THE ULTIMATE
The United States is set to see its first crewed launch of a spacecraft since the Space Shuttle programme was ended in 2011.
NASA is to utilise the Space X company's rockets to send two astronauts to the International Space Station, in what is also a first, as it will be the first time a company rather than a nation-state has launched people into space. Space X is the company founded by Elon Musk, having created Pay Pal and Tesla. The launch will be at 16:33 locat time, 20:33 GMT, 21:33BST. The Crew Dragon capsule, pictured below, will be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, from the same launchpad that launched Apollo 11 to the moon.
0 Comments
On this day, May 25th 240 BCE, Halley's Comet was first recorded in China, in the Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji.
It may have been commented upon in Greece and China prior to this. A later recording in 87 BCE appears on Babylonian tablets that can be seen at the British Museum. Halley's comet is famously depicted in the Bayeux Tapeestry, having been seen by the Anglo-Saxons in 1066, and they saw it as a bringer of doom. It is called Halley's Comet, after Edmund Halley who in 1705, used Isaac Newton's laws of gravity and motion to calculate that three comet appearances, were actually the same comet returning around every 76 years. He went on to predict it would return in 1758. Unfortunatley, Halley died in 1742. Late in 1758 the comet returned first being seen by a German farmer and amateur astronomer. A French astronomer named it Halley's Comet after Edmund Halley. The return of Halley's Comet proved Isaac Newton's principles, and was the first object kown to orbit the Sun other than the planets. Though, the Babylonian and Jewish authorities in ancient times may have recognised that it returned, was 'periodic', as a passage notes a star returning once every 70 years. The last sighting of Halley's Comet was in 1986, where a European space probe named Giotto closed in on it flying through the comet's tail. It was called Giotto, after the artist who painted a Christian Nativity scene, using Halley's Comet, as the Star of Bethlehem. Next sighting 2061! On this day, May 18th 1969, Apollo 10 was launched by NASA.
Apollo 10 was the second Apollo mission to orbit the moon, and acted as a 'dress rehearsal' for the July 1969 moon landing by Apollo 11. Astronauts, Thomas Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan, flew Apollo 10 31 times around the moon, and released the Apollo Lunar Module to descend towards the moon's surface, before returning to the Command Module at the stage where Apollo 11 would begin the descent stage to land on the moon's surface. The call signs for the mission were from the 'Peanuts' characters 'Charlie Brown' and 'Snoopy'; with 'Charlie Brown' being the nickname for the Command Module, that John Young remained in, and 'Snoopy' being the Lunar Module, which Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan headed towards the moon surface in and back. You can see 'Charlie Brown' in London's Science Museum, as America's Smithsonian museum, based in Washington D.C. loaned it to London's Science Museum in 1978. On this day, May 14th 1973, the USA's NASA launched its first Space Station, Skylab.
The Soviet Union had already put a space station into orbit, Salyut. It was the only solely US funded Space Station, and was taken into orbit, by a Saturn V rocket - the last mission for the Saturn V, that had launched the Apollo lunar missions. Skylab contained both Solar and Earth observatories, as well as the laboratory space for over 80 experiments to bec onducted. It was serviced by three crews. One of the first jobs the service crews had to do, was carry out external repairs to the Space Station that occurred during the launch, by attaching sheets to act as shields, these are the golden blankets that appear in the images of the Skylab. It also lost one set of Solar Panels, which gives it its assymetrical shape, as only one set of side solar panels remained. The last crew of astronauts left in 1974, expecting more crews to be launched, however, this didn't happen and in 1979 Skylab orbit was pulled by the Earth's gravity back into the Earth's atmosphere where it broke up, with pieces scattering over Western Australia. On 25th April 1990, the Space Shuttle, launched on the 24th, placed its payload the Hubble Space Telecope into low Earth orbit.
The Hubble Space Telescope sits in low Earth orbit around 600 km above the Earth's surface, and thus is above the clouds that obscure the views of space of Earth based telescopes, and it is near enough to Earth to be serviced by astronauts - this has occurred five times, including correcting a fault in its mirrors discovered within weeks of it becoming operational. Over the 30 years of its operation Hubble has transmitted incredible images across from across depth, breadth of space and time. NASA has released a new image and visualised fly through of an image called 'cosmic reef' for Hubble's 30th Anniversary. This can be seen at www.hubblesite.org as well as available links to a lecture on the Hubble for the 30th Anniversary. See the Astronauts and Space Scientists planning the next voyages to the Moon's surface...4/20/2020 Not since the early 1970s has humanity set foot on the Moon, but there are space scientists and astronauts researching into, planning for and training to return - with the hopes of achieving a lunar base in this generation - and the first missions were under tha name of Apollo, NASA's next will be under the name Artemis, Apollo's twin sister, and their are plenty of female astronauts and scientists ready to take the next steps onto the lunar surface...
See Paul Ricon's super BBC article 'To the Moon and Beyond' at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nkzysaP3pB/to-the-moon-and-beyond Today is the 50th Anniversary of the return to Earth of the sticken NASA spacecraft mission Apollo 13.
The crew of Apollo 13 - Lovell, Swigert and Haise - experienced an explosion in their Supply Module's oxygen tanks as they headed to orbit the moon, and reported to Mission Control - 'Houston we've had a problem'. The three astronauts were left in space, reducing their energy consumption and preventing their carbon dioxide levels climbing too high, whilst NASA officials in Houston tried to figure out ways to get offset the problem and return the astronauts to Earth - by only using what the astronauts had on board. Whilst the astronauts hung in space, their fate uncertain the world united below praying for their safe return. NASA worked out how the astronauts could create a do-it-yourself carbon dioxide filtration unit, by ripping up manuals and other equipment and using tape. This was one of only a series of problems the crew faced as their moon landing was cancelled and they readied for re-entry into the Eart's atmosphere - and the splashdown in the ocean. The mission events were turned into a major film in the 1990s directed by Ron Howard, with film stars Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon - the film altered the report of the explosion to Mission Control to the now poularly quoted 'Houston We Have a Problem', and created the phrase 'Failure is not an Option', which Gene Kranz the Nasa Flight Director for both Apollo X1 and XIII used as the title for his biography in 2000 - though he didn't use the phrase at the time, it did sum up what the atmosphere of the NASA teams. |
Archives
January 2021
Categories
All
|