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| Image credit: Xinhua |
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| Shenzhou 5 Returns Safely to Earth |
| Oct 16, 2003 - China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, emerged triumphantly from his Shenzhou 5 capsule yesterday after spending nearly 21 hours in space. The spacecraft landed in Inner Mongolia at 2223 GMT Wednesday (6:23 pm EDT); only a few kilometers from its intended landing spot. Liwei exited the vehicle within 30 minutes of landing and was perfectly healthy. Details about China’s future spaceflight plans are starting to emerge and could include another Shenzhou flight within a year or two. They’re also working on ideas for a space station and will probably send an unmanned probe to the Moon within a few years. |
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Einstein Still Seems to Be Right |
| Oct 16, 2003 - Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity says that information can’t travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, and a new experiment carried out by researchers at the University of Arizona seems to support this. By creating what’s called “Gaussian Pulses”, experimenters can send light through a medium of pumped potassium gas which causes part of the light wave to travel faster than the speed of light. But when they tried to send information along the wave as discontinuities in the signal, they didn’t travel through faster than the speed of light. |
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| Image credit: ESA |
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| Expedition 8 Gets Ready to Launch |
| Oct 16, 2003 - On Saturday, October 18 the crew of Expedition 8 (Michael Foale and Alexander Kaleri) will blast off in a Russian Soyuz rocket to begin their six-month mission on the International Space Station. Spanish astronaut Pedro Duque will also be on board, but he will spend only 10-days in space, performing a series of experiments for the European Space Agency. Then Duque and the crew of Expedition 7 will return in the previous Soyuz spacecraft currently docked with the station. |
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| Image credit: NASA |
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| Four Possible Causes for Contour's Failure |
| Oct 16, 2003 - NASA investigators have come up with four possible reasons why the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) mission failed in August 2002. The mission launched in July 2002, and was supposed to visit at least two comets and study their icy nuclei, but something went wrong that caused the spacecraft to disappear from ground tracking stations. The most probably cause of the failure was a structural failure of the spacecraft while its solid rocket motor was firing, but the investigators are also considering a collision with debris, a catastrophic failure of the rocket motor, and loss of the spacecraft’s control systems. |
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