.......International Space Station
- From: cnw <cnw@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:00:26 +0800
UPDATED: 09:36, September 10, 2006
Backgrounder: Basic facts of International Space Station
The launch of NASA's space shuttle Atlantis and its six-member crew on the
STS-115 mission on Saturday marked the return to assembly of the International
Space Station (ISS).
The International Space Station is a joint project of 16 nations including the
United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, Brazil and 11 countries from the European
Space Agency.
The station's first segment, the Zarya control module, was brought to orbit by a
Russian Proton rocket in November 1998 to provide the infant station's battery
power and fuel storage. The station is located in orbit around the Earth at an
altitude of approximately 360 km, a type of orbit usually termed as low Earth
orbit.
It orbits Earth in a period of about 92 minutes. By June 2005, it had completed
more than 37,500 orbits since the launch of the Zarya module.
In many ways the ISS represents a merger of previously planned independent space
stations: Russia's Mir 2, the U.S. Space Station Freedom and the planned
European Columbus and Japanese Experiment Module.
Due to the ISS, there is a permanent human presence in space, as there have
always been at least two people on board the ISS since the first permanent crew
entered the ISS on Nov. 2, 2000. It is serviced primarily by the Soyuz, Progress
spacecraft units and Space Shuttle.
The ISS construction is now far behind the original planned schedule for
completion in 2004 or 2005. This is mainly due to the halt of all NASA Shuttle
flights following the Columbia disaster in early 2003. And now NASA is racing
against the clock with just three shuttles to finish assembling the space
station before the winged spacecraft retires in 2010.
At present, the station has a capacity for a crew of three. Prior to ESA
astronaut Thomas Reiter joining the Expedition 13 crew in July 2006, all
permanent crew members came from the Russian or United States space programs.
The ISS has however been visited by astronauts from 12 countries and was also
the destination of the first three space tourists.
When assembly is complete, the ISS will have a pressurized volume of
approximately 1,000 cubic meters, a mass of approximately 400,000 kilograms,
approximately 100 kilowatts of power output, a truss 108.4 meters long, modules
74 meters long, and a crew of six.
Source: Xinhua
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