Astronomy Picture of the Day 10-20-02

NASA ^ | 10-20-02 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell

[petuniasevan]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2002 October 20

The Space Shuttle Docked with Mir
Credit: Nikolai Budarin, Russian Space Research Institute, NASA

Explanation: Before there was the International Space Station, the reigning orbiting spaceport was Russia's Mir. Pictured above in 1995, the United States Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the segmented Mir. During shuttle mission STS-71, astronauts answered questions from school students over amateur radio and performed science experiments aboard Spacelab. The Spacelab experiments helped to increase understanding of the effects of long-duration space flights on the human body. Last year, after 15 years of successful service, the decaying Mir space station broke up as it entered the Earth's atmosphere.

[petuniasevan]

MIR's demise over Fiji 3-22-01

And a fond farewell haiku to MIR:

Say what you will about the Russians; they kept that rattletrap station going 15 years.
The much-vaunted International Space Station is already scaled way back, with needed parts not available.
If it does ever get finished it will not deliver as promised.

Neither will it last 15 years.

[petuniasevan]

[RadioAstronomer]

I agree. :-(

IMHO, Skylab was an excellent scientific platform. (also the "first" space station)

[MeekOneGOP]

[RightWhale]

The whole pile, or pieces of the pile could have been sent to lunar orbit without much trouble. The cost to re-orbit
would be about $3 billion, and the cost to build the hardware will have to be repeated on top of that. It could even have been landed on the moon in pieces and would have served as the beginnings of the manned moon base. Say what you want, there is no moon base, and that is due to a political decision.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Pretty picture!

[da_toolman]

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