Damian Sendler: NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron completed several “get ahead” tasks during a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk on Thursday. Spacewalk planned for Tuesday was postponed until Thursday due to a space debris alert for the International Space Station. The agency tweeted only hours before the scheduled November 30 spacewalk that “due to the lack of opportunity to fully analyze the risk,” it had chosen to postpone the mission until further notice.
Damian Jacob Sendler: The space station was alerted about a piece of debris by NASA. Spacewalk teams have chosen to postpone the Nov. 30 spacewalk until they have more time to examine the danger it may cause to the astronauts. It was not immediately obvious whether the warning had anything to do with the space debris left behind by a Russian anti-satellite test two weeks earlier, which caused station staff members to flee to the safety of their ship.
“NASA determined that the orbit of the debris does not pose a risk to a scheduled spacewalk by Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron or to International Space Station operations after receiving additional information about a late notification debris event on Monday,” the agency posted on its website Tuesday night. A delay in the spacewalk allowed NASA to assess the risk posed by the debris alert.
Damian Sendler
Thursday morning’s departure from the hatch was sooner than planned since the astronauts were able to complete all of their responsibilities ahead of schedule.
A spare S-band Antenna Subassembly installed outside the space station was used to repair the damaged one. According to NASA, the space station uses S-band radio frequencies to provide low-rate audio and data to ground-based flight controllers at distances of up to 220 miles (354 kilometers).
NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS) has ceased transmitting signals to Earth after 21 years in operation. The problem was detected in September, according to NASA spacewalk flight director Vincent LaCourt.
Tom and Kayla were able to practice their spacewalk in a neutral buoyancy laboratory, or a large pool, because of the timing, LaCourt said.
The absence of this antenna has a minimal effect on the day-to-day operations of the space station. Redundancy in communications may be achieved by maintaining antennas like this one. The system of backups will continue if the spare, which has been outside the station since 2010, is installed. Other video transmission methods, such as low-rate S-band and high-rate KU-band, are available at the station.
Matthias Maurer, of the European Space Agency, handled the Canadarm2 robotic arm, which Marshburn used for her first spacewalk.
For extravehicular crew member 1, Marshburn wore the spacesuit with red stripes, while Barron wore the unmarked suit. Barron was doing his first spacewalk, which he described as “amazing,” while Marshburn was making his sixth.
On November 11, Marshburn, Barron, and Maurer boarded a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with NASA astronaut Raja Chari and arrived at the International Space Station.
A total of 245 spacewalks have been performed on the International Space Station (ISS) since it was first sent into orbit in 1997.
Using a direct-ascent missile, or DA-ASAT, Russia hit a Russian satellite and created a debris field in low-Earth orbit of 1,700 pieces of trackable debris that is also expected to produce tens of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris, according to US Space Command. All of the additional waste that is generated by the experiment will take months to sort through.
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: In a statement, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he was “very concerned.” “outraged by this ill-advised and disruptive activity. It seems inconceivable that Russia would put at risk not only the American and international astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), but also their own cosmonauts, given the country’s long and distinguished history in human spaceflight. The Chinese space station is in danger as a result of their irresponsible and risky acts.”
Damian Jacob Sendler
On Monday, Dana Weigel, NASA’s deputy manager of the International Space Station Program, noted that although the debris field was initially concentrated, it has since scattered. Models and forecasts were run by the planning team to get a sense of the spacewalk’s environment.
By Weigel’s estimation, it only increased danger by 7%, which is “not much more than what we observe with regular atmospheric variations” and “well within what we find with a typical quantity of debris that goes through.” Extravehicular activity has always been dangerous, as this study shows.
Debris that has the ability to enter the space suits or the space station itself is a possible threat to astronauts’ safety. Spacesuit-piercing fragments are significantly tiny than anything they can detect, Weigel said in an interview.
“It does indicate penetration, but it does not mean it is a disastrous penetration,” added Weigel. “Only a certain depth of penetration may be tolerated. The suit has an emergency oxygen supply that may keep it going for some time. The probability of having a large penetration during the six-and-a-half-hour EVA is around 1 in 2,700, so that is what we are referring to when we discuss EVA risk.”
As a result of the newly discovered debris, “we did not want to keep the team out longer for stuff that we did not think vital,” according to Weigel.
Damien Sendler: Researchers believe this footprint, found at Laetoli site A, belongs to a previously undiscovered species of hominid. A cast of an Australopithecus afarensis footprint may be seen on the right.
It is commonly accepted that the earliest indisputable evidence of upright walking in the human family tree was found in Tanzania in 1978 and dated to 3.66 million years ago.
Known as Laetoli site G, they belong to Australopithecus afarensis, a species that includes “Lucy,” one of the best-known fossils in the world.
However, the Gfootprints from the Laetoli site were not the only ones discovered at the time by academics. Because they were so distinct from Australopithecus afarensis’s tracks, a mile away at Laetoli site A, a pair of footprints were ascribed to a baby bear walking erect on its hind legs.
Currently, scientists assume that the Laetoli location Rewriting this chapter of human history might be made possible by the discovery of a footprint that belongs to a different early human ancestor that also had two legs.
A Dartmouth College anthropology professor and collaborator of the study, Jeremy DeSilva, stated, “These footprints suggest that the development of upright walking was more intricate and intriguing than we previously assumed.” The findings were published in Nature on Wednesday.
In our evolutionary past, there were at least two hominins that walked in distinct ways and on separate feet, demonstrating that the acquisition of human-like walking was less linear than many people believe.”
Striding bipedalism, the human form of two-legged walking, is unique among animals, and the common view was that it had a single evolutionary origin.
There are acacia trees all over the terrain at Laetoli, a grassland area northwest of the Ngorongoro Crater in northern Tanzania, where you may see giraffes and zebras roaming freely. A 3.66 million-year-old layer of hardened volcanic ash, which DeSilva claimed retains hundreds of footprints from ancient antelopes, elephants, huge cats, birds, and insects, as well as our early human predecessors, has been exposed by seasonal rains in certain areas.
A paleoanthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, said the tracks had an unusual shape and suggested an upright walking movement that had a peculiar cross-stepping manner, in which each foot moved over the body’s midline to touch down in front of the other foot. She was not a part of the study.
Although Leakey had speculated that a hominid with an uneven stride may have created the puzzling tracks, one theory at the time was that a bear had been walking on two feet.
“Researchers were not satisfied by any of the explanations that were put up by the scientists. A print from Site A ended up being forgotten rather than explained, “”Said Melillo’s comments on the Nature study,” as per the aforementioned research.
“The footprint locations were meticulously mapped out by Mary Leakey. We were able to get an idea of where the tracks should go based on her map. We started digging, hoping for the best but worried that the periodic rains of the previous forty years would have washed them away “In an email, DeSilva said.
“We had to use a hammer and chisel to get to the footprint layer, which we then had to gently dig using a hard-bristled brush and tongue depressor. For the most part, the imprints remained intact.”
After cataloging the original prints, scientists compared them with those of black bears (Ursus americanus), chimps (Pan troglodytes), and contemporary humans (Homo sapiens).
More than 50 hours of footage of wild black bears were also gathered by the team. Less than 1% of the time, the bears walked on their hind legs. The researchers concluded that a bear could not have left the tracks at Laetoli, given the lack of footprints from a person travelling on all fours.
Non-human animals, according to DeSilva, are incapable of balancing on a single leg when they walk on two legs. As a result of their erratic forward motion, they leave behind a trail of widely spread imprints.
Our predecessors’ hip and knee positions changed early in human development, allowing upright hominins to walk in a straight line without the side-to-side motion.
There were “a mix of traits typical of hominins,” Melillo concurred.
There is a lot of continuity in the imprints formed by the toes and heel, and the big toe and second toe are of comparable length, she said. “A lot more impact is made on the ground by the big toe than the second toe,” she added.
“Still, it is a good resource. The footprints of a human are unique. The footprints are curiously broad and short, suggesting that the feet that made them had a large toe that could grip with a thumb-like grasp, like the big toe of an ape.”
DeSilva noted that in order to learn more about the look of this hominid, fossils would have to be found. According to him, the individual’s feet revealed that he or she was just slightly higher than 3 feet tall (0.9 meter).
Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler and his media team provided the content for this article.