Category Archives: Transhuman News

Technology thousands of years old has been overhauled to capture threats to space hardware.

Space junk poses a serious threat, particularly to humans in space whether in the International Space Station, space shuttles, or other spacecraft.

The debris also poses a threat to satellites, which fulfill a critical role for militaries, governments, and businesses. Satellites, for example, help provide television, weather data, phone services and GPS navigation to the public.

The only way to protect current and future missions, as well as the satellites essential to everyday life, is to remove threats lurking in space.

The solution? Fishing. Recent tests for space age space nets by the European Space Agency have proved very successful.

While fishing nets have been in use for several thousand years, space nets take this this ancient piece of technology to a whole new level.

The hope is that nets could be deployed to capture and remove space threats.

The threat

Earth is entirely surrounded by a halo of junk in space. Space debris can be natural, like meteroids, or can be manmade.

There are more than half a million pieces of debris and, according to NASA calculations, at least 17, 000 trackable objects larger than a coffee cup.

See the rest here:
'Space nets' trap cosmic junk

Story highlights Scott Kelly will set a record for longest stay on the International Space Station Kelly will log nearly a year in space, making him the overall U.S. record-holder Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka will add to his all-time human spaceflight record

"It's a lot of fun," Kelly said at a media briefing in January. "Space station is a magical place."

Two cosmonauts will ride up with Kelly: Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka. Kornienko also will stay up for a year. Padalka will only stay up for six months.

The trio will join three crew members already on the space station: U.S. astronaut Terry Virts, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Other crew members also will rotate in and out during their year in orbit so it will never be just Kelly and Kornienko on the station.

Kelly, 51, will break the record for the longest mission on the space station set by NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin. They spent over seven months on the ISS -- from September 18, 2006, to April 21, 2007.

He will spend 342 days off the planet on this mission. When added to his previous space missions, that will give him a total of 522 days in space, breaking the record of U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke. Fincke spent a combined 381 days, 15 hours and 11 minutes in space, according to his official NASA bio.

While Kelly is setting space station and other U.S. records, Padalka will be setting a record for the most total time in space for a human. He's already spent more than 710 days in space, including stays on Russia's Mir space station and three previous stints on the International Space Station.

Why do it? Why stay up on the station so long? NASA wants to know more about the impact of long-duration spaceflights on the human body to help plan missions to Mars and deeper into space. And the space station is the best place available to study that.

The station orbits about 250 miles above the Earth. That's not too far if you drive it on land. But it's far enough above the planet to when you go straight up, you nearly run out of gravity. And it turns out the human body really likes gravity. NASA says space station astronauts have vision changes, bone loss, muscle atrophy and other problems.

The space station has about the same living space as a six-bedroom, two bathroom house. And it has a 360-degree bay window with a great view. But astronauts and cosmonauts still report feeling isolated and confined at times. Kelly will keep a journal for researchers, documenting his feelings about being away from his two children and the rest of his family.

More here:
U.S. astronaut launching on history-making mission

Astronaut Scott Kelly, left, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko plan to spend more than 11 months aboard the International Space Station to collect data on the long-term physiological and psychological effects of the space environment. NASA

Shuttle veteran Scott Kelly first heard about NASA's plans to send an astronaut to the International Space Station for nearly a full year shortly after he completed his third space flight in 2011, a 159-day stay aboard the orbital lab complex.

The idea wasn't particularly attractive.

"At first, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't all that interested," he said. "I hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, and it was soon after I had gotten back from my last flight. So the difficulty of living and working in space for a long period of time was still kind of fresh in my mind."

But he thought about it. Then he thought some more.

Finally, after "mulling it over and talking about it with my family, friends, girlfriend, I decided the challenges that staying in space for a whole year presented were appealing to me, even considering the sacrifices you and your family are in for to do that kind of thing."

In November 2012, Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, veteran of a 176-day stay aboard the station in 2010, were assigned to what NASA bills as the "One-Year Mission." Now, after more than two years of training in the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan, they're finally ready to go.

Joined by Soyuz TMA-16M commander Gennady Padalka, one of Russia's most experienced cosmonauts, Kelly and Kornienko are scheduled for blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:42:57 p.m. EDT Friday (GMT-4; 1:43 a.m. Saturday local time), departing from the same launch pad used by Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the space age more than 50 years ago.

If all goes well, the trio will dock at the space station's upper Poisk module around 9:36 p.m. after a four-orbit, six-hour rendezvous. Standing by to welcome them aboard will be Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts, cosmonaut Alexander Shkaplerov and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

Original post:
Astronaut Scott Kelly braces for yearlong space flight