Several pieces of Old Amsterdam cheese are currently circling the earth, waiting for Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers to arrive at the ISS space station in around a month's time, the Parool reports. Read more
The ISS is operated by Expedition crews, and has been continuously staffed since 2 November 2000 - an uninterrupted human presence in space for the past 10 years and 334 days. Read more