Celebrating April 12, 1961: Happy Yuri’s Night and 30 Years of Shuttle Flights
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on his way to the launch of Vostok 1. Courtesy NASA Great Images Project.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the flight into space of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. In the annals of the big space race between the United States and the Former Soviet Union, Gagarin carried the Soviet hopes aloft, beating the United States’s own effort to put a person into orbit. He climbed into his Vostok spacecraft, was launched into a single orbit of our home planet and returned safely to the planet — all on the same day in 1961.
Of course, this feat was a smack in the face of the U.S. space effort, which wasn’t doing well at the time. But, in time, I think we’ve all come to see what a great first step it was — and the effect it had on NASA’s own plans for space dominance. We may have had a space race for a decade, but since those days, the domain of space exploration has become — as it should always have been — a multi-national effort. And for that, we have this man to thank.
The launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis. Courtesy NASA.
Cosmonaut Gagarin never flew into space again, but his achievement marks an important step for humans in space. Following in his trail have been a solid line of astronauts and cosmonauts who claimed space (and, for the U.S. the Moon) as the place to explore.
In the 50 years since Cosmonaut Gagarin’s trip to space, hundreds of people have gone into space. They’ve lived in and explored the near-Earth environment. A few went to the Moon. And many more of us have watched as they did so. Some of us even dreamed of doing it ourselves. And, in a most fitting coincidence, we’re also celebrating 30 years of NASA’s shuttle program — the fleet of vehicles that made so many discoveries possible.
On this special anniversary — and to celebrate Yuri’s Night and the commemoration of the shuttle program — here’s a toast to the man who did it first and the folks who built, maintained and flew the space shuttles:
And, welcome to my humble blog. This week, my science-writer colleagues and I have multiple servings of tasty cosmic carnival fare for your delectation and intellectual curiosity. So, grab a brass ring, a refreshing beverage (more on that in a minute), and let’s get started down the space midway!
First into the center ring is Astropixie, with an a look at Determining Redshifts, a quick peek at how astronomers figure out just how far away things are in the universe. Amanda Bauer takes you step-by-step through the ways that astronomers determine distances in the cosmos.
Life in a Martian meteorite? Jury's still out on this one, but it begs the question about life's precursors. Courtesy NASA.
Next, the folks at Cheap Astronomy from Canberra, Australia, weigh in with a pair of podcasts about alien biology The first talks about the role that water plays in the formation and sustenance of life. The second makes the case for carbon as the basis for life, particularly on our planet. If you’ve ever wondered about the chemical basis for life on Earth, these make a good introductory listen.
Parallel Spirals explores the publication of information about the recent Chandrayaan water discovery mission idea a bit more in Hubble Supports Chandrayaan Water Discovery. The formal science paper about how Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the presence of water on the Moon while looking at the LCROSS impact site will be published very soon.
Over at Steve’s Astro Corner, in On the Horizon What is the Next Big Thing? Steve Tilford brings you a look the technologies for exploration outlined in the Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics. If it all gets built and funded, we’ll be studying everything from dark energy to the warm, dusty universe that will seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The future is also the subject of an essay called Population Limits of the earth and the solar system factoring in improved technology over at Next Big Future. It’s about how the modern issues of how much population Earth can support (reasonably) and the growth of technological power and knowledge. Can we put these two together to optimize our chances for the human population of space? Head over and find out!
Materials science and understanding the effect of vacuum and thermal friction on rotating particles may be very relevant to astronomers as they seek to understand cosmic nanoparticles such as interstellar dust and the optical spectra of rotating molecules. This is the subject of a short blog entry called Vacuum has friction from an effect similar to the casimir effect, also available at Next Big Future.
Alexi Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut during his spacewalk. Courtesy Vintagespace.files.wordpress.com
If the past is present, then it’s important that we understand the history of space exploration. At Vintage Space, you can read an historical flash from the past in an article called Landings, NASA, and the Soviet Space Program, that explores the Soviet methods of getting astronauts safely back to Earth.
This week’s flashy news story (that turned out to be all mainstream-media handwaving, smoke and mirrors) about a Jupiter-like planet in the outer recesses of our solar system is Weirdwarp’s subject of discussion in Jupiter-like Planet Lurking Just Outside our Solar System is Extremely Unlikely. Guest poster Andrei (from ZMEScience) is a more sane and rational look at what the stories REALLY should have been about.
Next Big Future also presents a reasoned look at the outer solar system planet story in Tyche Planet X is still just a theory. Find out about the scientific paper by two respected scientists who posit the reasons why some long-period comet trajectories seem to have their comets coming from the wrong direction. Here’s your chance to go “behind the scenes” of a story that the MSM didn’t quite get right.
This week’s OTHER flashy news story, which covers events closer to Earth, turned out to be quite fascinating. It was the news about the Stardust-NExT mission to Comet Tempel-1. I talk about the mission in a pair of back-to-back entries called Waiting for Tempel-1, written on “flyby night” and The Face of a Comet, posted the next day after some of the first images had been made public.
The COR1 coronagraph on the STEREO mission. Courtesy NASA.
At the center of our solar system, the Sun just keeps pumping out energy. Over at Vega 0.0, Francisco Sevilla writes about how coronagraphs enable astronomers to study the outer structures of the Sun’s superhot atmosphere. (Note the page is in Spanish, but you can translate using Google toolbar.)
Over at Science Backstage, Italian science blogger and physicist Gianluigi Filippelli gives us a little “scientific baseball card” with important stats about the Sun and how it works.
Beer made from barley grains descended from barley that spent five months on the Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station.
Finally, I mentioned a tasty beverage at the top of this entry. In that spirit, let’s raise a toast to National Geographic’s Breaking Orbit blog for its entry Space Beer Ready for Tasting. It’s about Australia’s 4 Pines Brewing Company and its human experiment involving tasting beer that is meant for drinking on commercial space flights. Find out why some beers you may like here on the ground wouldn’t be so great in space.
That’s it for this week’s Carnival of Space. As you can see, there are many and talented writers who blog each day about astronomy, space science, and all the topics related to these. If you like what you see, visit their blogs and let the authors know what you think!
