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miércoles, 24 de julio de 2013

NASA - Space Station Cargo Ship Activities to Air on NASA TV

Space Station Research Exposing the Salty Truth of Supercritical Water Transitions
The High Temperature Insert (above) is placed in the Device for the Study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization.
The High Temperature Insert (above) is placed in the Device for the Study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization.
Image Credit:  CNES
 
The Device for the Study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization has two rectangular boxes. The upper box contains the High Temperature Insert and all the diagnostic hardware. The lower box contains the command/control and data storage hardware.
The Device for the Study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization has two rectangular boxes. The upper box contains the High Temperature Insert and all the diagnostic hardware. The lower box contains the command/control and data storage hardware.
Image Credit: CNES
Images of water/saline solution being heated. The temperature and pressure increases through the critical point until there is no distinction between water’s liquid and vapor phase. This is evidenced by the disappearance of the thin black line that separates the phases
Images of water/saline solution being heated. The temperature and pressure increases through the critical point until there is no distinction between water’s liquid and vapor phase. This is evidenced by the disappearance of the thin black line that separates the phases.
Image Credit: NASA
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There is a moment when everything changes. Something familiar crosses a boundary and suddenly behaves in new ways. Take water for example. In middle school science class, you probably learned about saturation points when adding salt to a liquid. Or you discovered the importance of phase changes when going from boiling to steam or from freezing to ice. That moment of change is now being studied at a new level in space.
At sea level, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and both liquid and water vapor (i.e., steam) coexist. However, water heated under high pressures (more than 3,200 pounds per square inch, about the amount of pressure in 100 car tires) doesn’t boil. Above the critical temperature of 705 degrees Fahrenheit, water behaves like a dense gas where its distinct liquid and vapor phases no longer exist. At this point, any salt in the water no longer is soluble. It separates, or precipitates, from the water and attaches itself to surfaces like heating coils and pipes.
In order to study this phenomenon, the Supercritical Water Mixture (SCWM) investigation currently is running aboard the International Space Station. It is a joint effort between NASA and Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency.
"By studying supercritical and near-critical water without the effects of gravity, we'll look at how salt precipitates on a very fundamental level," said Mike Hicks, SCWM principal investigator at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. "We'll look at some fundamental questions: how is salt actually transported in this medium without the influences of gravity; what happens to the salt/water mixture when taken past the critical point; how does it precipitate; at what point does it start to agglomerate and clump together to where you can actually see little salt particles in the water?"
SCWM experiments began on the space station during the first week of July and will continue for a one-year period in a series of five test sequences, each lasting approximately 15 days.
Testing occurs in the Device for the Study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization's (DECLIC) High Temperature Insert (HTI). DECLIC and HTI were built by CNES and are housed in the space station's Kibo module. SCWM is operated by CNES from its facility in Toulouse, France. Results from the research will be shared between NASA and CNES.
"The salt water experiment was something NASA proposed to the French as an experiment that we would be interested in performing in their DECLIC facility," said Hicks, who also is NASA's SCWM project scientist and project manager. "The French wanted to perform a similar experiment but didn't have the funding to pursue this until NASA joined forces with them. So it is a collaboration of mutual interests. We're looking for ways to handle waste streams in space, and this is just one of the technologies that we're looking at for that."
SCWM research results can be extended easily to ground-based applications. A better understanding about what happens at near-critical and supercritical conditions is important in designing extended-life and low-maintenance systems, such as power plants, waste management and high salinity aquifers.
Use of supercritical fluids in supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) technology has been in place for years. For example, supercritical carbon dioxide is used in dry cleaning and decaffeinating coffee.
Learning how to use water efficiently in its supercritical phase is of great interest to researchers since many of our waste streams -- like city sewage, agricultural wastes and paper mill wastes -- contain water. SCWO provides a way to oxidize sewage in a closed system that essentially will burn out all the organics in a wet waste stream. The beauty of this process is that the combustion products are relatively benign compared with incineration, which produces a range of sulfur and nitrogen oxides. Typically, the SCWO processing of an organic waste stream will leave behind only carbon dioxide and water.
"SCWM is not just a fundamental science experiment," said Uday Hegde, SCWM co-principal investigator at the National Center for Space Exploration Research in Cleveland. "This is actually something that can be of benefit to NASA, in terms of recycling and waste management systems, and has application to real systems on the ground as well. For example, water reclamation in remote places. It may also prove to be extremely useful for waste processing at the single home or neighborhood level or an entire city. It is a relativity green process compared to incineration."
The tendency for salts to “fall out” of solution presents one of the leading challenges of SCWO technology. At ambient temperatures and pressures, salt is easily dissolved in water. However, when water goes to its supercritical state, salt no longer is soluble, and it precipitates out of the water. The salt then adheres to surfaces, building up and corroding systems and fouling pipes resulting in a large maintenance overhead.
Typically, these small particles of salt migrate toward the cooler regions, a process known as thermophoresis. Engineers have a hard time designing reactor vessels that can withstand these tremendously corrosive environments without implementing a costly maintenance program.
"In a very systematic way, we want to study the nature of these precipitates," said Hicks. "That's just the start. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done to make this technology economically viable. It's a wonderful technology except for the fact that it tends to be a maintenance nightmare. Hopefully, we can minimize this by better understanding how to handle the corrosion and fouling problems."
A good understanding of the behavior of salt in near-critical and supercritical conditions would assist designers in building next-generation SCWO reactors. With the knowledge gleaned from SCWM, they possibly could design systems that would operate without large maintenance problems.
 
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Note to viewers: On July 31, 2012, NASA.gov discontinued streaming NASA Television in the QuickTime and Windows Media proprietary formats. The change helped us to simplify our webcasting infrastructure. The site will continue to stream NASA Television and NASA Newsaudio in Flash and HTML 5 for iOS devices.

NASA TV’s PUBLIC, MEDIA CHANNELS NOW IN HD
NASA Television’s Public (101) and Media (103) channels are now transmitting in high definition.

NASA Television’s Public Channel (channel 101), the "NASA TV" most often carried by cable and satellite service providers, provides coverage of NASA missions and events, plus documentaries, archival and other special programming.

NASA TV’s Media Channel (channel 103) provides mission coverage, news conferences and relevant video and audio materials to local, national and international news-gathering organizations.

(HD Channel 105 is no longer in service.)


NASA Television Is On Satellite AMC-18C

NASA TV is available in continental North America, Alaska and Hawaii on AMC-18C. A Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) is needed for reception. Below are parameters for each channel:

Uplink provider = AMC 18 C
Transponder = 3C
105 degrees W
C-Band
Downlink Frequency: 3760 MHz
Downlink Polarity: Vertical
Transmission Format = DVB-S, 4:2:0
FEC = ¾
Data Rate = 38.80 Mbps
Symbol Rate = 28.0681
Modulation: QPSK/DVB-S

Public Channel" Programming:
HD Program = 101 (HQ1)
Compression Format = MPEG-2
Video PID = 0x111 hex / 273 decimal
AC-3 PID = 0x115 hex / 277 decimal
MPEG I Layer II Audio PID = 0x114 hex / 276decimal
Education Channel" Programming:
SD Program = 102 (HQ2)
Compression Format = MPEG-2
Video PID = 0x121 hex / 289 decimal
AC-3 Audio PID = 0x124 hex /292 decimal
MPEG I Layer II Audio PID = 0x125 /293 decimal
Media Channel" Programming:
HD Program = 103 (HQ3)
Compression Format = MPEG-4
Video PID = 0x1031 hex / 4145 decimal
AC-3 Audio PID = 0x1035 hex /4149 decimal
MPEG I Layer II Audio PID = 0x1034 hex /4148 decimal

NASA LIMS (Live Satellite Interviews) Now KU-Band*
Space Station Cargo Ship Activities to Air on NASA TV

 has moved to KU-Band service. KU-Band parameters are provided prior to each event. NASA will schedule each LIMS event on a satellite in proximity of AMC18 whenever possible.

Uplink provider = TBD
Transponder = TBD
KU-Band

Bandwidth = 18 MHz
Transmission Format = DVB-S, 4:2:0
Data Rate = 12 Mbps
Modulation: QPSK/DVB-S
MPEG-4 encoding (MPEG-2 available upon request)
HD 16x9
*C-Band LIMS service is not available.

› FAQs About NASA Television
 
WASHINGTON -- NASA Television will provide live coverage of the departure of one Russian cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, July 25 and the launch and docking of another to the station Saturday, July 27.
The ISS Progress 50 resupply ship currently moored to the space station's Pirs docking compartment will undock at 4:44 p.m. EDT Thursday. Progress 50 arrived at the station in February, and will depart filled with trash and then burn up during reentry over the Pacific Ocean. NASA TV coverage of undocking will begin at 4:30 p.m.
The departure will clear Pirs for the arrival of ISS Progress 52, another unpiloted cargo craft loaded with almost three tons of food, fuel, supplies and experiment hardware for the six crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory. Progress 52 is scheduled to launch at 4:45 p.m. Saturday (2:45 a.m. Kazakh time Sunday, July 28) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA TV coverage of launch begins at 4:30 p.m.
Progress 52's expedited four-orbit, six-hour trip to the station will result in rendezvous and docking at 10:26 p.m. NASA TV coverage of rendezvous and docking will begin at 9:45 p.m.
For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit:
For more about the International Space Station, visit:
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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