That’s
an interesting selfie !! Soyuz MS-13,
also designated ISS flight 59S, is a Soyuz spaceflight launched on 20 July 2019
carrying three members [posing in selfie] of the Expedition 60 crew to the International
Space Station: a Russian commander, an American and a European flight engineer.
MS-13 will be the 142nd flight of a Soyuz spacecraft. !?!?
It is
50 years of that significant event and the whole World is talking about ~ the
primary objective of the mission was to complete
a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961: perform a
crewed lunar landing and return to Earth. Additional flight objectives included
scientific exploration by the lunar module, or LM, crew; deployment of a
television camera to transmit signals to Earth; and deployment of a solar wind
composition experiment, seismic experiment package and a Laser Ranging
Retroreflector. During the exploration, the two astronauts were to gather
samples of lunar-surface materials for return to Earth. They also were to
extensively photograph the lunar terrain, the deployed scientific equipment,
the LM spacecraft, and each other, both with still and motion picture cameras. –
‘Apollo 11’
Apollo
is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in classical
Greek and Roman religion and Greek and Roman mythology. The national divinity
of the Greeks, Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of archery, music
and dance, truth and prophecy, healing and diseases, the sun and light, poetry,
and more. Apollo is the son of Zeus and Leto, and has a twin sister, the chaste
huntress Artemis. Seen as the most beautiful god and the ideal of the kouros (a
beardless, athletic youth), Apollo is considered to be the most Greek of all
gods.
Apollo 11 launched
from Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969, carrying Commander Neil Armstrong, Command
Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz"
Aldrin into an initial Earth-orbit of 114 by 116 miles. An estimated 650
million people watched Armstrong's televised image and heard his voice describe
the event as he took "...one small step for a
man, one giant leap for mankind" on July 20, 1969.
buzz Aldrin and man's boot prints on moon surface
The first color TV
transmission to Earth from Apollo 11 occurred during the translunar coast of
the CSM/LM. Later, on July 17, a three-second burn of the SPS was made to
perform the second of four scheduled midcourse corrections programmed for the
flight. The launch had been so successful that the other three were not needed.
On July 18, Armstrong and Aldrin put on their spacesuits and climbed through
the docking tunnel from Columbia to Eagle to check out the LM, and to make the
second TV transmission. On July 19, after Apollo 11 had flown behind the moon
out of contact with Earth, came the first lunar orbit insertion maneuver. On July
20, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the LM again, made a final check, and at 100
hours, 12 minutes into the flight, the Eagle undocked and separated from
Columbia for visual inspection.
President Nixon greets returning US astronauts
First Armstrong
emerged from the Eagle and deployed the TV camera for the transmission of the
event to Earth. At about 109 hours, 42 minutes after launch, Armstrong stepped
onto the moon. About 20 minutes later, Aldrin followed him. The camera was then
positioned on a tripod about 30 feet from the LM. Half an hour later, President
Nixon spoke by telephone link with the astronauts. For the Quizz enthusiasts, the details are :
Crew : Neil
Armstrong, Commander; Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module Pilot & Michael
Collins, Command Module Pilot
Backup
Crew : James A. Lovell, Commander; Fred W. Haise Jr., Lunar Module Pilot & William
A. Anders, Command Module Pilot
USA is a Nation
where achievements as also conspiracy theories galore. ‘We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty
Billion Dollar Swindle!’ – was one such mocking the events of July 20, 1969, the day when astronauts Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on Earth's moon for the first time in human
history. Four days later, they — along with Apollo 11 command module pilot
Michael Collins — were locked up on an American battleship in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean. The triumphant astronauts were in quarantine. Per a NASA safety
protocol written half a decade earlier, the three lunar visitors were escorted
directly from their splashdown site in the central Pacific to a modified
trailer aboard the USS Hornet, where a 21-day isolation period began. That was
to ensure that no potentially hazardous
lunar microbes hitchhiked back to Earth with them.
So it is 50 years
since Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. They
spent about two and a quarter hours together outside the spacecraft, and
collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material to bring back to Earth.
Command module pilot Michael Collins flew the command module Columbia alone in
lunar orbit while they were on the Moon's surface. Armstrong and Aldrin spent
21 hours 31 minutes on the lunar surface at a site they named Tranquility Base
before lifting off to rejoin Columbia in lunar orbit. Apollo 11 effectively
ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by
President John F. Kennedy: "before this decade is out, of landing a man on
the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
Bill Kaysing was a
former US Navy officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket
manufacturers for NASA's Apollo moon missions. He claimed that he had inside
knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landings, and many
conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings which persist to this day
can be traced back to his 1976 book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's
Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. The basic
template of the conspiracy theory is that NASA couldn't manage to safely land a
man on the moon by the end of the 1960s as President John F Kennedy had
promised, so it only sent astronauts into Earth orbit. Conspiracy theorists
then argue that NASA staged the moon landings in a film studio and that there
are tell-tale signs on the footage and the photos that give the game away. They
claim that NASA has covered up the elaborate hoax ever since.
These
and many other seeming anomalies have been debunked, but moon landing
conspiracy theories have persisted in the popular imagination. The conspiracy theories are more of popular
notion that significant events are not what they seem:
they have been staged, part of an official disinformation campaign. The 1978
Hollywood film Capricorn One did much to popularise moon landing conspiracy
theories. Mostly they are far-fetched in
factual terms, but whips up the more
plausible possibility that in our media-saturated age reality itself is
constructed, if not actually faked.
Even as there are
celebrations at USA, half a world away at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan,
NASA's former Cold War rivals were focused on getting three fresh crew members
to the International Space Station. Soyuz MS-13/59S commander Alexander
Skvortsov, Italian co-pilot Luca Parmitano and NASA physician-astronaut Andrew
Morgan blasted off from Yuri Gagarin's launch pad at the sprawling Kazakh space
center at 12:28 p.m. EDT (9:28 p.m. local time), the first step in a four-orbit
rendezvous with the laboratory complex. The timing of the launch was
coincidental with the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. But Morgan said
the crew was honored to serve as a symbolic link between the past, when the
United States and the former Soviet Union were engaged in a Cold War space
race, and today, when international cooperation is the rule and not the exception.
Skvortsov, Parmitano and Morgan carried out a series of carefully scripted
rocket firings to catch up with the lab complex, moving in for a docking at the
aft end of the Russian Zvezda module at 6:48 p.m. Hatches were expected to be
opened later, after lengthy checks to verify an airtight structural seal
between the two spacecraft.
Interesting !
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
20th
July 2019.
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