Good R.E.D. Friday Morning my Brothers and Sisters in arms!
The International Space Station was launched on November 20,1998 (24 years ago)! Many interesting scientific and mission oriented tasks have taken place over its lifetime. I have included a portion of the history, purpose, and current use from Wikipedia in the next few paragraphs. You can read more at Wikipedia.com.
Strange things have occurred and images and video has been captured and this short video provides some interesting and thought provoking discussion as the narrator provides the story.
From the accompanied video text I add:
"Strange, Unexplained Structure Detected Near The International Space Station!
The International Space Station is the largest single structure that humans have ever put into space. NASA will use lessons learned on the ISS to prepare for human missions that reach farther into space than ever before.
As with exploring any unknown terrain or space, there are bound to be encounters with the unknown. And now, the ISS might also be the place that has finally provided us with answers to the age old question “Are We Alone?”. The answer being a faint, but terrifying “No”.
What does NASA know? And why does it keep cutting the Live Feed?"
I hope you all learn and enjoy this video...
Kerry
ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION:
"The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station in low Earth orbit. The project involves five space agencies: the United States' NASA, Russia's Roscosmos, Japan's JAXA, Europe's ESA, and Canada's CSA. The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements. The station serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific research is conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields. The ISS is suited for testing the spacecraft systems and equipment required for possible future long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars."
"The ISS programme evolved from the Space Station Freedom, a 1984 American proposal to construct a permanently crewed Earth-orbiting station, and the contemporaneous Soviet/Russian Mir-2 proposal from 1976 with similar aims. The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations and the American Skylab. It is the largest artificial object in the solar system and the largest satellite in low Earth orbit, regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth's surface. It maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda Service Module or visiting spacecraft. The ISS circles the Earth in roughly 93 minutes, completing 15.5 orbits per day."
"The ISS provides a platform to conduct scientific research, with power, data, cooling, and crew available to support experiments. Small uncrewed spacecraft can also provide platforms for experiments, especially those involving zero gravity and exposure to space, but space stations offer a long-term environment where studies can be performed potentially for decades, combined with ready access by human researchers."
"The ISS simplifies individual experiments by allowing groups of experiments to share the same launches and crew time. Research is conducted in a wide variety of fields, including astrobiology, astronomy, physical sciences, materials science, space weather, meteorology, and human research including space medicine and the life sciences. Scientists on Earth have timely access to the data and can suggest experimental modifications to the crew. If follow-on experiments are necessary, the routinely scheduled launches of resupply craft allows new hardware to be launched with relative ease.[43] Crews fly expeditions of several months' duration, providing approximately 160 person-hours per week of labour with a crew of six. However, a considerable amount of crew time is taken up by station maintenance." - Wikipedia
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