Feb 10 1997
From The Space Library
The Russian Space Agency launched Soyuz TM-25, carrying a crew of two Russian Space Agency cosmonauts, Vasili V. Tsibliyev and Alexander I. Lazutkin, and German astronaut Reinhold Ewald to the Mir space station, from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The cosmonauts would become Mir's new, long-term crew, and the German astronaut would return with the retiring crew in two weeks. Germany had paid the Russian Space Agency millions of dollars to carry Reinhold Ewald aboard the Shuttle to Mir.
NASA researchers, astronauts, and scholars gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference of the National Academy of Sciences, disclosing and discussing details of experiments conducted aboard the Shuttle during two 1996 missions. The event commemorated the one-year anniversaries of the second U.S. Microgravity Laboratory and the third U.S. Microgravity Payload. Scientists predicted that discoveries made aboard the Shuttle flights in 1996 would eventually lead to technological advances. Research on numerous topics, from the climate of the universe to human biology, could lead to production of cheaper metals and alloys or new synthetic drugs. Highlights from the research presentations included the announcement of the discovery that space-grown crystals are of much higher quality than those grown on Earth; the description of experiments intended to uncover the effect of space on the production of metal and alloys; and the presentation of evidence that the microgravity environment of space had enabled scientists to make more precise measurements of the physical properties of elemental gas.
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