Showing posts with label Soyuz mission. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soyuz mission. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Russia launches astronauts after 5-month break

Two Russians and an American on Tuesday blasted off for the International Space Station (ISS) on a Soyuz rocket in Russia's first manned space launch for almost five months.

Russians Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and American Joseph Acaba started their journey on top of the Russian Soyuz FG rocket under crystal-clear skies from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, an AFP correspondent said.

Their Soyuz TMA-04M capsule was successfully delivered into orbit, with the rocket stages detaching as planned and all the crew were feeling good, mission control said.

They are due to dock the space station after a two-day journey on Thursday morning.

Russia is now the sole nation capable of transporting humans to the ISS after the withdrawal from service of the US shuttle but this blast-off was the first manned flight since December from the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome.

The launch had been delayed by one-and-a-half months after the spacecraft the three spacemen were initially to use in the mission was shown in testing not to be hermetically sealed and could not be used for safety reasons.

As a result, their mission has been cut down to 126 days but according to Padalka it will be extremely intense with 40 experiments planned on the Russian segment of the station alone.

Russia's space programme has been beset by a litany of technical problems which have led to the loss of a half dozen satellites and vehicles over the last year, including a Progress cargo vessel bound for the ISS.

The Soyuz rockets -- the workhorse of the Russian space programme and the direct descendant of the rocket that took Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961 -- were grounded after the Progress crashed into Siberia after launch.

However all manned launches since Russia resumed using the Soyuz have been textbook and hitch-free.

On board the ISS, the three newcomers will join Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers who have already been on the station almost five months since their December launch.

Together, the crew is set to have the historic task of receiving the first ever cargo consignment for the ISS delivered by a private company.

Private firm SpaceX is seeking to launch its Dragon spacecraft on May 19 from Cape Canaveral, Florida in what the company hopes will be the first step towards an eventual private manned mission to the station.

Padalka, who is making his fourth space flight, is one of Russia's most experienced and decorated cosmonauts who has already spent 585 days in space and made eight spacewalks.

He made his first space flight back in 1998, serving on the now defunct Russian space station Mir. He flew to the ISS again in 2004 followed by another long duration mission in 2009.

Acaba had previously made one shuttle flight while Revin is making his first trip into space.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

NASA ISS Expedition 30 Crew Returns to Earth - YouTube



Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank of NASA, Russian Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov and Flight Engineer Anatoly Ivanishin landed safely on the steppe of Kazakhstan on April 27, 2012, after bidding farewell to the Expedition 31 crew and undocking their Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft from the International Space Station.

The trio completed almost six months in space following a launch in November 2011. They are shown being assisted into reclining chairs by Russian personnel and beginning their adaptation to gravity after they were extracted from their capsule in Kazakhstan.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

NASA Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank's safe Return

Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank smiles as he rests outside the Soyuz TMA-02M Capsule just minutes after he and Expedition 30 Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin landed in a remote area outside of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, on Friday, April 27, 2012.

NASA Astronaut Burbank, Russian Cosmonauts Shkaplerov and Ivanishin are returning from more than five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 29 and 30 crews.

image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi 

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Yuri Gagarin's First Orbit of Earth - Video film

The real time recreation of humanity's first human space flight by Russia's Yuri Gagarin in a Soyuz rocket, on 12 April 1961.

This film was created to celebrate our first footsteps into the cosmos.


Wednesday, April 4, 2012

ESA Arianespace's Starsem affiliate readies the launch

Credits: ESA 

MetOp-B being readied for testing after arriving at the launch facilities at Baikonur.

ESA's MetOp-B is readied in Starsem’s facilities at Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the weather satellite will be orbited in May by a Soyuz launcher.

Preparations for the 25th mission of Arianespace’s Starsem affiliate are on schedule for a liftoff in the second half of May, using a Soyuz 2 launcher to orbit the European MetOp-B weather satellite from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome.

With MetOp-B undergoing checkout since being delivered on March 6 to the cosmodrome, the launcher campaign has moved into a new phase with today’s arrival of the Soyuz vehicle’s Fregat M upper stage.

MetOp-B was developed as a joint undertaking between the European Space Agency and EUMETSAT (the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites).

It is the second of three nearly identical satellites to provide continuous weather observations until 2020, and follows MetOp-A – which was orbited by Starsem in October 2006 on a Soyuz mission from Baikonur Cosmodrome.

This upcoming flight uses a modernized Soyuz version of the workhorse Russian-built launcher, which also is in service with Arianespace at the Spaceport in French Guiana.

Starsem is Arianespace’s affiliate company created to operate commercial Soyuz missions from Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Its first launch was in February 1999, and the 24 flights performed to date have orbited a diverse range of payloads, including first- and second-generation satellites for Globalstar’s mobile voice and data services, the Cluster II and Corot scientific spacecraft, the Mars Express and Venus Express interplanetary probes, the Galaxy 14 and Amos 2 telecommunications platform, the GIOVE navigation satellite, an Inflatable Reentry and Descent Technology demonstrator, the Radarsat-2 Earth observation satellite, and MetOp-A.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Roscosmos: Russia to launch new ISS module in 2013 as scheduled

Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos denied reports Friday of a delay to the launch of the new multi-purpose Nauka lab for the International Space Station (ISS).

"The launch has been planned for the second half of 2013. No decisions about a delay have been made," said Alexei Krasnov, head of Roscosmos' department for manned flights.

Earlier Friday, a source in the Russian space rocket industry reported the launch had been pushed back until at least spring 2014 but gave no reason.

Initially, the 20-ton Nauka lab was scheduled to launch in 2007 but it has been postponed several times due to underfinancing and re-design works.

The module will enable the Russian-manned Soyuz and Progress cargo ships to dock with the ISS, transfer fuel, control the station's orientation and store cargo. It is to replace the Pirs module, which will be decommissioned after undocking from the ISS.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Commander Chris Hadfield: made it to orbit today in Soyuz Simulator

Commander Chris Hadfield made it into orbit today - 4 hours in the Soyuz simulator, wearing the Sokhol pressure suit.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Inside the ISS - YouTube


Learning his return to Earth from the International Space Station might be delayed for possibly up to two months, NASA astronaut Ron Garan sings the blues from the Soyuz spacecraft that will take him home. Eventually. It's all in good fun, so enjoy.

NB: Since Ron and the Expedition 28 crew made this video during some weekend downtime, return options have been under review by NASA.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Russia to postpone next manned space launches


Russia is set to pospone the next two manned launches for the International Space Station (ISS) for several weeks due to technical problems with the Soyuz spaceship, an industry source told Interfax Friday.

The source told Interfax that the Soyuz TMA-04M vessel had not withstood tests to its pressure chamber ahead of the planned mission on March 30 and the first flight would be postponed to mid-April or the first half of May.

"This re-entry capsule now cannot be used for manned spaceflight," the source said.

That mission would fly with the re-entry capsule that was due to go up on the next mission on May 30 and as a result that mission would also likely be postponed to the middle or end of June.

The re-entry capsule goes inside the spacecraft and is the portion that eventually returns the astronauts to Earth when the mission is over.

Russia now has sole reponsibility for taking US and other international astronauts to the ISS following the withdrawal of the US space shuttle but its own space programme has been hit by a string of problems in the last months.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Astronauts undergo Survival Training

It's much colder this week in Star City for Nemo, Canadian astronaut @Astro_Jeremy & Ivan!

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe falls in Pacific Ocean


Doomed Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe that's been stuck in Earth orbit for two months has crashed down in the Pacific Ocean on late Sunday.

"Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean," Russia's Defense Ministry official Alexei Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti, adding that the fragments fell in 1,250 kilometers to the west of the island of Wellington.

The spacecraft fell at about 21:45 on Sunday Moscow time [17:45 GMT].

As of 20.15 Sunday, the spacecraft was moving in the near-Earth orbit with an altitude that varied between 113.8 km at perigee and 133.2 km at apogee, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Did US shoot Phobos-Grunt down? No!

Sometime this weekend, Phobos-Grunt will crash into the Indian Ocean.

The Russian space probe was supposed to return a sample from Mars's moon Phobos (hence the name – grunt means "ground" in Russian).

Unfortunately, after its launch on 9 November, the upper stages failed, and it remained stuck in low Earth orbit – so low that atmospheric drag will draw it back to Earth and destroy it.

It took more than a decade and some $163 million to build Phobos-Grunt, so it its inexplicable failure was understandably frustrating for the Russians.

In a bizarre interview, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency, alluded to foul play: "We don't want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out," he said, in The New York Times's translation.

He insinuated that the US was to blame: "The frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us."

The claim that Phobos-Grunt was shot down is absurd but that's not because it would be hard to do. If you can launch satellites, it is easier to destroy them, and to do so with deniability isn't much harder.

Had the US wanted to destroy Phobos-Grunt, it could have but it's hard to fathom why – not least of all because doing so would have messed with a couple of scientific missions piggy-backed onto the Russian probe: a Chinese Mars orbiter and an experiment run by the Planetary Society, an American space advocacy group co-founded by Carl Sagan.

More importantly, there is a global taboo on war in space. The US would not have broken it arbitrarily to destroy a scientific probe.

No country has ever (so far as is known in the unclassified literature) attacked another's satellite.

When China tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of its own satellites in 2007, it provoked an international outcry because it created more than 4000 new bits of debris, increasing by almost half the amount of trackable "space junk".

The US broke a de facto moratorium on space weapon testing in 2008, when a missile launched from a navy cruiser destroyed an American satellite, the first such test since 1985 (when an F-15-launched missile was the weapon of choice).

The US has by far the most invested in space. That gives it the most to lose. Military hawks talk about space as the "ultimate high ground."

This is silly, space is high ground, sure enough, and tremendously useful militarily but spacecraft are (and always will be) fragile, vulnerable things, unlike castles or forts built on normal, non-ultimate high grounds.

Popovkin's speculation is almost certainly incorrect and comes from a paranoid nation. I also suspect it was likely to be deliberate nationalist pandering, perhaps not meant to be taken seriously but there are two reasons why this is worrisome.

The first is that it's hard to prove he's wrong, so when the next, more militarily useful, spacecraft fails, the accusation can resurface. The other is that Popovkin, and the Soyuzes he controls, are the only way to get American astronauts to the International Space Station.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Russian Phobos Grunt Probe: Latest In-Orbit Images

Latest Phobos-Grunt true colour images with good colour rendition between solar panels and the body.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Report: Russia’s Phobos Grunt Probe to Fall to Earth January 15 - International Business Times

Russia's stranded Phobos Grunt spacecraft could fall to Earth on January 15, according to the spokesman of Russia's military space forces.

Spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin told Russian news agencies that fragments of Russia's stranded Mars probe Phobos-Grunt could fall to Earth on January 15.

"As of Wednesday morning, the fragments of Phobos-Grunt are expected to fall January 15, 2012. The final date could change due to external factors," said spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin.

In November, the military space forces" monitoring centre had predicted that the probewould fall to Earth in January or February.

Between 20 to 30 fragments of the Phobos Grunt spacecraft are expected to fall to Earth, but Russian space officials said the spacecraft's highly toxic fuel will burn up on entering the Earth's atmosphere.

Earlier, a Russian space official said that while the 13.5 ton probe, which is carrying highly toxic fuel, could also crash into the earth, it is impossible to predict the exact position of such an event.

"The crash area of any craft can only be estimated in the final 24 hours," said Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Roscosmos in the first official acknowledgment on failed probe Davydov said. "Before then, saying what will fall and where is pointless."

Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt research probe to the Martian moon Phobos on Nov. 9, in an attempt to reinvigorate its interplanetary program which had not seen a successful mission since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Because of the failed probe, Davydov said that in the future Russia may just focus on sending probes to the Earth's moon and researching on Mars in cooperation with its international partners.

It will be recalled that towards the end of 2010, Russia's already troubled space industry was further shaken by the failure of the Proton rocket sending a trio of GLONASS satellites, costing more than $138 million, to crash down into the ocean.

This was followed by the failed launch of the Rockot booster, which left a new-generation Geo-IK-2 military satellite in a useless orbit.

In August 2011 the agency again suffered the loss of the Ekspress-AM4 communications satellite and the unprecedented crash of a Progress cargo ship heading to the International Space Station.

Then came the Phobos-Grunt fiasco which is expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere next week

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Soyuz Rocket Debris Fireball

Astrophotographer Roman Breisch snapped this photo of a fireball created by a re-entering Russian rocket stage over Germany on Dec. 24, 2011. 

The rocket debris was part of a Soyuz rocket that successfully launched a new crew to the International Space Station on Dec. 21.
CREDIT: Roman Breisch

A dazzling fireball that lit up the night sky above Europe in a bright Christmas Eve display was no meteor or comet.

A falling piece of a Russian rocket created the light show to cap the end of its successful mission, scientists say.

The fireball was spotted over several European countries on the evening of Dec. 24. By Christmas Day, astronomers at the Belgium Royal Observatory pinned down the source of the night-sky fireworks.

"The fireball observed above Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany on December 24 around 17h30, was the re-entry of the third stage of the Soyuz rocket that transported the Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers to the International Space Station," observatory officials said in a written update.

The rocket's spent upper stage then fell back to Earth in a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere. But despite the man-made nature of the fireball, it still amazed skywatchers who happened to look up as the rocket debris fell to Earth

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Another Russian Soyuz-2 Rocket Fails to reach Orbit

An unmanned Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a Russian communications satellite lifted off from Russia's Plesetsk space center at 7:08 a.m. EST (1208 GMT), but failed to reach orbit after a third-stage engine failure.

The rocket and its payload crashed in Siberia, according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

There was no immediate word about whether the Soyuz-2 failure will impact upcoming launches, including a Soyuz flight slated for Wednesday to put six Globalstar mobile communications satellites into orbit.

The engine on the Soyuz-2 rocket lost Friday is different than the one used on the rocket that launches space station cargo and crews, NASA said.

"This is unlikely to have any effect on operations to the International Space Station," said NASA spokesman Joshua Buck.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

NASA Expedition 30 Lifts Off at Baikonur

The Soyuz TMA-03M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2011, carrying Expedition 30 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut and Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers to the International Space Station.

Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

NASA: The Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft lifted off at 8:16 a.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan


The Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft lifted off at 8:16 a.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Watch on NASA TV

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Aurora and two Soyuz spacecraft docked to the ISS

Aurora and two Soyuz spacecraft docked to the International Space Station are seen in this photo taken by astronaut Mike Fossum.

The closest Soyuz spacecraft will be used to transport the astronauts home at the end of their mission.

The farthest Soyuz spacecraft is the Progress cargo ship. 

It is used to deliver new supplies to the ISS, and carry away waste. It is designed to burn up in the atmosphere once released from the ISS.

Picture: BARCROFT