Category Space

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova born 6 March 1937) is a member of the Russian State Duma, engineer, and former cosmonaut. She is the first and youngest woman to have flown in space with a solo mission on the Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times, spent almost three days in space, and to date remains the only woman to have been on a solo space mission.

Valentina Tereshkova was born on 6 March in 1937 in the Bolshoye Maslennikovo, a village on the Volga River 270 kilometres (170 mi) northeast of Moscow and part of the Yaroslavl Oblast in central Russia. Her parents had migrated from Belarus. Her father, Vladimir Tereshkov, was a former tractor driver and a sergeant in command of a tank in the Soviet Army. He died in the Finnish Winter War during World War II when Tereshkova was two years old. He and her mother Elena Fyodorovna Tereshkova had three children. After her father’s death, her mother moved the family to Yaroslavl, seeking better employment opportunity, and became employed at the Krasny Perekop cotton mill.

After Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961, Tereshkova volunteered for the Soviet space program. Although she did not have any experience as a pilot, she was accepted into the program because of her 126 parachute jumps. At the time, cosmonauts had to parachute from their capsules seconds before they hit the ground on returning to Earth.

Along with four other women, Tereshkova received 18 months of training, which included tests to determine how she would react to long periods of time being alone, to extreme gravity conditions and to zero-gravity conditions. Of the five women, only Tereshkova went into space.

Tereshkova was chosen to pilot Vostok 6. It was to be a dual mission. Cosmonaut Valeriy Bykovsky launched on Vostok 5 on June 14, 1963.

 

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An American commercial cargo spacecraft bound for the International Space Station has been named after fallen NASA astronaut Kalpana Chawla, the first India-born woman to enter space, for her key contributions to human spaceflight. Northrop Grumman, an American global aerospace and defence technology company, announced that its next Cygnus capsule will be named the “S.S. Kalpana Chawla”, in memory of the mission specialist who died with her six crewmates aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
In 2000, Chawla was selected for her second voyage into space, serving again as a mission specialist on STS-107. The mission was delayed several times, and finally launched in 2003. Over the course of the 16-day flight, the crew completed more than 80 experiments.

On the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle returned to Earth, intending to land at Kennedy Space Center. At launch, a briefcase-sized piece of insulation had broken off and damaged the thermal protection system of the shuttle’s wing, the shield that protects it from heat during re-entry. As the shuttle passed through the atmosphere, hot gas streaming into the wing caused it to break up. The unstable craft rolled and bucked, pitching the astronauts about. Less than a minute passed before the ship depressurized, killing the crew. The shuttle broke up over Texas and Louisiana before plunging into the ground. The accident was the second major disaster for the space shuttle program, following the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

 

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Apollo was the NASA program that resulted in American astronauts’ making a total of 11 spaceflights and walking on the moon.

The first four flights tested the equipment used in the Apollo Program. Six of the other seven flights landed on the moon. The first Apollo flight happened in 1968. The first moon landing took place in 1969. The last moon landing was in 1972.

A total of 12 astronauts walked on the moon. The astronauts conducted scientific research there. They studied the lunar surface. They collected moon rocks to bring back to Earth.

NASA designed the Apollo Command Module for this program. It was a capsule with room for three astronauts. The astronauts rode in the Command Module on the way to the moon and back. It was larger than the spacecraft used in the Mercury and Gemini programs. The astronauts had room to move around inside the spacecraft. The crew area had about as much room as a car.

Another spacecraft, the Lunar Module, was used for landing on the moon. This spacecraft carried astronauts from orbit around the moon to the moon’s surface, then back into orbit. It could carry two astronauts.

Two types of rockets were used for the Apollo program. The first flights used the smaller Saturn I (1) B rocket. It was about as tall as a 22-story building. This rocket had two stages. That means it was made of two parts. When the first part ran out of fuel, it dropped away from the other and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. The second part continued flying. The Saturn IB rocket was used to test the new Apollo capsule in Earth orbit.

The other flights used the more powerful Saturn V (5) rocket. This three-stage rocket sent the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. It was about as tall as a 36-story building.

 

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Hayabusa was a Japanese spacecraft that brought back a sample of asteroid material to Earth in 2010, after a mission riddled with technical glitches. The spacecraft touched down on a small near-Earth asteroid called 25143 Itokawa and safely brought back minute rocky particles for analysis.

The success of the mission inspired a successor spacecraft, called Hayabusa 2. This spacecraft is on its way to asteroid 162173 Ryugu and is expected to arrive in July 2018. Asteroid samples will be returned to Earth in December 2020.

In November 2010, JAXA said it had collected 1,500 grains that “were identified as rocky particles”; most of them were thought to come from “extraterrestrial origin” (meaning, the asteroid). JAXA had known beforehand that the particles of material were there, but it took several months of analysis to confirm they were not contamination from Earth or from Hayabusa’s voyage.

In the initial results, JAXA announced it found minerals such as olivine and pyroxene, which are common on Earth and have been found on the moon and Mars. The particles were tiny, just one-tenth the width of a human hair (10 micrometers in size). Several articles on Hayabusa’s dust collection appeared in the Aug. 26, 2011, issue of Science; among the findings was confirmation that the dust on 25143 Itokawa was identical to material on an LL chondrite type of meteorite. This finding confirmed showed link between meteorites and asteroids.

 

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Peggy Annette Whitson (born February 9, 1960) is an American biochemistry researcher, retired NASA astronaut, and former NASA Chief Astronaut. Her first space mission was in 2002, with an extended stay aboard the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 5. Her second mission launched October 10, 2007, as the first female commander of the ISS with Expedition 16. She was on her third long-duration space flight and was the commander of the International Space Station for Expedition 51, before handing over command to Fyodor Yurchikhin on June 1, 2017.

The flight of Space Shuttle mission STS-120, commanded by astronaut Pam Melroy, was the first time that two female mission commanders have been in orbit at the same time. After completion of her eighth EVA in March 2017, Whitson now holds the records for the oldest woman spacewalker, and the record for total spacewalks by a woman, which was broken by her again after a ninth and tenth EVA in May 2017, surpassing Sunita Williams, who has completed 7.

Following her fellowship at Rice, she began working at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as a National Research Council Resident Research Associate. From April 1988 until September 1989, Whitson served as the Supervisor for the Biochemistry Research Group at KRUG International, a medical sciences contractor at NASA-JSC.

From 1991 through 1997, Whitson was invited to be an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Human Biological Chemistry and Genetics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. In 1997, Whitson began a position as adjunct assistant professor at Rice University in the Maybee Laboratory for Biochemical and Genetic Engineering.

From 1992 to 1995, she served as project scientist for the Shuttle-Mir Program and, until her selection as an astronaut candidate in 1996, as deputy division chief for the Medical Sciences division at the Johnson Space Center.

 

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Moons — also called natural satellites — come in many shapes, sizes and types. They are generally solid bodies, and few have atmospheres. Most planetary moons probably formed from the discs of gas and dust circulating around planets in the early solar system.

There are hundreds of moons in our solar system — even a few asteroids have been found to have small companion moons. Moons that begin with a letter and a year are considered provisional moons. They will be given a proper name when their discoveries are confirmed by additional observations.

Earth’s Moon probably formed when a large body about the size of Mars collided with Earth, ejecting a lot of material from our planet into orbit. Debris from the early Earth and the impacting body accumulated to form the Moon approximately 4.5 billion years ago (the age of the oldest collected lunar rocks). Twelve American astronauts landed on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo program from 1969 to 1972, studying the Moon and bringing back rock samples.

 

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The first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua, was discovered Oct. 19, 2017 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope, funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations (NEOO) Program, which finds and tracks asteroids and comets in Earth’s neighborhood.

The first confirmed object from another star to visit our solar system, this interstellar interloper appears to be a rocky, cigar-shaped object with a somewhat reddish hue. The object, named ‘Oumuamua by its discoverers, is up to one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated—perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide. That aspect ratio is greater than that of any asteroid or comet observed in our solar system to date. While its elongated shape is quite surprising, and unlike objects seen in our solar system, it may provide new clues into how other solar systems formed.

The object was officially named 1I/2017 U1 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for granting official names to bodies in the solar system and beyond. In addition to the technical name, the Pan-STARRS team dubbed it ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), which is Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”

 

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The Orion Nebula, the brightest nebula in the sky and occupying an area twice the diameter of the full Moon, can be viewed with the naked eye but was missed by early astronomers.

The Orion Nebula’s position in our galaxy is well-known. If we could view the Milky Way from above, it would appear as a pinwheel with four spiral arms. The galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars and massive amounts of gas and dust. Our solar system resides in the Orion Spur, which sits between the Perseus and Sagittarius arms, about halfway out from the galactic center.

Our earthbound view is different. On a clear summer night in the Northern Hemisphere, the Milky Way’s glow stretches from Cassiopeia in the northeast to Scorpius in the south. From this vantage point, we’re looking along the galaxy’s rim. Toward Scorpius is the central part of the Milky Way. Rather than seeing a field of blazing stars, our view is obscured by huge clouds of dust and gas.

In the winter, we see the sky opposite the stellar traffic jam found toward the galaxy’s center. The winter Milky Way is there, but you need a dark sky to see it with unaided eyes. The winter sky is the brightest of the seasonal skies — it contains the highest concentration of bright stars — and its most famous representative is Orion.

 

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At the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole in the region known as Sagittarius A. It has a mass of about 4 million times that of our Sun.

Almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its heart, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers are still studying why the heart of galaxies often hosts a supermassive black hole.

Observations of several stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, particularly star S2, have been used to determine the mass and upper limits on the radius of the object. Based on mass and increasingly precise radius limits, astronomers have concluded that Sagittarius A* is the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole.

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that Sgr A* is a supermassive compact object, for which a black hole is the only currently known explanation.

In 2017, direct radio images were taken of Sagittarius A* and M87* by the Event Horizon Telescope. The Event Horizon Telescope uses interferometry to combine images taken from widely spaced observatories at different places on Earth in order to gain a higher picture resolution. It is hoped the measurements will test Einstein’s theory of relativity more rigorously than has previously been done. If discrepancies between the theory of relativity and observations are found, scientists may have identified physical circumstances under which the theory breaks down.

 

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A bolide is an extremely bright meteor, especially one that explodes in the atmosphere. In astronomy, it refers to a fireball about as bright as the full moon, and it is generally considered a synonym for a fireball. In geology, a bolide is a very large impactor.

Many explosions recorded in Earth’s atmosphere are likely to be caused by the air bursts that result from meteors exploding as they hit the thicker part of the atmosphere. These types of meteors are also known as fireballs or bolides with the brightest known as superbolides. Before entering Earth’s atmosphere, these larger meteors were originally asteroids and comets of a few to several tens of metres in diameter, contrasting with the much smaller and much more common “shooting stars”.

The most powerful recorded air burst is the 1908 Tunguska event. Extremely bright fireballs traveling across the sky are often witnessed from a distance, such as the 1947 Sikhote-Alin meteor and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, both in Russia. If the bolide is large enough, fragments may survive such as the Chelyabinsk meteorite. Modern developments in infrasound detection by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization and infrared Defense Support Program satellite technology have increased the likelihood of detecting airbursts.

 

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