Trio blast off to space station

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American astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko have blasted off on a mission to spend an entire year away from the Earth.

The trip is Nasas first attempt at a one-year space flight, anticipating Mars expeditions that would last two to three years.

Their Soyuz space capsule set off from Russias manned space launch facility on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 1.42am local time on Saturday and was to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) about six hours later after making four orbits of the planet.

Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka of Russia was also aboard their Soyuz capsule. He is scheduled for the standard six-month tour of duty aboard the space station.

Kellys identical twin Mark, a retired astronaut, agreed to take part in many of the same medical experiments as his orbiting sibling to help scientists see how a body in space compares with its genetic double on Earth.

Kelly and Kornienko will remain on board until next March. During that time, they will undergo extensive medical experiments, and prepare the station for the anticipated 2017 arrival of new US commercial crew capsules. That means a series of spacewalks for the 51-year-old Kelly.

They also will oversee the comings and goings of numerous cargo ships, as well as other Russian-launched space crews.

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Trio blast off to space station

Mark Kelly: My Twin Brother's Spending a Year in Space

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BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan He's off the planet and on his way to the International Space Station.

Earlier today, I watched as my brother, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and two Russian cosmonauts launched to space aboard a Soyuz rocket. They left from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, the oldest space launch facility in the world. They went from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in about 12 minutes.

After docking with the space station, opening the hatch, and floating out of their capsule and into the space station which is about the size of a four-bedroom house Scott will settle in for his yearlong mission.

Watching the launch from nearby and feeling the roar of the Soyuz's rocket engines, I thought of how the first manned American space flight lasted only 30 minutes. And now, we will have an American in space for a year. We have come a long way.

One thing that hasn't really changed over the history of our space program is what it feels like to launch on the back of a rocket. It feels like the hand of God has come down, grabbed you by the collar, and ripped you off the planet. It is quite the ride. You spend years training for it. and even then, as Scott likes to say, once those engines start, you know things "are about to get real."

The day of your launch I've had four of them you wake up knowing there are really two main possibilities for what you'll be doing at the end of the day: You'll either be dead, or you'll be floating in space, looking down on our beautiful planet.

So every time we safely launch people into space, it's a big deal. It represents the successful coming together of science, engineering, and the drive to explore. A huge number of committed individuals have to work together to support a singular event: accelerating people off the planet. It is a really challenging thing to do. And it is never, ever routine. After all, spaceflight is a pretty risky business.

But it is an important endeavor. The mission Scott is embarking on will push the limits of what Americans can do in space. To better understand how long-term space flight impacts humans, NASA is studying Scott and me while he's in space and I'm on Earth. Because we are identical twins, they have a unique opportunity to study how the human body changes in space. I get the easy job, and Scott gets the fun job.

Hopefully, this will advance our knowledge of what happens when people leave the planet for a long time and help pave the way for sending Americans beyond low-earth orbit. There are a lot of exciting destinations in the universe, some not too far away. This mission is another step toward them.

But spending a year in space is a really hard thing to do. Imagine where you were a year ago now imagine being at the space station for that entire time. Imagine going to your office and having to stay there for a year and not go outside once. That's what the next year will be like for Scott at the Space Station. But take it from me: The views are pretty good.

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Mark Kelly: My Twin Brother's Spending a Year in Space

Miniaturizable High Performance Fiber Optic Gyroscopes for Small Satellites – Video

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Miniaturizable High Performance Fiber Optic Gyroscopes for Small Satellites
NASA Early Stage Technology Workshop: Astrophysics Heliophysics Joey Costa http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-early-stage-technology-workshop-astrophysics-heliophysics/

By: NASA.gov Video

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Miniaturizable High Performance Fiber Optic Gyroscopes for Small Satellites - Video

Meta-Materials for Precision Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Astrophysical Imaging Applications – Video

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Meta-Materials for Precision Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Astrophysical Imaging Applications
NASA Early Stage Technology Workshop: Astrophysics Heliophysics Ed Wollack http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-early-stage-technology-workshop-astrophysics-heliophysics/

By: NASA.gov Video

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Meta-Materials for Precision Millimeter and Sub-millimeter Astrophysical Imaging Applications - Video

Asteroid hitting Earth: NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will use Enhanced Gravity Tractor – Video

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Asteroid hitting Earth: NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will use Enhanced Gravity Tractor
NASA announced a plan on Wednesday regarding a future mission to change the trajectory of an asteroid. The mission may have the potential to protect Earth from an impending asteroid impact...

By: TomoUSA

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Asteroid hitting Earth: NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) will use Enhanced Gravity Tractor - Video

RAW: Soyuz rocket blasts #NASA’s Scott Kelly, Russian comrades into space – Video

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RAW: Soyuz rocket blasts #NASA #39;s Scott Kelly, Russian comrades into space
A Soyruz rocket on Friday launched NASA #39;s Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts into space for what will be a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station. The rocket launched...

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RAW: Soyuz rocket blasts #NASA's Scott Kelly, Russian comrades into space - Video

In Praise of NASA's Ambitious Asteroid Grab

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An astronaut examines an asteroid pieced into orbit around the moon in this NASA illustration. Target date for the rendezvous: 2025.

If you pay attention to news about space exploration, you may have seen some skeptical stories about NASAs proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission. (And even if you dont follow such things, you might well have been dismayed by headlines announcing a less ambitious asteroid mission that is unlikely to get funded.) This is not another one of them.

I think the asteroid mission is a cool idea, and an important one. I think it will advance the cause of space exploration in several meaningful ways. And it is exactly the kind of medium-scale, focused mission that could revitalize the whole idea of sending humans on grand adventures beyond Earth orbitif only it can make its way past the naysayers, political opponents, and misguided scientific skeptics who threaten to derail it before it even gets started.

A little background first. The Asteroid Redirect Missioneveryone calls it ARM, because NASA loves to reduce everything to an acronymgrew out of a 2011 study by the Keck Institute for Space Science. The concept was both clever and expedient. NASA is developing a huge rocket, called the Space Launch System (yep: SLS), designed to carry humans on new deep-space voyages, but so far it has nowhere to go. It is a rocket without a destination.

In theory, SLS is supposed to take humans to Mars, but the government has provided no funding for the necessary technical infrastructure, much less for the actual cost of such a lengthy, dangerous, and complicated mission. The Obama administration suggested a human voyage to an asteroid as an intermediate step, but even that would be an expensive, multi-month voyageone that is, again, notably lacking any financial support. Where, then, to go?

The Asteroid Redirect Mission answers that question in a novel way. Instead of taking humans to an asteroid, it would do most of the work robotically (and at much lower cost) by bringing the asteroid most of the way to us. In the original plan, ARM would send a collector spacecraft to a small asteroid, no more than 5 meters [15 feet] wide, and tow it to a local orbit around the moon. Then the SLS rocket would ferry a crew to the asteroid, where they would analyze it, collect samples, and bring them back to Earth.

NASAs revised concept, announced earlier this week, still follows the same outline, but with one notable difference. Instead of grabbing and towing a tiny, solitary asteroid, the ARM spacecraft will now cozy up to a much larger object, pluck a large boulder off its surface, and bring that back to lunar orbit. The rest of the plan would unfold as before. The scientific return would probably be much the same as well. Many small asteroids are probably broken-off bits of larger ones, so a surface boulder on a larger asteroid might turn out to be pretty much the same type of object as the original target.

Looking like a vending-machine claw, the Asteroid Redirect Vehicle snatches a large rock off the surface of an asteroid. This part of the mission is scheduled for 2022. (Credit: NASA)

There are a bunch of reasons to like the Asteroid Redirect Mission:

It will advance our understanding of the solar system. Asteroids are time capsules that record a highly revealing early stage in the formation of the planets. Unmanned space probes have examined a number of asteroids up close, but the only sample-return mission (Japans Hayabusa) largely failed to deliver. Japan is trying again with Hayabusa 2, and NASA is preparing its own asteroid sampler, called OSIRIS-REx. But ARM would collect a sample on a vastly larger scale than has ever been attempted before. Just getting to know the target asteroid (potentially a carbon-rich, 400-meter-wide object called 2008 EV5) will be a great learning experience. And if the boulder proves geologically and chemically interesting, we can return to it again and again.

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In Praise of NASA's Ambitious Asteroid Grab