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August 31, 2021
The International Space Station module has small cracks, according to a report.
On Dec. 6, 1998, the STS-88 space shuttle crew captured the Russian-built Zarya module, which launched on Nov. 20 of that year, and mated it with the Unity node. (Image credit: NASA)

It's unclear whether the cracks are allowing air to escape the orbiting laboratory.


According to a fresh report, small cracks have been discovered in the Zarya module of the International Space Station.

"Superficial fractures have been identified in several spots on the Zarya module," Vladimir Solovyov, head engineer of Moscow-based Energia, Russia's main contractor for human spaceflight, told Russia's state-owned RIA news agency, Reuters reported today (Aug. 30). "This is awful news, and it means that the cracks will widen over time."

According to Reuters, Solovyov did not disclose whether the cracks detected by Russian cosmonauts have caused any air to seep from Zarya (Russian for "Dawn").

Zarya, commonly known as the FCB (short for "Functional Cargo Block"), is a section of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). With its launch in November 1998, it was the first section of the station to reach orbit.

This isn't the first time cracks have been discovered on the International Space Station, which has been occupied by rotating astronaut crews since November 2000. Fissures in the Russian Zvezda module, for example, caused a tiny air leak on the orbiting lab in September 2019. The Zvezda breaches were patched by cosmonauts in October 2020 and March this year, but the problem has remained; Russia reported another pressure decrease in the module, which was sent into Earth orbit in July 2000, last month.

(An air leak was discovered by ISS controllers in August 2018, however it was quickly confirmed that it was caused by a drill hole in an attached Russian Soyuz spacecraft.) It's unclear how that hole got there in the first place. The majority of specialists believe it was caused by human mistake on the ground, but a Russian space official recently attempted to accuse NASA astronaut Serena Auón-Chancellor. According to NASA officials, this claim is without merit.)

In July 2021, Russia's long-awaited Nauka scientific module arrived at the International Space Station. That meeting did not go as planned; immediately after docking, Nauka's thrusters fired wildly, causing the entire station to rotate about 540 degrees. The issue was eventually brought under control, and the orbiting lab was returned to its regular orientation.


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July 27, 2016
Jupiter- massive-http://www.woobleweb.com/
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, gas giant, and subject of the Juno mission, is huge. Huge.
It's so huge, in fact, that it doesn't actually orbit the Sun. Not exactly. With 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, it's big enough that the centre of gravity between Jupiter and the Sun doesn't actually reside inside the Sun – rather, at a point in space just above the Sun's surface.
Here's how that works.
When a small object orbits a big object in space, the less massive one doesn't really travel in a perfect circle around the larger one. Rather, both objects orbit a combined centre of gravity.
In situations we're familiar with – like Earth orbiting the much-larger Sun – the centre of gravity resides so close to the centre of the larger object that the impact of this phenomenon is negligible. The bigger object doesn't seem to move, and the smaller one draws a circle around it.
But reality is always more complicated.
For example: when the International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth, both Earth and the space station orbit their combined centre of gravity. But that centre of gravity is so absurdly close to the centre of Earth that the planet's motion around the point is impossible to spot – and the ISS follows a near-perfect circle around the whole planet.
The same truth holds when most planets orbit the Sun. The Sun is just so much larger than Earth, Venus, Mercury, or even Saturn that their centres of mass with the Sun all lie deep within the star itself.
Not so with Jupiter.
The gas giant is so big that its centre of mass with the Sun, or barycenter,actually lies 1.07 solar radii from the middle of the Sun — or 7 percent of a Sun-radius above the Sun's surface. Both the Sun and Jupiter orbit around that point in space.
This not-to-scale gif from NASA illustrates the effect:
That is, in essence, how Jupiter and the Sun move through space together – though the distances and sizes are far different. Jupiter is still only a fraction of the Sun's size.
So next time someone asks you for a crazy space fact, you'll know: Jupiter is so massive, it doesn't orbit the Sun.

This article was originally published by Tech Insider.
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July 27, 2016
Jupiter- massive-http://www.woobleweb.com/
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, gas giant, and subject of the Juno mission, is huge. Huge.
It's so huge, in fact, that it doesn't actually orbit the Sun. Not exactly. With 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, it's big enough that the centre of gravity between Jupiter and the Sun doesn't actually reside inside the Sun – rather, at a point in space just above the Sun's surface.
Here's how that works.
When a small object orbits a big object in space, the less massive one doesn't really travel in a perfect circle around the larger one. Rather, both objects orbit a combined centre of gravity.
In situations we're familiar with – like Earth orbiting the much-larger Sun – the centre of gravity resides so close to the centre of the larger object that the impact of this phenomenon is negligible. The bigger object doesn't seem to move, and the smaller one draws a circle around it.
But reality is always more complicated.
For example: when the International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth, both Earth and the space station orbit their combined centre of gravity. But that centre of gravity is so absurdly close to the centre of Earth that the planet's motion around the point is impossible to spot – and the ISS follows a near-perfect circle around the whole planet.
The same truth holds when most planets orbit the Sun. The Sun is just so much larger than Earth, Venus, Mercury, or even Saturn that their centres of mass with the Sun all lie deep within the star itself.
Not so with Jupiter.
The gas giant is so big that its centre of mass with the Sun, or barycenter,actually lies 1.07 solar radii from the middle of the Sun — or 7 percent of a Sun-radius above the Sun's surface. Both the Sun and Jupiter orbit around that point in space.
This not-to-scale gif from NASA illustrates the effect:
That is, in essence, how Jupiter and the Sun move through space together – though the distances and sizes are far different. Jupiter is still only a fraction of the Sun's size.
So next time someone asks you for a crazy space fact, you'll know: Jupiter is so massive, it doesn't orbit the Sun.

This article was originally published by Tech Insider.
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August 22, 2015
object -spinning- in -zero -gravity-handle-at-space
If ever there was a symbol for what astronauts put themselves through in the name of science, it would be this crazy spinning T-handle. Up there in the zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS), everything happens according to a completely different set of rules, and the things you take for granted on Earth suddenly no longer apply. For example, in zero gravity, your sweat doesn't evaporate, there's a constant concern that your eyeballs might be going flat, andcarbonated beverages hurt because it's physically impossible to burp out all that extra gas. But as that T-handle so elegantly demonstrates, we can learn so much from what's going on.
Found recently by Digg, the video above shows an astronaut spinning a T-handle in the SpaceDRUMS (Space Dynamically Responding Ultrasonic Matrix System) facility aboard the ISS, and as they so delicately point out, "You thought things in space pretty much follow the rule 'go in one direction forever' right? Well it turns out you are wrong and not a physicist."
For those of us who aren't physicists, what's going on here?
Henry Reich from MinutePhysics actually discusses it in the video below, when he was lucky enough to ask astronaut Scott Kelly to demonstrate it using a Leatherman tool. He calls it the "instability of rotation around the intermediate axis of an object," and explains that if you rotate an object around its largest and smallest axes, it will spin in a stable, consistent manner.
But if you rotate it on an intermediate axis (watch the video below to see what he means), the rotation is unstable. The object will flip back and forth in orientation as it spins, because it's trying to spin itself on the more stable large or small axes instead. The only difference between how this works on Earth and in zero gravity is that in space, you can actually see the results of this instability without the help of slow-motion footage.
Watch the footage of Scott Kelly trying it out for himself, it's like a crazy, uncoordinated dance, but there's a certain grace and dignity to it too
via - sciencealert
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