Soyuz Rocket Fills Breach Left by Loss Of Shuttle(po katastrofat vo kolumbija satlot-vokoj zagina i prviot evrein-ilan ramon koj go unisti ira;kiot reaktor vo bagdad)
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: Sunday, April 27, 2003
Filling in for NASA's grounded space shuttle, a Russian Soyuz rocket roared off a Kazakhstan launching pad into orbit today carrying a Russian and an American on a crucial mission to sustain the International Space Station.
The two crewmen, Yuri I. Malenchenko and Edward T. Lu, will replace a crew of two Americans and one Russian who were forced to extend their time in space after the Columbia disaster left NASA's shuttle fleet unable to send replacements.
A successful launching today was seen as absolutely vital to the space station's future, because the Russian space program provides the only means of sending humans into orbit until the American shuttles are certified to fly again and flights resume, perhaps early next year.
''The station can't work without the crew,'' Mikhail L. Pronin, the chief engineer at the Russian Space Agency's ground control center here, said in an interview. ''And without the crew, there is no program.''
Mr. Malenchenko, the 41-year-old flight commander, and Mr. Lu, 39, are flying a mission significantly altered by the Columbia disaster. Their main task will be to keep the space station up and running until another crew arrives in October, most likely on another Soyuz rocket.
They also will supervise experiments, including one monitoring the growth of crystals in weightless conditions and a second exploring the loss of bone density that plagues humans in weightless conditions.
A number of planned experiments were shelved because the Columbia disaster led the two space agencies to reduce the crew for today's launching from three to two, and to fill the extra space with food and other supplies for the station.
NASA's space shuttles, with a 25-ton payload, normally keep the space station fully supplied. Today's Soyuz launching carried only 2.5 tons of supplies in addition to the crew, and pilotless Russian Progress space freighters also can carry only 2.5 tons of cargo.
Russia has said it can launch as many as five missions this year, two of them manned, butmuch of the equipment for those missions remains on productions lines now.
Mr. Lu said he planned to pin a badge to his space suit to honor the crew of the Columbia.
''One of the things that we have been talking about, thinking about before the flight, is that they never really completed their mission,'' Mr. Lu said. ''We are doing what I think they would have wanted and what their families wished them to do -- to continue the process of flying into space.''
Investigators suspect that a piece of insulating foam that broke off the shuttle's external fuel tank and struck the left wing seconds after liftoff created a breach that later allowed hot gases to destroy part of the shuttle's superstructure.
The mission is unusual in that the crewmen leaving the station -- the Americans, Capt. Kenneth D. Bowersox of the Navy and Donald R. Pettit, and the Russian flight engineer Nikolai M. Budarin -- are to return to earth in a Soyuz capsule, landing on May 4 in Kazakhstan not far from the site of today's launching.
Space station crews normally return to earth in shuttles, and the Soyuz capsules, which are regularly docked to the station, are reserved for use in case of emergencies.
Mr. Pronin, the chief engineer at the Russian Space Agency's mission control center, said that the three-man crew now at the station was still receiving extra training in space to prepare for a return in the Soyuz capsule.
Mr. Lu and Mr. Malenchenko, one of Russia's most experienced astronauts, were initially trained to navigate the NASA shuttle to dock with the space station but received new instructions after the Columbia disaster in linking the Soyuz capsule to the station.
eve termini upotrebuvani vo astronomija:
Binary star
A binary star is a double star system having orbital revolution components that cause the twin stars (so called because they usually form from the same interstellar cloud) to orbit each other around a shared center of mass due to the 'mutual gravity' of the binary system.
Aphelion & Perihelion
Aphelion / Perihelion is an object's orbital point (in distance and time) around a star where the object's distance (on its elliptical orbit) from its parent star is farthest / closest. The terms apogee & perigee are used instead when referring to objects orbiting the Earth apoapsis & periapsis refers to orbits around all other bodies.
Astronomical Unit
This is slightly less than the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun, approx. 149,597,870.691km or about 93 million miles. The semi-major axis between the Earth and Sun is greater than one AU because one astronomical unit is the measure of an unperturbed circular orbit. If you were travelling at 160 kilometres/hour speed it would take at least a century to cover a distance of one AU.
Opposition
A planet further out from the Sun than Earth is in opposition at 180 degrees from the Sun, directly on the opposite side of the Earth. A planet in opposition is at its closest to, and at its best visibility from, Earth.
Precession
Precession is a circular motion about a body's axis of rotation. Like a giant the giroscope Earth has an axis that passes through its poles, precessing once every 27,700 years. This slow yet uniform rotation about the Earth's axis constantly changes coordinates on sky maps. The rotational axis never points in the same direction due to lunisolar and planetary precessions, causing the celestial equinoxes to drift westward.
Wane & Wax
A waning moon refers to the time between the full and new phases; a waxing moon refers to an increase in the illuminated lunar surface area.
Division of the Sky into Constellations
The sky (including both the northern and southern hemisphere) is divided into 88 constellations. A constellation is a grouping of stars usually resembling a mythical figure from Greek or Arabic folklore. Many constellations are easily recognisable in the sky e.g. the Big Dipper (also known as the Plough). These constellations act as guideposts to the heavens enabling astronomers, professional and amateur alike, to find their way around the night sky. So the constellations serve a practical function, rather than just being superficial patterns.
Every region of the sky is designated to a particular constellation, this facilitates the current, though rather old and peculiar, method of naming stars. In astronomy the stars are named according to their brightness (magnitude) and assigned Greek letters. For instance, the brightest star in theconstelatiomof sygnumis given the name Alpha Cygni, the second brightest Beta Cygni and so on, until one runs out of Greek letters that is, then its on to roman numerals.
Many of the stars also have common names as well e.g. Alpha Cygni is better known as Deneb. A few of the more famous constellations are:
uursa major Orion - the Hunter, cassiopea
http://www.astronomytoday.com/astronomy/cassiopeia.html, and the Southern Cross.
Celestial co-ordinate system
From the Earth, the constellations seem to be struck on the inside of a hollow sphere known as the celestial sphere. This sphere appears to rotate around the Earth in an east-west direction every 24 hours. A grid of lines known as right ascension and declination help astronomers locate stars on the celestial sphere, and star maps are a projection of the imaginary sphere onto a flat surface.
Right Ascension (R.A.)
R.A. is one of the co-ordinates used to locate positions on the celestial sphere. Lines run from the North to the South celestial pole and are similar to the Earth's lines of longitude, except that they are measured in units of time.
Declination (DEC.)
DEC. is one of the co-ordinates used to locate positions on the celestial sphere and it is measured in degrees. Lines run from East to West and are linked to the Earth's lines of latitude: stars of 0° Dec., for example, lie in the same plane as the Earth's equator.
Community Feature
Apparent Magnitude
This is a measure of apparent brightness, which is the visible-light brightness of a celestial object observed from Earth, depending on both the distance of the object and its actual or true brightness.
Absolute Magnitude
is the magnitude (visible-light brightness) that a celestial object would have if it were observed at a standard distance of 32.6 light years (10 parsecs). Absolute magnitude differs from apparent magnitude, which is a measure of how bright an object looks to an observer on the Earth.
Astronomers here on Earth use apparent magnitude. The brighter a star is the lower its magnitude, i.e. a star with a magnitude of 1.2 is brighter than one with mag. 3.0, and a star mag. -0.7 is brighter than one of mag. -0.1. During the 18th century the ratio between magnitudes was fixed at 2.5 (2.5118865 to be exact). This means that a star of a given magnitude is 2.5 times brighter than a star one magnitude dimmer.
i za asteroidi:
Една од поинтересните работи која не очекува оваа година е лансирањето на вселенското летало Kepler. Ова летало вредно 500 мил. долари на НАСА ке има мисија да зема податоци и слики од ѕвезди и планети во нашата галаксија за кои научниците сметаат дека е можно да има жив свет.
До сега научниците имаат детектирано 322 планети кои кружат околу други ѕвезди но повеќето од нив се гас џинови. За прв пат во историјата ова летало ке може да детектира и помали планети со слична димензија на нашата земја, за кои сметаат дека можеби се населени од жив свет. Ова летало ке користи моќен фотометар кој ке регистрира 100 000 ѕвезди и планети кои се наоѓаат пред нив. Секое најмало прекршување на светлината од планета ке биде регистрирано и ке може да се одреди големината на планетата со огромна прецизност.
Launch date/time: 2009 March 5 at 10:48 pm EST
hmm prviot feniks imase problemi pr isletuvanjeto...dali naovoj site sistemi ke mu istrajat-ama aj da se nadevame vo ime na naukata a i state of the art e.