Astro Alex arrived at the station!

Yesterday afternoon Alexander Gerst and his crew Sergei Prokopyev (Russia) and Serena Auñón-Chancellor (USA) arrived at the International Space Station and received a warm welcome by the 55/56 increment crew.

Launch of Astro Alex ahead & delays for MarconISSta

Astro Alex will launch to the ISS this Wednesday! MarconISSta has already arrived safely on the ISS on May 24th. We can guess that you want to know when operations start. And we guess you know that we are even more excited! Unfortunately, there still is some remaining paperwork that needs to be done by other involved parties…

ISS Rendezvous

[Image Credit: NASA] Quick update: The CYGNUS Spacecraft will arrive at the ISS tomorrow morning. You can follow the rendezvous, capture and installation live from 9:45 CEST: https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive/ Enjoy!

LIFTOFF!

Finally, launch day! Although we have to wait for start of operations for a few more weeks, this day marks the major milestone of our project and the whole team was excited to follow the launch and early orbit phase of our experiment.

Final Test @ BIOTESC

Three days before launch and few weeks before operations, the procedures for setting up our experiments were validated at BIOTESC in Hergiswil, Switzerland. Located at the Vierwaldstätter See, BIOTESC is one of ESA’s USOCs (User Support & Operations Center) and responsible for the operations and crew support for various ESA experiments like CIMON, Flying Classroom or MarconISSta.

MarconISSta@ITU

Have you ever wondered who is responsible for the global coordination of radio frequency spectrum? It’s the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and its members. The ITU composed and maintains the ITU Radio Regulations which contain all regulatory procedures and guidelines for the efficient use of RF spectrum. Can MarconISSta be useful for the ITU?

Launch date

MarconISSta will be launched on May 21th, 10:39 a.m. CEST (Berlin time).The launch can be streamed live on various platforms, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive.

The project team will watch the launch in our mission control center.

Awaiting launch

Once again we did not update our blog for some weeks – why? Well, the main reason is that we are currently focusing on the development of a GUI for data analysis. The first steps for this are always not very interesting for the public, as requirements have to be defined and backend (background) tools […]

Validation of procedures at EAC

Today was the validation of installation/ deinstallation procedures of MarconISSta. Martin went to the ESA European Astronaut Centre (EAC) to go through the installation procedures with staff from ESA crew training and BIOTESC (the Operations Centre for MarconISSta).

Cargo Review passed!

Great news, we passed the cargo review! With that, the hardwarwe is now safely stowed in a Cargo Transfer Bag (CTG) and waiting for the flight to the ISS in May 2018. It will be part of the Orbital Cygnus 9E cargo.