The International Space Station is a massive structure orbiting Earth. It is made up of pressurized modules and it travels through space at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 km/h).It travels in an elliptical orbit around the planet every 90 minutes, and it also rotates once every 90 minutes as well. The station weighs approximately 399,000 pounds (181,000 kg) and has a length of about 50 ft (15 m) and width of 38 ft (12 m). Its highest point is 193 ft (59 m).
The International Space Station was launched in 1998 by the Russian Space Agency and has been continuously occupied since then. It was launched by Russia, the United States and Canada, which together formed the International Space Station partnership. It’s located at an altitude of 250 miles above Earth’s surface (400 km), making it one of the most remote places on our planet. That’s the equivalent of flying over your house and looking down at it.
The space station is roughly the size of a football field, the end zones. In its orbit around Earth, it goes through an area known as “the geostationary earth orbit,” which means that it stays above one spot over oceans or continents without moving away from that position.
The space station has been in operation since 1998 when Russia began building it for NASA under an agreement signed by then-President Boris Yeltsin and President Clinton when they met during their term in office (1997-2001).
The construction of the station began in 1998 and was completed by 2011. A total of 15 astronauts have visited it since then, spending over 200 days aboard (or nearly 8 months).
The first module to be added to the ISS was Zarya – which means “beginning” in Russian – launched on 20 November 1998 by Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft into low-Earth orbit (LEO). Zarya was followed by three more modules: Columbus (launched 14 December 1999), TMA-1 (launched 25 May 2001), and Poisk (launched 5 October 2003).
In addition to these large structures there have been other smaller ones attached to various points on their surfaces such as Argus II which operated from 2006 until 2009 when it was moved into storage before being replaced temporarily with another experimental device called Mini-Research Module 2/6R during its first year of operations due to budget constraints imposed upon NASA by Congress; however this replacement proved unsuccessful so instead we had MELFI instead!
The space station serves as a testing ground for future technologies such as commercial satellites or human exploration missions beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). It has also been used to conduct scientific research on how humans adapt to long-term lives in space and provide insight into how we might live off the planet later this century – asteroid mining efforts.
The space station has been used as a laboratory for experiments in fields such as biology, human biology and physics. Some of the experiments conducted on the space station that had a direct impact on Earth include:
Studying how plants grow in weightlessness (the effect of microgravity).
Studying how plants adapt to long-term spaceflight. This can help us understand how humans will fare during future missions to Mars or beyond!
The International Space Station is one of the most important scientific and technological achievements of our time. It has allowed us to study human biology in extreme conditions, such as space travel, zero gravity and radiation. We have also made advances in space technology that we can use here on Earth instead of trying to send everything back down again.
Content created and supplied by: Kritiq (via Opera
News )