![]() Recently, at the urging of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the Biden White House agreed to extend the space station to 2030. The space station, therefore, offers humanity a pathway toward cooperation and sustainability in spaceflight. Hundreds of people have now lived on the station, providing biological information that will inform future spacecraft and exploration missions. With its pioneering experiments on human health and microgravity, too, the space station is providing a template for understanding how humans can live and work and thrive in space for months or even years. But in this century they have worked together and contributed money and hardware toward the construction of something greater than each nation could have made on its own. Many of these countries warred in the 20th century. It has brought together the United States and Russia in space, as well as a host of other European nations alongside Japan and Canada. In many ways, the International Space Station offers a hopeful vision for what our future in space could hold. NASA's Johnson Space Center recently posted the photos on its Flickr page. Most recently, the Crew 2 mission led by NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough undocked from the space station on November 8, and the crew was able to capture multiple views of the space station. But thanks to the emergence of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle, astronauts have started circumnavigating the station once again after undocking and before heading home. For more than 20 years, these harsh conditions have worn on the station, inducing stress fractures and other damage.įollowing the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, NASA lost the ability to fly humans around the station to catalog these changes with highly detailed photographs. Over this time the station has begun to show its age, being exposed to the extreme hot and cold temperatures of space, a vacuum environment, and micrometeoroid debris. And while primary construction of the orbiting laboratory ended a little more than a decade ago, before the retirement of NASA's space shuttle, the station has continued to evolve with smaller modules and an ever-changing array of visiting spacecraft. So, putting the ISS even a little higher than its current orbit would expose the astronauts living on the station to the hazards of the inner belt - and reaching geostationary orbit would put them within the outer radiation zone.The International Space Station is now more than two decades old. They wax and wane, but generally, the inner belt sits at 400 to 6,000 miles (643 to 9,700 km) and the outer belt stretches from 8,400 to 36,000 miles (13,400 to 58,000 km) above Earth. ![]() These regions are called the Van Allen belts. There are two zones of radiation above the planet, consisting of energetic charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. Not only do launches and cargo shipments get exponentially more expensive the higher the station is, but they also get more dangerous. There are a few other reasons to keep the ISS in a low Earth orbit as well. Luckily, everything space agencies wanted to study aboard the ISS, including microgravity and the space environment, could be achieved in low Earth orbit. This fleet of orbiting spacecraft was only able to achieve an orbital altitude between 190 and 330 miles (304 to 528 km). Most of the ISS was assembled using NASA’s space shuttle, which was designed to fly in low Earth orbit. In theory, that would work, but the ISS had one major obstacle holding it back from reaching those heights: the space shuttle. A geostationary orbit, or one where the ISS would stay parked above the same spot on Earth, would require the station to have an altitude around 22,000 miles (36,000 km) above the equator. The International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth at an average altitude of 200 to 250 miles (322 to 402 km).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |