FLUG REVUE June 2004: ESA DELTA mission to ISS

ESA DELTA MISSION TO THE ISS

By Matthias Gründer

Because of problems with the Shuttle and the dire financial straits of the Russians, the ISS resident crews now consist of only two persons. It could actually be three, as the Soyuz feeder craft have three seats. But the ailing Russian spaceflight industry urgently needs this third seat for fare-paying passengers, and $20 million per flight is no trivial matter. Nevertheless, even if the Kremlin keeps Soyuz

coming out with ambitious statements about the glorious future of Russia, only two manned missions and two to three unmanned supply flights per year are possible, as the state coffers are empty and there is little money over for prestige projects.

The two manned missions each year are used primarily to change over the ISS resident crew. This in April, the ninth crew, Gennadi Padalka and Michael Fincke, arrived to take over from the eighth crew of Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri. This time the paying guest on board was the Dutchman André Kuipers, whose 10-day research sojourn on the ISS goes under the name of DELTA (Dutch Expedition for Life science, Technology and Atmospheric research). The associated logo depicts a globe in the Dutch national colours, the mission name and three stars, which stand both for the Greek letter delta and for spaceflight co-operation between Holland, ESA and Russia.

Born in 1958, Kuipers is a doctor who worked in the research department of the national aviation medicine centre in Soesterberg, following which from 1991 he was involved on various ESA projects. In July 1999, he became a member of the European Astronaut Corps in Cologne, then in 2002 he completed the basic training. In December 2002, he was confirmed as flight engineer for the present mission. Kuipers's standby was the German ESA astronaut, Gerhard Thiele, who can now hope to take part on a separate mission.

The commander of the ninth expedition crew and Soyuz commander is test cosmonaut Colonel Gennadi Padalka, born in 1958. He was previously an air force pilot with 1,500 flying hours on six different aircraft types and 300 parachute jumps to his name, who began his training as a candidate cosmonaut in 1989. Between 13 August 1998 and 28 February 1999 he commanded the 26th MIR resident crew, spending 198 days in space.

The ISS “science officer” is Edward Fincke, a US Air Force spaceflight engineer and lieutenant colonel born in 1967, with 800 flying hours on over 30 different aircraft types. In April 1996, Fincke was appointed to the NASA Astronaut Corps, whose basic training programme he completed two years later. His present mission will be his first trip to space.

Padalka and Fincke are wearing a colourful, heavily symbolic logo on their space suits which shows a Roman numeral nine, formed from a Soyuz rocket and an X, which also stands for “exploration”. The stars on the wings of the eagle stand for all the spacemen who have given their lives to spaceflight, while an Arabic numeral nine is formed from the rocket gases and encloses the US astronaut symbol. Finally, next to the ISS are the moon and Mars, symbolising the next goals of international manned spaceflight.

After a long waiting time and hard training, the 1687th launcher vehicle of series R-7 (Soyuz FG) finally lifted off on 19 April 2004, 9.18am local time in Baikonur (5.18am CEST) headed for earth orbit with the Soyuz TMA-4 space capsule on board.

WIDE EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME

Two days later the space vehicle docked at the ISS, where the previous resident crew of Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri had been desperately awaiting their arrival. But after disembarcation there was little time for welcoming formalities, as a lot of work lay ahead of the five men. The 11-day DELTA mission had four main areas of focus: replacement of the ISS Soyuz TMA-3 “lifeboat” by a new, unused capsule, relief of the resident crew after six months' work in zero gravity, scientific experiments, and an extensive educational programme for schoolchildren on the earth.

This scientific programme consisted of a total of 15 experiments covering a range of disciplines: physiology (blood pressure and cardiac rhythm, orthostatic intolerance, vestibular adaptation, stiffness after exertion and eye reflexes), biology (bone atrophy, cell growth, threadworms as model organisms for genetic research, investigation of the NFKB protein, which plays a role in numerous serious illnesses, plant growth), microbiology (behaviour of microbes), physics (instability of gas mixtures in high-intensity discharge lamps), earth observation (research into lightning and storm clouds), technology (thermal conduction, spatial orientation with tactile displays) and education (amateur radio connections, bacterial fuel cells, plant growth and video demonstrations).

The most important of the educational projects bears the name of SEEDS (Seeds in Space) and entails sowing garden cress simultaneously on the station and on earth and then comparing the two lots of plant growth. Meanwhile on the earth, instead of being carried out in a scientific laboratory, this experiment has been performed by around 70,000 schoolchildren in 100 Dutch secondary schools.

All the experiments on this mission have been funded by the Dutch government through the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science and the Science Ministry. Many of the experiments were developed by Dutch scientists, and the associated instruments and equipment were built by industrial companies and research establishments in Holland.

A YEAR-LONG STINT ON BOARD THE ISS?

While the five men were thus carrying out their scientific work and simultaneously preparing for the change of crew, it turned out that one of the stabilisation gyros on the ISS had failed due to a circuit breaker problem. Repairing this would require adding an extra spacewalk to the work schedule of the ninth resident crew. According to ISS Manager Mike Suffredini, the remaining two gyroscopes were perfectly capable of maintaining attitude stabilisation, and even a further failure could be compensated for with the aid of the numerous thruster drives on board.

Meanwhile the Russians have asked their partners from NASA whether the time spent by future expedition crews could not be extended to one year. The background to this is the dire financial situation of both the Russian space agency and also the manufacturer Energia, which are hardly in a position to pay for two ships per year. Such extended flights would definitely be useful by way of preparation for possible manned Mars missions, but here there is a big problem, especially on the part of NASA: none of NASA's career astronauts is willing to work for such a long time in the “tin can” and already it is difficult to find volunteers prepared to stay there for six months. Discussion on this subject is by no means closed.

From page 70 of FLUG REVUE 6/2004

Last updated 7 May 2004

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