Soyuz TMA-09M, launched May 28, 2013, carried three astronauts to the International Space Station. Its crew consisted of Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin, Luca Parmitano (ESA), and Karen Nyberg (NASA). They participated in Expedition 36 on the ISS and returned to Earth in November 2013, after 166 days in space.
Seated (L-R): Linda Godwin, Thomas Jones, Jay Apt, Michael Clifford
STS-59 mission patch
Space shuttle Endeavour (STS-59) was launched April 9, 1994. Its crew consisted of Commander Sidney Gutierrez, Kevin Chilton, Jay Apt, Michael Clifford, Linda Godwin, and Thomas Jones. The crew was divided into two groups, Red and Blue, and the groups split tasks and research projects throughout the mission.
They returned to Earth eleven days later, after 183 orbits.
Boeing Starliner crew Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore
Boeing Starliner mission patch
Astronauts Sunita 'Suni' Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth yesterday, March 18, 2025 after nine months in space. They launched aboard the Boeing Starliner capsule to the International Space Station in June 2024 for an eight-day mission. However, the Starliner's thrusters malfunctioned as it approached the ISS, and NASA determined it was too risky for the crew to return. The spacecraft returned uncrewed on September 7, 2024.
SpaceX Crew-9 launched on September 28, 2024 to the ISS with astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Crew-10 (L-R): Kirill Peskov, Nichole Ayers, Anne McClain, Takuya Onishi
NASA SpaceX Crew-10 mission patch
SpaceX Crew-10 lifted off successfully from the Kennedy Space Center here at Cape Canaveral tonight, a little after 7pm. Its crew consists of Commander Anne McClain (NASA), Pilot Nichole Ayers (NASA), Takuya Onishi (JAXA), and Kirill Peskov (Roscosos). It is the first flight for Ayers and Peskov, the second for McClain and Takuya Onishi.
They will dock with the International Space Station and participate in Expeditions 72-73, before returning to earth, scheduled for July 2025.
Soyuz MS-23, launched February 24, 2023, was an uncrewed spaceflight to the International Space Station to replace the damaged Soyuz MS-22.
A micro-meteoroid impact resulted in a 0.8 mm hole in the radiator of Soyuz MS-22, and doubts about the safety of the spacecraft. It returned to Earth uncrewed, and Soyuz MS-23 was launched.
Soyuz MS-23 docked with the ISS February 26 and returned to Earth in September 2023, with Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and Francisco Rubio.
Soyuz TMA-05M, launched July 15, 2012, carried the members of Expedition 32 crew to the International Space Station. Its crew consisted of Commander Yuri Malenchenko, Sunita Williams, and Akihiko Hoshide. The crew participated in Expedition 32 and Expedition 33, before returning to Earth November 19, 2012.
Mariner 5, launched June 14, 1967, carried a cadre of instruments to Venus, to study its atmosphere and magnetic field fluctuations above the planet. It had been built as a backup to Mariner 4, a Mars probe, but the Mariner 4 project was a success, NASA modified Mariner 5 to study Venus during the 1967 Venus launch window.
Mariner 5 flew by Venus on October 19, 1967 at an altitude of 2480 miles, and determined that the surface was hotter and the atmosphere denser than previous studies had indicated.
Between April and November 1968, NASA tried to contact Mariner 5 to reacquire a signal for probing interplanetary conditions. A signal was received in October, but the they had no success in gaining an uplink signal, so there was no possibility of fixing or continuing its use. Operations were terminated November 5, 1968. Mariner 5 remains in a heliocentric orbit.
Paul Richards, born May 20, 1964 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, went into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery (STS-102) to the International Space Station as a mission specialist in March 2001. The mission was to carry the crew of Expedition 2 to the ISS and bring home Expedition 1.
During the mission, Richards and fellow astronaut Andrew Thomas performed an EVA which lasted 6 hours and 21 minutes.
Richards returned to Earth after almost 13 days in space. He retired from NASA in February 2002 to pursue private interests.
Mercury-Atlas 9 launched on May 15, 1963 from Cape Canaveral with astronaut Gordon Cooper in the Faith 7 spacecraft. It was the final crewed mission of the Mercury program and the last time an American was launched alone on a solo mission.
Gordon passed Wally Schirra's original record of seven orbits, completing twenty-two during the 34-hour mission. Gordon conducted radiation experiments, recorded status reports, took pictures, and dined on powdered roast beef mush and water.
On May 16, Faith 7 splashed down four miles from the recovery ship, USS Kearsarge, the most accurate landing to date. The Mercury program had fulfilled all its mission objectives.
Intuitive Machine's uncrewed spacecraft Odysseus landed successfully on the moon yesterday, February 22, 2024. It is the first time a spacecraft from the US has landed on the moon since 1972, the last Apollo mission. NASA payed Intuitive Machines, a private company, $118M to deliver 6 instruments to the moon.
Odysseus landed near the moon's south pole, where ice and water are present.
Elara, the 8th largest moon of Jupiter, was discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine January 5, 1905. He made his discovery at the Lick Observatory at the University of California on Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose.
Up until 1975, Elara was known as Jupiter VII when it was given the name Elara. In Greek mythology, Elara is a lover of Zeus (Jupiter in Roman mythology). Zeus hid her from his jealous wife Hera by putting her deep into the Earth, where she gave birth to the giant Tityos.
NASA lists Elara on their website as having a diameter of 43 km, but a 2015 article in the Astrophysical Journal lists its diameter as around 80 km. Don't know when that will be resolved. Elara orbits Jupiter every 258 days.
The New Horizons spacecraft captured several images of Elara as it passed on its way to Pluto.
Astronaut Mary Cleave, born February 5, 1947 and went into space twice, passed away November 27, 2023 at age 76. She flew on Atlantis (STS-61-B) as mission specialist in November-December 1985, and on Atlantis (STS-30) as mission specialist in May 1989. She spent almost 11 days in space.
Jerry Elliott High Eagle, born in 1943 in Oklahoma City, was one of the first Native American employed at NASA. His contributions as lead retrofire officer during the Apollo 13 disaster earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Although facing racial discrimination from the professors at University of Oklahoma, he received a degree in physics, being one of the first Native Americans to achieve such an accomplishment. He joined NASA as a flight mission operations engineer in 1966. He was Program Staff Engineer during the Apollo-Soyuz Program.
He was the only Native American in mission control during Apollo 11's successful moon landing. He was lead Retrofire Officer during the Apollo 13. For his work on helping bring the astronauts home safely, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Richard Nixon.
His name "High Eagle" was given to him by tribal elders when he turned 41.
On Day 7 of Challenger's (STS-41-G) historic flight, the crew wok up to Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver. David Leestma and Kathryn Sullivan donned their space suits, with help from Jon McBride, to conduct an EVA. They maneuvered to the ORS, situated at the rear of the cargo bay. Leestma installed a valve assembly into the simulated Landsat propulsion plumbing.
Sullivan secured the Ku antenna as they headed back to the air lock. One of the two motors that steered the Ku antenna failed on the first day, but Mission Control managed to devise a workaround for it so it would point at the TDRS satellite and send the stored data to NASA. The EVA lasted 3 hours and 29 minutes and Sullivan became the first American woman to conduct a spacewalk.
The crew woke up to John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane on Day
3, October 7. They lowered Challenger’s
orbit to 140 miles, which was the optimal altitude for the Shuttle Imaging
Radar-B (SIR-B) and other Earth-observing instruments. Garneau continued his
CANEX investigations. Leestma conducted several
scheduled ORS fuel transfers.
Scully-Power continued his oceanography studies.
Less than 9 hours after launch, the crew of the space shuttle Challenger (STS-41-G) deployed the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS). Sally Ride, on her second mission, used the Canadarm to remove the satellite from the payload bay. Then the ERBS fired its on-board thrusters and boosted it into orbit. It was the first spacecraft to be launched and deployed by a space shuttle mission.
One of the solar panels on the ERSB did not extend properly so Ride shook the satellite with the Canadarm for the panel to extend fully. Pilot Jon McBride maneuvered the shuttle away from the satellite when it was finally deployed.
The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment (SAGE II), an instrument on board the ERSB, measured the decline in ozone over the Antarctic, and the data collected was key in the international community's decisions during the Montreal Protocol Agreement in 1987.
Another instrument was the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Scanner which studied longwave radiation, shortwave radiation, and total energy radiating from Earth. The third instrument was the ERBE non-scanner, which measured the total energy from the sun. Both were included in the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System mission and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.
The instruments were powered off in August 2005 in preparation for decommissioning. During the decommissioning process, fuel was depleted, batteries were discharged, on-board memory was scrubbed, and the solar arrays were disconnected from the battery.
ERSB re-entered Earth's atmosphere on January 8, 2023.
Soyuz MS-22 crew (Top-Bottom): Dimitry Petelin, Frank Rubio, Sergey Prokopyev
Soyuz MS-23, which launched back in February 2023, returned to Earth safely yesterday with the crew of Soyuz MS-22, which launched September 21, 2022. The crew consisted of Sergey Prokopyev (Commander), Dimitry Petelin, and Francisco Rubio (NASA).
While aboard the International Space Station, they participated in Expeditions 67-69.
Rubio has spent more than 370 days in space, making him the first American to spend more than a full year in space, breaking Mark Vande Hei's record.
Eight years ago, I posted a link about NASA entering into a partnership with Arx Pax, inventor of hover engine technology, to develop a tractor beam, which have been a part of science fiction for decades. It seemed as if it was to become reality. I wanted to see how far they have come along, but the original link I posted to Arx Pax's website does not work any more. A search of NASA's website yields no results for 'Arx Pax'.
NASA is now starting a program Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan, to deal with the threat of near Earth objects (NEO). The program includes tasks for identifying NEOs and determining which ones might pose a danger to Earth. Its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year demonstrated that NASA can alter the trajectory of an asteroid. They plan to develop 'gravity tractors' but I haven't been able to find any research on this.
I did find an article on-line about a group at University of Colorado at Boulder that is working on a tractor beam in an effort to clean up space debris. There is a lot of space junk in orbit up there and collisions create more junk. They are basing their research on the Coulombe force, where objects of opposite charges attract each other, and objects with the same charge repel each other.
One of the first of its kind, OSIRIS-REx, Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) is a NASA spacecraft sent to study the asteroid Bennu and return a sample to Earth.
It was launched September 8, 2016 and landed on Bennu in October 2020. It lifted off from the asteroid's surface in early April 2021 and in May, began its journey back to Earth. It is expected the storage container of samples of Bennu will touchdown September 23 of this year.
Explorer 6, launched August 7, 1959 by NASA, took the first photographs of Earth from a satellite. On board it carried a Beacon (108 and 378 MHz) to measure electron density, Fluxgate magnetometer, an ion chamber and Geiger-Muller Counter, a micrometeorite detector, a proportional Counter Telescope, a scintillation counter, search-coil magnetometer, a TV Optical Scanner, and a VLF Receiver.
Explorer 6 operated until October 6, 1959 when the last contact was made with the satellite. It reentered the atmosphere on July 1, 1961.
