There are times when I feel that I have the coolest job in the world. I am currently working on a small project (with the hopes of it becoming a much larger project!) involving the astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) called CyMISS (Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS). They are taking pictures of tropical cyclones to support our development of an instrument package that could one day fly on the ISS or on its own dedicated satellite. It would gather data that we can use to gauge accurately the intensity of powerful tropical cyclones while they are far out at sea and beyond the reach of hurricane tracking aircraft. After spending years on projects that were primarily centered on ground-based instrumentation, it is a real pleasure to have the chance to begin shifting towards analyzing imaging data from space again not to mention working with the astronauts and other people associated with the ISS.
A sample color image of a cyclone taken from the ISS that has been geometrically processed for analysis. (Visidyne/A.J. LePage)
While I was unpacking my library from my move last September, I could not help but take time to flip through some of the things I was unpacking while taking well-deserved breaks. Among those items were a collection of slides and photographs I took during a trip to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in August 1998. Buried among the images was one odd one of a large white room somewhere in the KSC tour with a rather lonely looking, dark-colored skewed cylinder on a yellow mount and surrounded by scaffolding. It was only recently that I remembered that this was a piece of the ISS waiting for launch – the same ISS where my images are coming from today.
An image of PMA-1 taken during a KSC tour in August 1998 – about four months before it was launched on the Space Shuttle Endeavour for the first ISS assembly mission. Click on the image to enlarge. (A.J. LePage)
What I saw was a Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA) that is used to connect certain modules of the ISS together as well as serve as a docking port for visiting spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle. My recollection from the tour was that this was the first piece of the ISS to arrive at KSC so I assume that this is PMA-1 which currently connects the Russian-built Zarya module (on the left of the image at the top of this post) to the American-built Unity Node 1 (on the right). PMA-1 along with PMA-2 were attached to the Unity Node at KSC and launched on the STS-88 Shuttle mission on December 4, 1998 (four months after my visit to KSC). This was the first ISS assembly flight for the Shuttle and its mission was to mate the Unity Node to the 19 metric ton Zarya which had been launched by the Russians on November 20, 1998 – their first launch of the ISS program. After almost a week in space and three EVAs, the Shuttle astronauts had connected Unity and Zarya and began to activate the brand new ISS.
The image at the top of this post was taken from the departing Shuttle Endeavour after completing this first of many assembly missions. Now over 15 years later, the assembly of the ISS is almost complete: The last module, the often-delayed Russian Nauka (“Science”) or Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), is currently scheduled to be launched late next year. And buried in the heart of the ISS is PMA-1 which I briefly saw during a summer vacation trip almost 16 years ago.
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Related Reading
“ISS Tropical Cyclone Experiment”, Drew Ex Machina, November 10, 2014 [Post]
“A New Satellite-Based Method to Determine Hurricane Strength”, Drew Ex Machina, June 18, 2014 [Post]
“RAMOS: The Russian-American Observation Satellites”, Drew Ex Machina, June 21, 2014 [Post]
“The Day I Saw Buran”, Drew Ex Machina, April 12, 2014 [Post]