The International Space Station has been in orbit around our home planet since 1998 when the first piece of the station was lifted into orbit. Now, the football field-sized space station sits in orbit above the Earth — but how did they build this massive piece of engineering? Let’s take a closer look the ISS and all the work that went into creating it.
A Global Collaboration
There’s a reason it’s called the International Space Station. It is the result of a massive collaboration with the space agencies in countries around the globe. It included engineers and experts from NASA in the United States, the Canadian Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos out of Russia.
The station itself is divided into two segments — the Russian Orbital Segment,which includes four Russian owned sections, and the U.S. Orbital Segment, which includes portions that are owned by the U.S. and the other member countries.One of these sections, Zarya, is included in the Russian Orbital Segment because Russia built it, but it belongs to the United States because we funded it. Zarya is the first component of the ISS that was sent into orbit.
Years of Construction
Construction on the ISS started in the early 1990s, even though the first segment didn’t launch until 1998. The idea dates back to the Reagan Administration. In 1984’s State of the Union address, the then-President directed NASA to build an international space station within the next decade. If only he had known then how far that declaration would carry us.
If six years ago you had forgotten a Fisher space pen in your car’s glove box and you pull it out today, it will write without a hiccup. It will also write underwater, in extreme heat and in freezing cold. In fact it will write in space too. It has been used for exactly that for decades.
You must have heard of that story where NASA spent millions to invent a pen that writes in space. That is not really true. The millions in research was Paul Fisher’s own money that he spent to develop a pen which would write in weightless conditions. Well, NASA was spending money on it at almost the same time too. But their research program’s budget spiraled out of control and had to deal with public pressure before going back to using pencils.
There’s a good chance you must have received an email like this one, maybe around April 15th:
When NASA started sending astronauts into space, they quickly Discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero Gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a Decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero
Gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glass And at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C.
The Russian one line solution compared to the “$12 Billion” dollar Americans used sounds like a smooth story to tell. But that is not really how it all went down.
At the height of space race, both Americans and Russians used pencils to write in space. But since pencils use graphite to leave a mark, and graphite is flammable, it made pencils not the best things to take into space, especially after the Apollo 1 fire incident. Secondly, graphite conducts electricity pretty well. That means a broke piece of pencil tip, or even the small amount of graphite dust from it could get into the electronics and cause shorts. And then there’s paper, wood and eraser which go with a pencil. All of which produce particles when used and are combustible.
Mechanical pencils were a better solution as they eliminated wood but the graphite was still a problem. Grease pencils or wax pencils solved it to some extent. But again the mark left by any pencil was not as reliable as a pen. Ballpoint pens worked pretty well. However the problem with normal ball pens was that the ink was not designed to work well at low pressures, nor would it do very well in extreme space temperatures. Felt tip pens again used a much thinner ink which wasn’t an ideal choice for usage in low pressure environments like space.
Fisher solved all of these problems by inventing a pen that used an ink cartridge that was pressurized at 35 psi. This ensured the ink would come out irrespective of the orientation of the pen, or the pressure it was in. It also used a non-newtonian thixotropic ink which acted like ketchup – stayed put as long as the pen was not intending to write, and flowed due to a change in viscosity when the pen had to write. Oh and the ink was designed to work well at -25 to 120 degrees C, not 300 C.
This original spacepen – Antigravity 7 or AG7, the one which was used on Apollo 7 space mission in 1968 after 2 years of testing by NASA, sells on Fisher spacepen’s website for about $60.
This video talks about how it all started from a sandwich:
NASA and other space agencies continue to work tirelessly on finding new technology to make deep space exploration a possibility. The Korean Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, as well as NASA are currently working on a new technology involving self-healing silicon chips for spacecraft that will make the interstellar trip in the near future.
NASA will present the technology at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco in December 2016. The largest hurdle scientists have faced in regards to sending deep space probes is the intense radiation from the other stars and planets. This new technology will allow the silicon chips to heal after radiation exposure using a transistor made from nanowire technology.
How Self-Healing Chip Technology Works
As a deep space probe travels, its exposure to large amounts of radiation causes degradation before the probe can reach the end of its journey. Although a space shuttle or probe may run into other challenges such as heating and cooling or fuel issues, scientists believe the destruction from radiation scenario is avoidable by using a gate to surround the nanowire transistors.
If you combined the masses of all the planets in the solar system, that would still weigh almost less than half of Jupiter’s mass. That’s heavy. So heavy, that effectively when it tries to revolve around the sun, it also makes the sun revolve around it a little. That is to say, both these massive bodies revolve around a common point, called a barycenter. The barycenter for the sun and the Jupiter lies just outside of the sun! Almost on the surface. At about 1.068 times the radius of the sun.
“Jupiter’s mass is 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined—this is so massive that its barycenter with the Sun lies above the Sun’s surface at 1.068 solar radii from the Sun’s center. Jupiter is much larger than Earth and considerably less dense: its volume is that of about 1,321 Earths, but it is only 318 times as massive.”
When the Chinese unmanned lunar exploration mission Chang’e 3, landed its first lunar rover on the moon in 2013, not many people knew this. But it’s coming to light just now with a new report published that shows they’ve have had a UV telescope on the moon all along.
The telescope has recorded thousands of hours of observations. And has also been able to record an impressive UV image of a galaxy that is 21 million light years away – Pinwheel Galaxy.
The robotic telescope has worked for an impressive 2 years now and has captured some really good data which couldn’t have been possible from any telescope on the earth. That’s mostly because of two reasons.
1. Earth’s atmosphere is too thick to allow detectable UV light from distant celestial objects.
2. Moon spins 27 times slower than the earth so it is possible to make the telescope focus at a single object and collect light for a lot more time than it can do on earth.
George Aldrich has probably one of the strangest jobs on the planet. His job is to smell. George smells everything and anything, even the worst smells. And guess whom he works for?
He works for NASA! The space agency. Everything that is taken into space, George smells it. He makes sure it is safe to be taken inside the capsule that will be leaving for space. He’s been doing it for more than 3 decades.
If it wasn’t for George, manned missions to space wouldn’t have been very successful.
Imagine you have two equal sized balls of clay. You mix both of them together to get a bigger ball of clay. Now as simple math dictates, the mass of this new ball will be twice the mass that you had in each ball initially. However, the radius of this new ball is clearly only slightly more than the initial ball. Had you wanted to make a ball with the radius twice as much as the initial ball, you would have needed to club 8 of the small balls.
Black holes do not work that way. The event horizon, a kind of one-way membrane from which not even light can escape is like a boundary for the black hole. Let’s say this defines the size of a black hole.
The funny thing about the size of a black hole is that if you double the mass of a black hole, the size doubles. The physics of it is complex, unlike anything of a clay ball. So, just believe me when I say that doubling the mass doubles the radius.
When such things happen, there are weird results. That means, if you keep adding mass to a black hole, and at some point it reaches a really massive mass, say as much as Billion times that of our sun – That’s not unheard of, it happens. If you get your calculations right, you’ll find that in a black hole like that one, the density will be really low. A black hole of that size would span from the center of the sun to the orbit of Neptune. And the density of it would be around 1/1000 of a gram per cc. That, if you did not know, is also the density of air. That’s how low density black holes can be. Probably even lower, if they are bigger…
A very very big sphere of a radius 2.7 billion miles filled with air would be a black hole. Hard to believe, but it’s true.
This might be a prevalent piece of information but like so many other very common things I do not know about, the Messier catalogue, I found, was just one of them. Ignore this if you know what it is…
I realized not knowing about the Messier catalogue, when a friend of mine asked me what the M with a number beside it signify in his Google sky app. We some how collectively chose to blindly predict that this was the way stars are named, with no knowledge whatsoever on the fact why only M was used.
Boy, we were wrong! Of course, M was used because of the “Messier catalogue”. But it wasn’t for stars.
Charles Messier was a French astronomer who had a decided on a mission for his life. He was to search and find as many comets he could, in his lifetime. He went on to find 15 of them – quite extraordinary for a single man to have done that.
While doing this search for comets Messier, to keep the comets separate from other cloudy objects he discovered, he started keeping a journal of non-comet objects. This came to be known as the Messier catalogue of deep sky objects.
As time progressed, objects were added one by one to the list. Their names on this catalogue start with the letter M – denoting “Messier objects” (not stars, but nebulae, star clusters and galaxies.). There are a total of 110 objects in this catalogue and is a nice thing for amateur astronomers to do the Messier marathon. This involves watching all of the objects at night spotting the sun rises.
The last object, M110 was added by Kenneth Glyn Jones in the year 1967.
All of these objects have other names too. One other name is the one that comes from the New General Catalogue (NGC). And hence the names are like NGC 1952 for M1.
More information about each one of the 110 objects can be found here [Link]
Now just like Google let’s you move around with you having a bird-eyes view of the whole world, NASA has released an interactive map of the surface of Mars. This map lets you see the red-planet in 2D or 3D and you can zoom around to explore areas in a better detail.
Call them the orphan planets, isolated orbs or lone planets, scientists estimate that there are so many of these undetected moving around in space that they may be double in number than the number of stars.
Planets of the size of Jupiter, as astronomers from a Japan-New Zealand based survey note, have been roaming around without any parent star to revolve around. They first observed about 10s of them when they were looking towards the centre of the milky way galaxy. These new planets they found are about 10,000 to 20,000 light years away from earth, and there are probably many more around.
In the year 1928, a resident of Baltimore, Robert Condit made plans to leave earth by making a blueprint for a spacecraft that would fit exactly one person, food tablets, water, and was planned to fly all the way to venus. Oh, for safety purposes it had a first-aid kit and a couple of silk parachutes too.
With the help of brothers Harry B. and Sterling Uhler, the 24 foot spacecraft was constructed. It looked like a over sized bullet and had 8 steel pipes (read engines) attached all around it. The inside of pipes each had a spark plug to burn sprayed gasoline and create a lift. It took them 8 months to complete Condit’s design.
50 gallons of gasoline was filled in it and it was aimed carefully towards venus. The target speed was 25000 miles per hour. That, as Condit estimated, would allow him to reach 40 miles above the earth and then it would be an easy journey ahead.
Unfortunately, the spacecraft didn’t leave ground, Robert left for Florida and was never seen again.
There was an accident at NASA when they were testing the space suits for the Apollo moon missions. To recreate the situation the suit had to face on moon, a large vacuum chamber, with other chambers on the outside which had successively decreasing pressures, was constructed.
A NASA spacesuit technician, Jim LeBlanc was the test subject to test this suit out on December 14, 1966. Somehow when he was going through the test, the tube which was supposed to pressurize his suit was disconnected. His suit pressure dropped from 3.8 PSI to 0.1 PSI in less than 10 seconds. But in the end, he survived and became the first and only person to survive in near-vacuum pressure.
Normally, to re-pressurize the chamber it would have taken about 30 minutes. But the experimenters had to rush and did this re-pressurization in about 90 seconds, which could have done a lot of damage to LeBlanc’s hearing and other sensitive parts of the body. However, he gained consciousness all fine and everything was perfectly al right.
What’s closest to the sun must be hot. Yes, being 58 million kilometers away makes it pretty hot. And mercury, as the guy in this video says, is also super cool. One way it’s cool that I know is because one day on mercury the sun rises, stops in mid day and goes back to where it came from. Now if that’s not cool, there’s more.
Mercury zips past pretty fast. If you are able to locate it, you’ll see that it moves past the stars pretty quickly, as you keep an eye on it. It makes a complete orbit in just 88 days. That’s about 1.5 mercury days in a year. Imagine having a birthday almost every other day!
That’s because it is so close to the sun. That means it takes a much faster movement to prevent it from collapsing into the sun. Interestingly, the mercury, when seen through a good telescope, with a great amount of patience can be seen to change phases, just like the moon does. But it’s not easy to make that kind of an observation.
It also has the most elliptical orbit. And through out the year it can move from just 40 million kilometres away from the sun to more than 70 million kilometres away. That’s some change of seasons. More in the crashcourse video below:
Ever wondered why we don’t have solar eclipses every month, given the moon makes a full circle of earth in a month? Shouldn’t there be an eclipse every month at least at one place on earth? And the same goes for lunar eclipses too. That’s because the orbit of moon is slightly tilted, at about 5 degrees. And that’s pretty huge when it comes to big distances of the space.
Also, by some bizarre coincidence, a moon 400 times smaller than the sun is also 400 times closer to earth than the sun. That crazy coincidence gives it the ability to block out the sun’s light during a full solar eclipse, even when it is much smaller than the object it is blocking. Like your thumbnail, smaller than the sun, but much closer than it can block the sun’s light.
But the moon isn’t at the same distance from earth all the time. So, when it is far, you get these annular solar eclipses, which block the suns inner part, and you still can see a ring of brilliant light.
And since the moon is slowly going away, about 600 million years from now, there’ll be only annular solar eclipses. Of course we won’t be around to miss the complete solar eclipses.
