After days of glitches and tweaks, a new recycling system designed to turn astronaut urine back into drinking water is apparently working well aboard the International Station.

The space station's urine processor, part of a larger wastewater recycling system, worked non-stop for a full four-hour test and longer late Monday to the delight of astronauts and NASA engineers. The system is crucial if the space station is to jump to double-sized, six-person crews next year.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/081125-sts126-urine-recycler.html

An upgraded Russian cargo ship launched toward the International Space Station early Wednesday, hauling fresh supplies for astronauts aboard the orbiting lab, though an antenna failed to deploy shortly after reaching orbit making it likely the spacecraft will have to be guided in manually by the orbiting lab's crew, NASA officials said.

The unmanned space freighter Progress 31 lifted off atop a Russian-built Soyuz rocket at about 7:38 a.m. EST (1238 GMT) from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft will dock at the space station on Sunday a few hours before the planned landing of NASA's space shuttle Endeavour, which is currently docked at the station and due to depart Friday.

Crew members aboard Endeavour and the International Space Station got good news on two fronts when they were awakened for a day to be devoted largely to transfer of materials from the station to be returned to Earth.

The starboard Solar Alpha Rotary Joint, which rotates in a paddle-wheel fashion the 240-foot solar wings on the station's right side, was automatically tracking the sun for the first time in more than a year during a three-hour, two-orbit test begun at 4:55 a.m. CST. The joint appeared to function well after repairs during the four spacewalks by Endeavour astronauts, but it will be some time before results of this and subsequent tests are known.

An International Space Station Expedition 18 ARISS school contact has been planned with participants at Wairarapa Home School Association, Carterton, Wairarapa, New Zealand on 26 November. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 0227 UTC.

The contact will be a telebridge contact between stations NA1SS and VK4KHZ. The contact should be audible over eastern Australia. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.80 MHz downlink. The participants are expected to conduct the conversation in English.

Wairarapa Home School Association is a support group for many of the Home Schoolers in the Wairarapa province located about 90 Kms north east on Highway 2 from the Capital City, Wellington. We are a rural community consisting of dairying, cattle, sheep, timber, cropping and some fruit growing industries. The Wairarapa in Maori means "sea of sparkling waters" from Lake Wairarapa, a fresh water lake in the province. Our organisation provides a point of communication for events and resources that are in the Wairarapa, and for parents to plan events that will provide for educational and social activities for our families.

Topics in this report: 1. Upcoming School Contacts 2. First ARISS School Contact in New Zealand Successful 3. ARISS Celebrates International Education Week 4. ARISS International Team Meeting Held 1. Upcoming School Contacts The Wairarapa Home School Association in Carterton, Wairarapa, New Zealand has been scheduled for an Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact on Wednesday, November 26 at 02:22 UTC via telebridge station VK4KHZ in Australia. Students have been learning about space exploration and the International Space Station to prepare for the contact. Age appropriate studies, exercises, and activities have been undertaken by all those who will be involved in the event which will include some of the parents.

Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke and Endeavour Mission Specialist Don Pettit have proven their knack for detailed maintenance work during previous stays at the International Space Station and have once again put their skills to use.

The Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) inside the Water Recovery System (WRS), which recycles condensate and urine onboard the station, has experienced several shutdowns during testing. Engineers believe motion of the centrifuge caused physical interference within the UPA, resulting in increased power draw and temperatures.

Fincke and Pettit removed grommets from the UPA and hard-mounted it into the WRS rack. The grommets were serving as isolators to dampen vibrations from the centrifuge, but might have been allowing too much motion and causing the interference. Mission Control has been monitoring the UPA's operation and it has been running normally for two hours without prematurely shutting down.

After completing a spacewalk Thursday Endeavour and International Space Station crew members will work today on getting ready for another spacewalk Saturday, transferring material between the station and the shuttle and other tasks.

Endeavour crew members, Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Eric Boe and mission specialists Don Pettit, Steve Bowen, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Shane Kimbrough and Greg Chamitoff, and the station crew, Commander Mike Fincke and flight engineers Yury Lonchakov and Sandra Magnus, were awakened at 8:05 a.m. CST.

The music was for Piper. The song was in the Ukrainian language, which she learned as a child. It was "Unharness Your Horses, Boys," a traditional song about Cossacks performed by The Ukrainians.

Nations around the world will join together to mark a milestone in space exploration this week, celebrating the 10th birthday of a unique research laboratory, the International Space Station.

Now the largest spacecraft ever built, the orbital assembly of the space station began with the launch from Kazakhstan of its first bus-sized component, Zarya, on Nov. 20, 1998. The launch began an international construction project of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.

The station is a venture of international cooperation among NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and 11 members of the European Space Agency, or ESA: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. More than 100,000 people in space agencies and contractor facilities in 37 U.S. states and throughout the world are involved in this endeavor.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.
Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Astronauts Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and Steve Bowen completed the first of four spacewalks scheduled for Endeavour's mission to the International Space Station today. The spacewalk was the 115th in support of ISS construction.

Piper and Bowen began the spacewalk at 12:09 p.m. CST and ended it at 7:01 p.m. They spent six hours and 52 minutes outside the station working on several tasks, including removing a depleted nitrogen tank from a stowage platform on the outside of the complex and moving it into Endeavour's cargo bay. They also moved a flex hose rotary coupler from the shuttle to the station stowage platform, as well as removing some insulation blankets from the common berthing mechanism on the Kibo laboratory.