By Jamie Douglas
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| ISS026-E-029296 (24 Feb. 2011) |
As most of you know, I hope, there is something called the International Space Station that races around the world in an elliptical orbit, roughly once an hour. It passes over everyone on the planet at predetermined times, which anyone can look up on this site: http://www.heavens-above.com/. In the first paragraph that appears on their home page, there is a way to establish an account (it’s free and spam free) which, after you sign up, lets you enter your city or nearest town, or your geographical coordinates, easily obtained from Google Earth: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
From there, you can see when the contraption will be highly visible to you for 2-5 minutes. These days it is loaded, with the space shuttle hooking up to it, as well as an automated space freighter already there, a gadget the size of a double-decker bus. That makes for a lot of reflection that will be visible on a clear night, even near big cities. If you can see any stars, you should be able to see the ISS.
For those of you not too familiar with it, I have included an easy explanation of the concept from NASA:
The first proposal for a manned station occurred in 1869, when an American novelist told the story of how a "Brick Moon" came to orbit Earth to help ships navigate at sea. In 1923, Romanian Hermann Oberth was the first to use the term "space station" to describe a wheel-like facility that would serve as the jumping off place for human journeys to the moon and Mars. In 1952, Dr. Werner von Braun published his concept of a space station in Collier's magazine. He envisioned a space station that would have a diameter of 250 feet, orbit more than 1,000 miles above the Earth, and spin to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
The Soviet Union launched the world's first space station, Salyut 1, in 1971 - a decade after launching the first human into space. The United States sent its first space station, the larger Skylab, into orbit in 1973 and it hosted three crews before it was abandoned in 1974. Russia continued to focus on long-duration space missions and in 1986 launched the first modules of the Mir space station.
In 1998, the first two modules of the International Space Station were launched and joined together in orbit. Other modules soon followed and the first crew arrived in 2000.
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| ISS026-E-023340 (31 Jan. 2011) |
Since then, American Space Shuttles, Russian Rockets and the European Space agency’s Space Trucks have been bringing more and more equipment and supplies to make the station bigger and more livable.
With the pending retirement of the US Shuttle fleet, the stations occupants will depend very heavily on the Russian lifting capability to bring and retrieve personnel from this heavenly outpost, as the European Space Agency’s launches from French Guiana have not yet advanced to manned missions, as they are specializing in launching Ariane Rockets to launch better paying payloads, such as communications satellites, as well as the new European constellation of next generation GPS. This launch vehicle is being built by the ESA, a division of EADS, the same people that build the Airbus commercial aircraft.
So I urge all of you to log in to this little website and take note of the ISS passes over your neighborhood. It is very fascinating to me, at least, to watch this bright heavenly body zoom by overhead, knowing that there is a human presence out there, and I am sure your kids, if you have any, will be amazed by that shooting star.
Jamie Douglas,
Patagonia, Planet Earth
To contact Jamie regarding this article, email: jamie@expatdailynews.com
Jamie Douglas is an Adventurer, Writer and Photographer with an amazing array of Nikon equipment, and a lifetime of experience traveling and documenting. To contact him for assignments and new adventures. email: jamie.douglas [at] yahoo.com
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