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S P A C E T E A M O N L I N EUPDATE # 71 - February 22, 1999 PART 1: Busy Times Ahead! BUSY TIMES AHEAD!
We want to thank you for continuing to respond to the survey. These replies are very helpful to us, and we want to assure you that changes you would like to see happen on STO will receive much consideration. As you can tell by the lengthy schedule below, things are very active here at NASA Quest's Space Team Online. We will cap off February with an exciting introduction. This is your opportunity to get inside those areas at Kennedy Space Center where outsiders usually are not allowed. The ISS Behind the Scenes monthly programs will give you a peek into the areas where the International Space Station is being prepared and tested. Tomorrow is the kickoff. You'll see the familiar faces of Brandt Secosh, NASA Quest's KSC Correspondent, and Mike Ciannilli, who so enthusiastically brought us the launch of STS-95 live from the cape. Old friends, but new on camera, are team members like Joe Delai and Sharon Carlson. You can see all these folks profiled in the Team section of STO. Each of the upcoming broadcasts will be preceded by an anticipatory set of Workshop Activities to help you prepare your students to view the tours intelligently and to participate in the discussion from an informed standpoint. Join us to launch this exciting series of events! http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/ISS Female Frontiers continues to grow and bring you interactive possibilities with today's heroines! By the way, I just saw a copy of the Women in Aviation - Women's Firsts calendar. It's a treasure of information and pictures of aviatrix history from Amelia Earhart to Eileen Collins. NASA Quest does not receive any financial benefit from its sale, but we helped a bit with its production. It's a reasonably priced keepsake you can find at: http://www.womeninaviation.com/calendar1.html Hope you'll be joining us for these very active several weeks. See you online, Linda UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS: ->Monday, February 23, 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) Space Team Online presents: ISS Behind the Scenes, live from Kennedy Space Center. In this segment we will present an overview of the program and meet some of the people who will be giving you an insider's view into construction and assembly of the ISS. http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/sto/iss/series2.html ->Tuesday, February 23, 1999, 9:00 a.m. PST (Noon EST) Dawn Riley, First female captain of America's Cup Team See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/riley.html Register for the chat at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Wednesday, February 24,1999 -10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) Ruth Simmons, First female to head major University as president of Smith College - See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/simmons.html Register for the chat at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Thursday, February 25, 1999 - 9 a.m. PST (Noon EST) Oran Cox, NASA Quest, QuestChat Project Manager. Oran is also a graduate student at San Jose State University. See his profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/qchats/ocox.html Register for the chat at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/special/mlk99/ ->February 25, 1999 -10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) Make It Your Business - Join viewers for a worldwide, interactive forum to discuss the global implications of commercialization of the space industry. A diverse panel of top NASA, university and commercial researchers, international investors, and other experts will take your questions and comments on the air. Join in at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/sto/iss/program.html ->Tuesday, March 2, 1999 -Noon PST (3:00 EST) David Cox, lead schedule integration engineer, is responsible for making sure that goals for the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) can be reached. David assists ISS construction companies with planning and scheduling, and communicates scheduling deadlines with different levels of management. Read his profile and latest journal at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/cox.html Register at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/chats ->Wednesday, March 3, 1999, 9 a.m. PST (Noon EST) Keith Zimmerman, operations lead, spends a lot of time in Russia leading the operations team for NASA at Russia's Mission Control Center, in Moscow. Read Keith Zimmerman's profile at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/zimmerman.html Register at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/chats ->March, 2,1999 Time TBA (We're sorry, time is dependent on a weekly filming schedule. We will post the time at our earliest knowledge!) Chat with Kate Mulgrew, First female starship captain in the history of primetime. Read her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/mulgrew.html Registration coming soon at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Wednesday, March 3, 1999 - 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) Chat with Julie Mikula, First woman manager of NASA's Simulation Laboratories (SimLab). See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/mikula.html Register at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Wednesday, March 3 - 11:30 a.m. PST (2:30 p.m. EST) Female Frontiers Chat with Mae Jemison, First African-American woman to fly in Space. See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/jemison.html Register at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Thursday, March 11,1999 - 11:00 a.m. PST (2:00 p.m. EST) Chat with Congresswomen Ellen Tauscher, First women to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Registration coming soon at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Tuesday, March 16, 1999 - 11:00 a.m. PST (2:00 p.m. EST) Chat with Kathryn Sullivan, First American woman to walk in Space See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/sullivan.html Registration open 3/2/99 at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html ->Tuesday, March 23 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) Chat with Sally Ride, First American woman in Space. See her profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/ride.html Registration coming soon at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html For continuing Female Frontiers schedule see: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/schedule.html For March Space Team Online chats see: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/chats [Editor's note: Dian is an engineer at Kennedy Space Center. Her expertise is materials science and she helps decide what kind of metal or plastic can be used for different jobs. Dian appears both in Space Team Online and the Female Frontiers projects.] TIMES ARE CHANGING! http:://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/hardison.html Interviewer: Brandt Secosh February 17, 1999 It has been a busy year for Dian, with her new job and a ton of educational outreach projects. One of Dian's recent activities involved her participation with the Female Frontiers project. She participated in a chat for the project and was kept really occupied trying to keep up with all of the incoming messages. To learn more about this project, please visit the Female Frontiers web site at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/ What's going on with her new job? Dian is on a rotational assignment with the Design Engineering Directorate. This has turned out to be a very good way for her to keep up-to-date on the many new developments in the world of advanced flight vehicles. New ground support equipment is needed to analyze, develop, and test hardware and components to improve quality and safety in payload and launch processes that will be used on future launches from Kennedy Space Center. There is a lot going on within the directorate, such as the involvement with the X33, X34, and new propulsion systems. Dian will be returning to her primary job in safety in the very near future. She believes that safety should continue these rotational assignments so that each safety team member will have a better idea of what is going on within each directorate. She points out that a lot has changed in her field since she began with safety 11 years ago. For example, finite element analysis has become an entirely new process. Newly developed software allows engineers to conduct very accurate stress analysis of objects on the computer. Objects are now modeled on the computer that can represent the type of material it is made of and the environmental conditions it will be used in. Engineers can apply stresses to test the object and determine its stress characteristics. Objects can even be combined by programming the type of weld that will be used. This process and the new software being used didn't exist until fairly recently. Before that, the engineers would have to create the model and test it in a laboratory. Imagine the time and money saved by doing this! One of the projects that Dian worked on during her assignment is the Chandra satellite, the Advanced X-Ray Facility. Chandra will be the payload onboard STS-93. Chandra is one of the "Great Observatories," like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will be in a higher orbit than the Hubble (an elliptical orbit of 2,200 miles to 86,000 miles!), so it can't be visited and repaired by astronauts during its five-year lifetime and must carry a large amount of hypergolic fuel and oxidizer. To learn more about Chandra please visit - http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/payload/missions/axaf/ One of the questions Dian gets asked a lot is, "Are we going to live on the moon or Mars?" The answer to that is, "Yes, absolutely!" A lot depends on funding for the space program, and for scientific research in general, but you can count on seeing people living and working in space and on other planets within the new century! [Editor's note: Steve is in training to be on console at Mission Control as flight controller during the International Space Station flights. He works at the Johnson Space Center in Texas] PREPARING FOR MY FIRST TRIP TO RUSSIA http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/long.html Interviewer: Lori Keith February 8, 1999 It's been awhile since my last journal, and a lot of things have happened. Along with the beginning of the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) the last few months, I have begun constructing a family. I was married, November 14, to Marcia. We were married in San Antonio, Texas, on the River Walk in a small ceremony with both our families present. The wedding was outside, on a bridge, over the San Antonio River. It was great! We have a 7-year-old daughter, Ariel, and now a baby on the way. We have a dog, Hermes, named after the messenger of the gods. Hermes is part Lhasa Apso and Maltese and looks like a little fluffy white furry snowball. I also found out that I didn't have to retake my GRE. Once I return from Russia, at the end of this year, I will start working on my master's degree. I hope to be enrolled during the spring semester 2000. As far as work goes, I have just started doing some sim work (OJT - on-the-job training) in preparation for Flights 2A and 3A. I probably won't actually work these flights, but it will help me when I go to Russia, which comes up in a little over 60 days. The sims are exciting and very interesting, especially as far as the wrenches they throw at us. The point of the sim, or simulation, is for the trainers to break things so we can figure out how to fix them. When I leave for Russia, I will be gone for 10 weeks. I am spending a good bit of time getting ready for my trip and the work I will do there. I have also been working on the Service Module End-to-End Test with one of the flight directors here. This test is to prepare the Service Module for flight later this year. Some of this testing will go on while I am in Moscow. I have finished my Russian language studies. This was 12-14 weeks of intensive training. The only thing I have left to complete is the Russian cross-cultural training, scheduled sometime next month. These classes will prepare me for everyday activities, like shopping in Russian grocery stores. In the grocery store, all the departments are split up. When you get your meat, you get a meat tally sheet; get your dairy and a dairy tally sheet, etc. Then you go to the major check out where they gather all your tally sheets, add them together, and collect your money. I am continuously working on the total understanding of my systems. Right now, we are using Early Com, which is the radio on the ISS Node. The S-Band will go up on Flight 4A. I also need to know how the Russian systems work. One of their systems, Komparus, is used for television and high rate data transfer. They also use the "Radio Measuring System", a slow information gathering system. This system is used once every 90 minutes when the Station is over Russia. It collects the data slowly over the 90 minutes and transmits one time. Right now, my group -- CATO, Communication and Tracking Officer -- is the Station Duty Officer, or SDO. The SDO monitors the US side of the ISS 24 hours a day with CATO rotating seven people. This small crew monitors all systems, and if a problem occurs, we contact whoever is needed to come in, work the problem, and fix it. This is such an exciting time!! Until next time, study hard . . . STATUS OF COLUMBIA PROCESSING
Below, we provide reports on the processing of Shuttle Columbia taken from the detailed daily reports found at the NASA Shuttle Status web site at http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/status/status.htm. At times these reports will contain jargon and unfamiliar terms; our intent is not to confuse you but to provide a glimpse at all the steps involved. Status stayed the same: February 10, Columbia rolled out of OPF bay 3 and into VAB high bay 2 for temporary storage. Shuttle Atlantis will be the next occupant in OPF bay 3, following a week of open bay preparation. Columbia will remain in the VAB until mid-April, when Shuttle Discovery rolls out of OPF bay 1. Columbia will then be transferred to OPF bay 1 to complete STS-93's orbiter preparations.
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