HOUSTON -- Nations around the world will join together to mark a milestone in space exploration this week, celebrating the 10th birthday of a unique research laboratory, the International Space Station.

Now the largest spacecraft ever built, the orbital assembly of the space station began with the launch from Kazakhstan of its first bus-sized component, Zarya, on Nov. 20, 1998. The launch began an international construction project of unprecedented complexity and sophistication.

The station is a venture of international cooperation among NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, and 11 members of the European Space Agency, or ESA: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. More than 100,000 people in space agencies and contractor facilities in 37 U.S. states and throughout the world are involved in this endeavor.
"The station's capability and sheer size today are truly amazing," said International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini. "The tremendous technological achievement in orbit is matched only by the cooperation and perseverance of its partners on the ground. We have overcome differences in language, geography and engineering philosophies to succeed."

Only a few weeks after the U.S.-funded, Russian-built, Zarya module was launched from Kazakhstan, the space shuttle carried aloft the Unity connector module in December 1998. Constructed on opposite sides of Earth, Unity and Zarya met for the first time in space and were joined to begin the orbital station's assembly and a decade of peaceful cooperation.

Ten years later, the station's mass has expanded to more than 627,000 pounds, and its interior volume is more than 25,000 cubic feet, comparable to the size of a five-bedroom house. Since Zarya's launch as the early command, control and power module, there have been 29 additional construction flights to the station: 27 aboard the space shuttle and two additional Russian launches.

One hundred sixty seven individual representing 14 countries have visited the complex. Crews have eaten some 19,000 meals aboard the station since the first crew took up residence in 2000. Through the course of 114 spacewalks and unmatched robotic construction in space, the station's truss structure has grown to 291 feet long so far. Its solar arrays now span to 28,800 square feet, large enough to cover six basketball courts.

The International Space Station hosts 19 research facilities, including nine sponsored by NASA, eight by ESA and two by JAXA. Cooperation among international teams of humans and robots is expected to become a mainstay of space exploration throughout our solar system. The 2005 NASA Authorization Act recognized the U.S. orbital segment as the first national laboratory beyond Earth, opening it for additional research by other government agencies, academia and the private sector.

"With the International Space Station, we have learned so many things -- and we're going to take that knowledge and apply it to flying to the moon and Mars," said Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke, now aboard the station. "Everything we're learning so close to home, only 240 miles away from the planet, we can apply to the moon 240,000 miles away."

To take a virtual tour of the International Space Station and learn more about the current mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station


To find out how to see the station from your own backyard, visit:

http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings
Read more!

Are you ready for a just-in spacecraft result that will blow your mind?

The Cassini spacecraft recorded the jumbled icescape near Enceladus's south pole with a resolution of just 40 feet (12 m) per pixel. This portion of a much larger mosaic is about 2 miles (3 km) wide.

NASA / JPL / Space Science Inst.

Have a close look at this image. It's one of many ultra-high-resolution images of Saturn's moon Enceladus (near its south pole, to be precise) taken by the Cassini spacecraft a few days ago, on October 31st.

This is just a small snippet (about 1%) of the full image mosaic, which measures 2,531 by 2,376 pixels. What's shown here is a swatch of icy terrain about 2 miles (3 km) on a side. The smallest details are just 40 feet (12 m) across — about the size of a house. It's the eyeball view you'd get from an altitude of about 12 miles (20 km).
If I were to track down Saturn in the predawn sky from my light-polluted backyard, glimpsing 12th-magnitude Enceladus would be a real challenge. But, thanks to Cassini's Imaging Science System ("cameras" for short), with a few mouse clicks I can achieve a virtual magnification of 75,000,000× — and no Barlow is needed!

The spacecraft took this view and others just after passing within 107 miles (171 km) of Enceladus. That's close — too close in some respects. We've all had the problem of trying to photograph the scenery from a fast-moving car, and Cassini's images would likewise have been badly smeared were it not for a "skeet-shoot" technique first tried last August. Essentially, the spacecraft slews its cameras as fast as it can to track the icy moonscape whizzing by. As you can see, it worked really, really well.

So kudos to the Cassini flight team for providing this Halloween treat. You can get the encounter's play-by-play at ciclops.org, the website maintained by ISS principal investigator Carolyn Porco and her team.

Cassini's next brush with Enceladus won't occur until this time next year. And by then, as Porco notes in her NASA blog, the Sun will be slowly setting on the south polar terrain. "So take your fill of this fabulous place now," she writes, "because it will be a very, very long time before you see it like this again."

By the way, Cassini had another brush with Enceladus back on October 9th. That one was incredibly close — just 15 miles (25 km) from the surface! — and it carried the spacecraft right through the icy plumes rising from the eight geysers concentrated near the moon's south pole. Some instruments should have determined what's in those plumes, but for now their science teams are keeping mum on what they've learned. Stay tuned!

Posted by Kelly Beatty, http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/33840874.html Read more!

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned spacecraft mission to moon, entered lunar orbit today (November 8, 2008). This is the first time that an Indian built spacecraft has broken away from the Earth’s gravitational field and reached the moon. This historic event occurred following the firing of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft’s liquid engine at 16:51 IST for a duration of 817 seconds. The highly complex ‘lunar orbit insertion manoeuvre’ was performed from Chandrayaan-1 Spacecraft Control Centre of ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network at Bangalore.

Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) at Byalalu supported the crucial task of transmitting commands and continuously monitoring this vital event with two dish antennas, one measuring 18 m and the other 32 m.

Chandrayaan-1’s liquid engine was fired when the spacecraft passed at a distance of about 500 km from the moon to reduce its velocity to enable lunar gravity to capture it into an orbit around the moon. The spacecraft is now orbiting the moon in an elliptical orbit that passes over the polar regions of the moon. The nearest point of this orbit (periselene) lies at a distance of about 504 km from the moon’s surface while the farthest point (aposelene) lies at about 7502 km. Chandrayaan-1 takes about 11 hours to go round the moon once in this orbit.

The performance of all the systems onboard Chandrayaan-1 is normal. In the coming days, the height of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft’s orbit around the moon will be carefully reduced in steps to achieve a final polar orbit of about 100 km height from the moon’s surface. Following this, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) of the spacecraft will be released to hit the lunar surface. Later, the other scientific instruments will be turned ON sequentially leading to the normal phase of the mission.

It may be recalled that Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched on October 22, 2008 by PSLV-C11 from India’s spaceport at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota. As intended, PSLV placed the spacecraft in a highly oval shaped orbit with a perigee (nearest point to Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point to Earth) of 22,860 km. In the past two weeks, the liquid engine of Chandrayaan-1 has been successfully fired five times at opportune moments to increase the apogee height, first to 37,900 km, then to 74,715 km, later to 164,600 km, after that to 267,000 km and finally to 380,000km, as planned. During this period, the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the eleven payloads (scientific instruments) of the spacecraft, was successfully operated twice to take the pictures, first of the Earth, and then moon.

With today’s successful manoeuvre, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to Moon. The other countries, which have sent spacecraft to Moon, are the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan and China. Besides, the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries, has also sent a spacecraft to moon. Read more!

Space station junk burns up over ocean

NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson, an Expedition 15 flight engineer, tosses a hefty unneeded ammonia tank the size of a refrigerator overboard from the international space station during a spacewalk on July 23, 2007. NASA said the tank broke up Sunday during atmospheric re-entry.

A piece of space trash the size of a refrigerator plunged into Earth's atmosphere late Sunday to burn up over the southern Pacific Ocean, more than a year after an astronaut tossed it off the international space station, NASA officials said Monday.

Space station program manager Mike Suffredini told reporters that the orbital trash, a 1,400-pound (635-kilogram) tank of toxic ammonia coolant, slammed into Earth's atmosphere and broke up at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 kilometers) as it flew above the ocean just south of Tasmania.

"What debris may have been still together after re-entry, it fell into the ocean between Australia and New Zealand," Suffredini said during a NASA briefing. "I know a lot of folks were wondering what the end result of that was."

NASA expected up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the fiery plunge, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). The largest pieces, if they survived, may have hit the ocean at speeds of up to 100 mph (164 kilometers per hour).

The U.S. Space Surveillance Network kept a close watch on the ammonia tank for NASA as part of its effort to monitor the thousands of pieces of orbital debris circling Earth.

Known as an Early Ammonia Servicer, the coolant tank was the largest piece of trash ever disposed of by hand from the space station. NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson junked the tank while wearing a spacesuit and standing at the tip of the station's Canadian-built robotic arm during a July 23, 2007, spacewalk.

"We're really fortunate to be able to track objects to a fairly small size," Suffredini told Space.com before the ammonia tank re-entered, adding that the ammonia tank was rather large and easy to track.

NASA takes great care to ensure that any trash tossed overboard from the space station does not endanger other spacecraft or people on Earth, he added.

The obsolete tank had served as a spare reservoir of ammonia coolant for the space station in case of leaks since 2001, but was no longer required after astronauts activated the outpost's main cooling system in early 2007. Because the tank was so old, engineers were worried that its structural integrity wouldn't hold during a return to Earth aboard a NASA shuttle.

Instead they asked Anderson to toss it during a spacewalk dedicated to discarding old equipment. He also jettisoned a 212-pound (96-kilogram) video camera stand. That item burned up in Earth's atmosphere earlier this year.

"I just like it when they've re-entered and it's not a problem," Suffredini said. "One of the big concerns for any orbiting pressurized spacecraft is orbital debris." Read more!