Jun 6 2000
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(New page: After two earlier unsuccessful trials, Russia launched, without incident, a modified Proton rocket carrying a large Gorizont communications satellite. Propulsion-system flaws had trigg...)
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After two earlier unsuccessful trials, Russia launched, without incident, a modified Proton rocket carrying a large Gorizont communications satellite. Propulsion-system flaws had triggered explosions of the Proton rocket in previous trials. The United States viewed the successful test launch as a positive sign of Russia's commitment to the ISS project, a boost for the strained relationship between the two countries. After the failed tests, a joint NASA-Russian Space Agency research crew had determined that production flaws in the turbomachinery of the rocket's second and third stages, including the presence of contaminants such as asbestos cloth and metal fragments, had caused the problems. Russia planned to test the Proton rocket again before scheduling the much-delayed delivery of its crew module to the ISS.
NASA announced that its Chandra X-ray Observatory had revealed a "luminous spike of x-rays," known as a hot spot, located approximately 800,000 light-years away from its black-hole source. Scientists commented that the images captured x-ray behavior that astronomers had not predicted. Andrew S. Wilson of the University of Maryland explained, "the brightness and the spectrum of the x-rays are very different from what theory projects." A possible explanation offered for the brilliant hot spot of x-rays was that a series of shock waves had catapulted across the galaxy electrons with energies as high as 50 thousand billion times the energy of light.
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