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Category: space – Page 675

ISS Anniversary: Here’s How (And Why) Humans Have Lived in Space For Over Two Decades

Happy birthday, ISS.

The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) were launched on November 20, 1998, roughly 12 years after the first Soviet MIR-2 module was launched and a full 25 years after Skylab.

The ISS took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble. It is the result of unprecedented scientific and engineering collaboration among five space agencies representing 21 countries: NASA (United States of America), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), CSA (Canada), and ESA (16 EU countries and the UK).

With fully-equipped laboratories and advanced life support systems powered by solar arrays, the ISS has space for up to seven crew members to live and work, conducting many kinds of research in low Earth orbit.

Let’s explore (and celebrate) one of the most impressive pieces of engineering ever created.

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Mike Suffredini talks Axiom module additions to ISS, ensuring no gap in LEO station access

It is a lesson the U.S. space program has had to learn many times over: don’t voluntarily give up a space capability without having a successor ready to go or already operational.

But for the ISS (International Space Station), a gap in LEO (low Earth orbit) scientific research capability will likely not occur when the iconic outpost ends its career, whenever that may be.

And that is in large part due to Axiom, a private space organization with private funding that will begin adding modules to the ISS in 2024 — with the goal that those added modules will then be easily disconnected from the ISS at the end of its life, thus ensuring no gap in low Earth orbit space station capability for the United States.

Orion Bar region investigated in detail

Using spacecraft and ground-based facilities, Russian astronomers have inspected the Orion Bar photodissociation region, focusing on the mid-infrared emission from this source. Results of the study could help astronomers to better understand the evolution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in space. The research was published November 10 on arXiv.org.

At a distance of about 1,300 away, the Orion Nebula is the nearest of massive star formation to Earth, with a complex and extensive gas structure. It hosts the so-called “Orion Bar”—a ridge-like feature of gas and dust formed by the intense radiation from nearby, hot, young stars, which appears to be shaped like a bar.

The Orion Bar is a photodissociation region or photon-dominated region (PDR). In general, PDRs are regions in the interstellar medium (ISM) at the interface between hot ionized gas and cool molecular gas that are energetically dominated by non-ionizing ultraviolet photons.

Sending a Tiny Telescope Past Saturn Could Solve Some of the Biggest Mysteries of the Universe

Dozens of space-based telescopes operate near Earth and provide incredible images of the universe. But imagine a telescope far away in the outer solar system, 10 or even 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The ability to look back at our solar system or peer into the darkness of the distant cosmos would make this a uniquely powerful scientific tool.

I’m an astrophysicist who studies the formation of structure in the universe. Since the 1960s, scientists like me have been considering the important scientific questions we might be able to answer with a telescope placed in the outer solar system.

So what would such a mission look like? And what science could be done?

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