After spending more than 9 months at the International Space Station after their Boeing Starliner developed issues, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are on their way back to Earth. The trip is not in a Starliner however, but aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule named Crew 10.
It has been alleged that the length of the stay was influenced by politics. Joe Biden supposedly did not want to give SpaceX and Elon Musk a win in the run up to the election.
Crew 10 undocked from the orbiting outpost at 1.05am ET with Wilmore, Williams, NASA Astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Splashdown off the Florida coast near Tallahassee is estimated to be just before 1800 EDT.
So, how did they get past the Van Allen radiation belt?
The Moon Landing: Stanley Kubrick’s Greatest Film | How NASA and Hollywood Fooled the World
A Message to NASA… (you can’t hide anymore)
Capture theory suggests that theMoon was a wandering body (like an asteroid) that formed elsewhere in thesolarsystem and was captured by Earth‘s gravity as it passed nearby. The accretion hypothesis proposes that theMoon was created along with Earth at its formation.
What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.
The first high resolution images of deep space taken by NASA’s James Webb telescope have been published. I have to admit they are stunning. Don’t believe me? Take a look at some of them below.
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope combined the capabilities of the telescope’s two cameras to create a never-before-seen view of a star-forming region in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), this combined image reveals previously invisible areas of star birth. An enormous mosaic of Stephan’s Quintet is the largest image to date from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The visual grouping of five galaxies was captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light, at left, and mid-infrared light, at right, from NASA’s Webb Telescope. This scene was created by a white dwarf star – the remains of a star like our Sun after it shed its outer layers and stopped burning fuel though nuclear fusion. Those outer layers now form the ejected shells all along this view. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail.
This is just a small sample of the images sent back by Webb. If you’d like to see more visit the Webb telescope site here.
73 seconds. That was the flight time of the final flight of STS-51L, the Challenger. The doomed Space Shuttle lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:39 local time on 28 January 1986. It was the first fatal accident of an American space craft in flight.
Francis R. Scobee, Commander, Michael J. Smith, Pilot, Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist, Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist, Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist, Gregory Jarvis, Payload Specialist and Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist and teacher were all killed.
The disaster was caused by the failure of the two redundant O-ring seals in a joint in the Space Shuttle’s right solid rocket booster (SRB). The record-low temperatures of the launch reduced the elasticity of the rubber O-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints. The broken seals caused a breach into the joint shortly after liftoff, which allowed pressurized gas from within the SRB to leak and burn through the wall to the adjacent external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand SRB’s aft attachment and the structural failure of the external tank. Following the explosion, the orbiter, which included the crew compartment, was broken up by aerodynamic forces.
The crew compartment and many other vehicle fragments were recovered from the ocean floor after a three-month search-and-recovery operation. The exact timing of the deaths of the crew is unknown; several crew members are known to have survived the initial breakup of the spacecraft. By design, the orbiter had no escape system, and the impact of the crew compartment at close to 200 mph with the ocean surface was too violent to be survivable.
The disaster led to a 32 month hiatus in Shuttle flights and the creation of the Rodgers commision by President Reagan. The commision faulted NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes. As early as 1977 the issues with the SRB O-rings were known, yet NASA failed to address the issues. It also came out that NASA managers also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching in cold temperatures and did not report these technical concerns to their superiors.
The Space Shuttle fleet was grounded for two years and eight months while the program underwent investigation, redesign, and restructuring. On September 29, 1988, Discovery launched on STS-26 mission from LC-39B with a crew of five veteran astronauts. Its payload was TDRS-3, which was a substitute for the satellite lost with Challenger. The launch tested the redesigned boosters, and the crew wore pressure suits during the ascent and reentry. The mission was a success, and the Space Shuttle program resumed flying.
There wouldn’t be another accident until the Columbia broke apart on re-entry on 1 February 2003.
NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are making their return journey from space. After a two month stay at the ISS, the pair undocked from the station at about 7:34 p.m. eastern time Saturday and are expected splash down Sunday at 2:41 p.m.
