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Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 – January 28, 1986) was an American NASA astronaut and physicist.He died at the age of 35 during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, in which he was serving as one of three mission specialists in a crew of seven.
Space weather is the source of aurora that shimmer in the night sky, but it also can disrupt satellites, cause power grid failures and disrupt GPS communications. The Van Allen Probes were built to help scientists understand this region and to better design spacecraft that can survive the rigors of outer space . [ 2 ]
The Starfish Prime radiation belt had, by far, the greatest intensity and duration of any of the artificial radiation belts. [1] The Starfish Prime radiation belt damaged the United Kingdom Satellite Ariel 1 and the United States satellites, Traac, Transit 4B, Injun I and Telstar I. It also damaged the Soviet satellite Cosmos V. All of these ...
New Horizons may also take a picture of Earth from its distance in the Kuiper belt, but only after completing all planned KBO flybys and imaging Uranus and Neptune. [223] [224] This is because pointing a camera towards Earth could cause the camera to be damaged by sunlight, [225] as none of New Horizons' cameras have an active shutter mechanism ...
The first three African Americans to travel into space – Ron McNair, Guy Bluford and Fred Gregory. African-American astronauts are Americans of African descent who have been part of an astronaut program, whether or not they have traveled into space. African-Americans who have been passengers on space-tourist flights are also included in this ...
Laboratory simulation of the Van Allen belt's influence on the Solar Wind; these aurora-like Birkeland currents were created by the scientist Kristian Birkeland in his terrella, a magnetized anode globe in an evacuated chamber. The outer belt consists mainly of high-energy (0.1–10 MeV) electrons trapped by the Earth's magnetosphere. It is ...
The Salyut program was the world's first space station program undertaken by the Soviet Union, which consisted of a series of four crewed scientific research space stations and two crewed military reconnaissance space stations over a period of 15 years from 1971 to 1986. Two other Salyut launches failed.
Program Start date First crewed flight End date No. of crewed missions launched Notes Mercury program: 1958 1961: 1963: 6: First U.S. crewed program Gemini program: 1961 1965: 1966: 10: Program used to practice space rendezvous and EVAs: Apollo program: 1960 1968: 1972: 11: Landed first humans on the Moon Skylab: 1964 1973: 1974: 3: First ...