Anyone Up There?
| October 28, 2015
What’s that? The ISS (International Space Station) is a $150 billion space station in orbit around the earth at a low altitude. Low for a space station means between 99 and 1 200 miles (160 and 2 000 kilometers). The ISS shaped like the letter H has three main parts:
· 15 pressurized modules (units) the crew can be in without wearing spacesuits
· external trusses — the skeleton that supports the modules
· solar panels to provide energyThe first part of the space station was launched into orbit in 1998.
Two years later a space shuttle brought the first astronauts. Other parts arrived in space shuttles and rockets launched from the US Russia and Japan. Some of these parts were assembled robotically others by the crew during spacewalks (any time an astronaut leaves a vehicle while in space whether for experiments or repairs it’s called a spacewalk).
It usually takes a rocket two days to get to the ISS because of the many maneuvers involved in docking correctly but recently astronauts made the trip in six hours. Who’s there now? The ISS can hold up to seven crew members. Crews usually stay several months but sometimes they’re in space for much longer. As you’re reading this NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts (Russian astronauts) Mikhail Kornienko and Commander Gennady Padalka are orbiting overhead on Expedition 44. Kelly and Kornienko are on a one-year mission that ends in March 2016.
In September Gennady Padalka will return to earth and four new members will join Kelly and Kornienko to start Expedition 45. NASA’s operations center in Alabama monitors every minute of the crew’s day and keeps the crew in touch with scientists on earth. The team is also responsible for the astronauts’ lost property — after all if they don’t put their keys in the right place they could float away. What are they doing up there? The ISS program is a joint project of five space agencies from the US Russia Europe Japan and Canada to do research.
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