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Khimki, Aug 20: In an anonymous complex next to a suburban Moscow Shopping Centre, a retired Russian Army General is setting up his next galactic conquest.
Georgy Polishchuk, head of the Lavochkin Association, is preparing an unmanned mission to a moon of Mars that would search for signs of life on the red planet and try to unlock the universe's secrets.
"We have to find life and whether it can be sustained," Polishchuk said, his eyes shiny as his pen drew out the planned way during a dialogue this month at the installation.
The theory that there might be life on mars, bolstered by signs that there has been or still is water on the planet, has enthralled scientists and space enthusiasts about the world for more than a century.
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Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams is now undergoing rigorous training as a team member of space shuttle Discovery to be launched by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), this December. Discovery would dock with the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Williams would transfer to the station, where she would spend about six months.
NASA provided elite access to SAW to film inside the mock-up facility at its Houston headquarters, where the crew is at present training for the upcoming mission. This is the first time for this mission that an Indian TV team has been allowed to film inside this facility.
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NASA will try to launch space shuttle Atlantis on August 27 to restart edifice of the half-built International Space Station, US space agency officials said on Wednesday.
Launch was set for 4:30pm EDT (08:30 NZT August 28), but technical issues should be resolved before the shuttle is officially cleared for flight.
"The challenge of the space station assembly is actually huge. It might not go exactly the way it's all scripted," NASA's associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (Reuters) - The Air Force's new top leader for space predicted on Tuesday future attacks on U.S. satellites and called for really expanded tracking and identification of payloads launched by other countries.
Currently, U.S. efforts are focused on formative if an overseas launch is a ballistic missile or designed to put a thing in orbit, then cataloging it over a period that could take weeks, said Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, who heads the Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.
"I say those days are over," he told an annual conference here on the fledgling, multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile shield. "If it's a space launch, we can't afford to relax."
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Over 70 applicants have submitted requests to the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Biomedical Problems Institute since the end of July by volunteers willing to join the Mars- 500 experiment, Institute spokesman Mark Belakovsky told Inter-fax.
“The more than 70 volunteers, among them six women and a married couple, come from 17 countries,” Belakovsky said.
He said applications had been acknowledged from citizens of Australia, Argentina, Belarus, Bulgaria, Brazil, Belgium, Britain, India, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, the United States, Ukraine and Estonia.
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STENNIS, MS, United States (UPI) -- Officials at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi announced two agreement awards Wednesday.
Mississippi Space Services, situated at Stennis, received a one-year contract addition to provide ability operating services at the center. Stennis also exercised the first option on a six-year, cost-plus-award-fee agreement with Sverdrup Technology Inc., to support propulsion test operations at the center and at NASA`s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The one-year contract extension for Mississippi Space Services is valued at $61.6 million, and the agreement option for Sverdrup has an predictable value of $42.4 million.
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WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- NASA says it is about to board on a series of space flights as hard as any in history in order to complete the International Space Station.
'The flights ahead will be the most complex and challenging we've ever carried out for construction of the International Space Station in orbit,' said Mike Suffredini, NASA station program manager. 'The station literally becomes a new spacecraft with each assembly mission, and that would be true starting this year with vivid changes in its cooling and power systems, habitable volume, operation capability as well as its appearance.'
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The crew of the next space mission is set to turn up in at Cape Canaveral on Monday.
Space Shuttle Atlantis rolled over to the start on pad last week.
The crew is set to undergo a countdown dress practice this week. They would participate in space suit checks and training exercises in preparation for the launch, which is set right now for August 27.
Astronauts would be resuming construction of the International Space Station.
Stay with News 13 for continuing coverage on the launch, mission and landing of space shuttle Atlantis.
For more Destination Space and STS-115 Atlantis coverage, check Destination Space: STS-115 Web pages.
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Two astronauts from the International Space Station floated external their orbital home for a six-hour spacewalk on Thursday to prepare the $US100 billion, half-built compound for future construction.
NASA's Jeffrey Williams and the European Space Agency's Thomas Reiter, both experienced spacewalkers, slipped outside the US airlock as the path outpost flew over Australia and Southeast Asia.
Among a long list of tasks, they replaced broken equipment in what would become the station's primary cooling system, tested an infra-red camera designed to sense damage to the station's thermal surface and installed two experiments.
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JAPAN'S first space tourist, Daisuke Enomoto, would blast off in a Russian spaceship headed for the International Space Station (ISS) on September 14, the Russian space group Roskosmos said today.
"The Japanese tourist is due to go into space on September 14. He is continuing his training at Star City (near Moscow)," said spokesman Igor Panarine.
:Last month, Daisuke Enomoto took a sea and land survival course in Sebastopol (Ukraine). Now he is training on a simulator of the ISS. And he is working at it with considerable determination," the spokesman said.
The first Japanese space tourist is due to take off in a Soyuz capsule from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, escorted by a Russian cosmonaut, Mikhail Tiurin, and a NASA astronaut, Michael Lopez-Algeria.
Mr. Enomoto, 35, who made his luck in the Internet business, would pay nearly $US20 million ($26.18 million) to spend about 10 days in space.
He would become the world's fourth space tourist.
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The Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn and headed for a sequence of close encounters with Titan, the planet's main moon, also appears aimed for an extensive stay at the ringed planet, the mission's chief says.
"The spacecraft is doing just remarkably well, performing practically flawlessly," says Cassini program boss Bob Mitchell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Launched in 1997, the $3 billion international spacecraft here at Saturn just over two years ago, making a bold dash across the planet's rings to settle into orbit on a four-year mission.
At the mission's halfway point, the spacecraft launched the Huygens prod to Titan last year and has explored Saturn's rings in great detail, finding evidence of spokes and other unforeseen shapes in the planet's six bands.
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For five years students at Montana State University worked mounting a satellite to monitor weather in outer space. If successful, it might have saved the lives of tomorrow's astronauts. Instead, an old Russian-built missile brought those dreams deafening down to Earth.
On Wednesday a Dnper rocket laden with 18 satellites took off from Kazakhstan. After 13 minutes the team at ground control was still awaiting a signal from the rocket. Two hours later news of the rocket’s colliding was reported.
"In the 86th second of the flight, an emergency engine shutdown has occurred on board the Dnepr carrier rocket," a spokesman said.
"The failure of the Dnepr rocket launch, with the loss of Montana's first satellite, MEROPE, is bad news, but rocket launches remain a tricky business," said Hiscock. "We have accomplished 95 percent of the satellite's mission by just getting it to the launch pad; the educational experience for the MSU students designing and building the satellite is not diminished by the failure of the launch vehicle."
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