В феврале будущего года Россия намеревается затопить космическую станцию "Мир" в Тихом океане. и сконцентрировать свои небогатые ресурсы на проекте новой Международной космической станции, в котором участвуют 16 стран во главе с США

MOSCOW, (Reuters) --Russia decided on Thursday to dump its the troubled Mir space station in the Pacific Ocean next February but warned some debris from the aging Soviet-era vehicle might hit land.
The decision signals the end of an era for Russia's cash-strapped space program, which has been urged by its partners to concentrate its resources on a 16-nation International Space Station (news - web sites) project. Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian space agency, told reporters after a government meeting the decision is made because Mir, designed for a three-year stay in space when launched in 1986, was becoming a safety hazard due to aging components and corrosion. "You have to stop in time. The station has got to the point where it would be normal for any system to fail", he said.
Koptev said a cargo craft would dock with Mir in late January and use its booster rockets to steer the station back toward Earth.
"That would ensure the station's organized re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere around the 26th, 27th or 28th of February, with the main fragments of the station falling into the Pacific Ocean between 900 and 1,200 miles from Australia", he said.
Moscow has set aside $27 million to cover the cost of sending Mir to a watery grave. No Absolute Safety Guarantees
Anatoly Kiselyov, head of the Khrunichev center that designed and built Mir, said ballistic experts reckoned parts of the vehicle would hit an area up to 6,250 miles long and 125 miles wide, Interfax reported. He said there was no way to guarantee that all sections would fall safely into the ocean.
"To calculate precisely the mathematical model of the process...of passing through the atmosphere and falling into the ocean of a 130-ton multi-module orbital complex with enormous paneling is not feasible", Kiselyov said.
Koptev said that on re-entry, Mir would break up into thousands of fragments, some weighing as much as 1,500 lbs. They would hurtle toward Earth with enough force to smash a way through reinforced concrete six feet thick. Under international law, Russia is bound to provide safety guarantees for space craft and satellites returning to Earth from space, but re-entry is far from an exact science.
In 1979, the U.S. Skylab was supposed to land in the south Atlantic but instead scattered itself over the Indian Ocean and parts of western Australia, its sonic boom waking sheep farmers and Aborigines. No one was hit.
In another case, a Russian military satellite, Cosmos 954, scattered a suitcase sized cylinder of uranium over Canada's Northwest Territories.

Rise And Fall Of A Space Legend

During its eventful life Mir helped Soviet and Russian cosmonauts set a string of space endurance records that have been the envy of its better-funded U.S. rivals.
But in recent years the station lost its luster due to a series of mishaps, including a near catastrophic collision with a cargo craft, an on-board fire and computer failures which sent the station spinning aimlessly through space.
The decision marks a defeat for the commercial MirCorp consortium which had tried to raise millions of dollars of private cash to keep Mir in operation. Dutch-based MirCorp, which devised a series of novel money-spinning ventures including space tourism in an effort to save Mir, was not immediately available for comment on the news. But the announcement will dash the hopes of U.S. businessman Dennis Tito, a former NASA (news - web sites) engineer who has already paid MirCorp part of a multimillion dollar fee for a once in a lifetime trip to Mir.
James Cameron, director of hit movie Titanic, was another possible space tourist, while U.S. television network NBC planned to send a winning game show contestant into orbit as part of a true-life show dreamed up by the producer of the hit show "Survivor" MirCorp has spent some $40 million on keeping the station aloft but various Russian officials have said in private that the financing fell short of what was needed to keep Mir going.
And with the first international crew housewarming the $60 billion International Space Station, Moscow has clearly lost interest in the venture.

Российские законодатели хотят очистить русский язык от иностранных и бранных слов

MOSCOW, (AP) -- For years, Russians have complained about politicians who pepper their speech with puzzling terms derived from English or Latin, words like "keeler", "defolt", and "impeech" - or "killer", "default" and "impeach", as they're better known to native speakers.
Others bemoan the gangster-style talk of Russians, from the working classes to public figures, who litter their language with unprintable swear words. Now a group of lawmakers in Russia's parliament wants to outlaw both kinds of talk: The 12 legislators have proposed a bill that would mandate the use of Russian words instead of imports and make the use of swear words in any public comments a criminal offense.
It is unclear how wide-ranging the bill would be, and whether it would apply to everyone or just politicians and the media. But under the bill, politicians talking about defaulting on debts would have to say "nevypolneniye obyazatelstv" instead of taking the common foreign shortcut, "defolt" And references to the new "millennium" would be replaced by the Russian word, "tysyacheletiye".
The text of the draft has not been published yet, but excerpts were provided to The Associated Press by one of authors, pro-Kremlin Unity Party lawmaker Alexei Alexeyev.
"Unfortunately, there are no legal norms in our current legislation on the purity of the Russian language" - an oversight that the bill proposes to fix, Alexeyev said Thursday. The legislation was proposed by Unity but also backed by several of parliament's Communists, who are known for a nationalist dislike of imports, linguistic or otherwise.
The bill may have a hard time winning wide backing in the house, called the State Duma, where many lawmakers themselves resort to foreign or unprintable words in private, and occasionally public, conversation. But the proposal highlights some Russians' growing concern about the state of the language of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And it comes amid increasing threats to the language's eminence in former Soviet republics outside Russia, where long-suppressed local tongues are taking over.
Almost daily, Russian newscasts show politicians talking about reaching "konsensus" (instead of "soglasiye", the Russian word for "agreement"); about the Communists' "impeechment" attempt against ex-President Boris Yeltsin; about the government's "defolt" on foreign loans - all words that were once alien to the Russian ear but recently have pushed their way into everyday conversation.
Even the Russian word for "murderer" is often abandoned in favor of the English-derived "killer", pronounced "keeler" Many prominent government and public figures are notorious for mangling Russian's complex grammar. President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) himself could become a target of the bill: He is known to resort to rough speech at times, and at least once crossed publicly into the unprintable. Speaking to families of the sailors killed in the sinking of the submarine Kursk (news - web sites), he used an obscenity that prompted him to add: "May the women forgive me".
The lawmakers' effort is not the first crusade for the Russian language. A popular Russian radio station runs a brief program that highlights frequently mispronounced Russian words and tells listeners how to say them correctly. The Academy of Science's Institute of the Russian Language has set up a free telephone service for callers who want to know how to spell or use a difficult word. And the Russian Press Ministry has set up a literacy Web site with dictionaries and a survey of common language mistakes in the Russian media.
"Language is not simply a communication tool, but a creative force that forms, preserves and modifies the national perception of the world", the site says. Regulating the "national perception of the world" was something Soviet-era propaganda once excelled in. But in today's Russia, where state control over everything from speech to public dress is largely a thing of the past, the lawmakers' proposal has been received with humor rather than apprehension.
Punishment for violators of the proposed language law has not been specified yet, Alexeyev said. He said the authors are still putting finishing touches on the document.

Космическая станция "Мир" упадет на землю

MOSCOW, Nov. 16 -- Out of cash and worried about safety, Russian officials reluctantly decided today to end the 14-year orbit of the storied Mir space station and let it fall--disintegrating into thousands of pieces--into the Pacific Ocean in late February.
Officials said it would be sheer folly to keep the rusting, 140-ton station aloft any longer. "We simply have no right . . . to play Russian roulette", said Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian space agency. "We have reached a point where any system may fail. It is time to stop before it is too late".
Russian officials promised to carefully control the giant spacecraft's descent from more than 200 miles above Earth. Most of the spacecraft, they said, will burn up as Mir reenters Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 27 or 28. Fragments weighing up to 1,700 pounds are expected to fall about 1,000 miles east of Australia.
The final decision to end Mir's career came after years of unsuccessful efforts to find private sponsors. Unwilling to abandon the onetime symbol of Russia's prowess in space, officials toyed with the idea of using the station to advertise products or making a film about it.
Most recently, a Dutch-based firm agreed to lease Mir and give rides to space tourists, but it ran out of money, space agency officials said. Koptev said these "mostly exotic projects" have led nowhere.
He acknowledged that the government held on to Mir even after it was abundantly clear it could not both keep it running and build the Russian components for the international space station on time. U.S. officials, who are leading the international project, have said delays by the Russians have significantly increased the international station's cost.
NASA had little to say officially about the move. "Decisions about Mir and the fate of Mir are the sole purview of the Russian government", said spokeswoman Kirsten Larsen. "Our concern has only been that the Russians have adequate resources to support their commitments" to the international station, which is currently under construction with a crew of two Russians and one American in residence.
Sporting antennas, solar panels and six modules, Mir was considered revolutionary in design when it was launched in 1986. But after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, financial constraints developed and maintenance problems arose.
Mir's recent years were marred by a series of hair-raising incidents, including an onboard fire, the failure of an oxygen generator, computer shut-downs and a 1997 collision with a cargo craft that threatened the lives of two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut on board. Koptev said not only does Mir now require constant repair, but some key elements in its structure simply cannot be replaced.
He and other top-ranking Russian officials promised that Mir's descent would be planned to the last detail. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said Russia must "ensure the safety of the final state of Mir's flight"The government was said to have set aside $27 million for the operation.
Both the United States and Russia have lost control of space modules on their descent to Earth. In 1978, a Soviet military satellite crashed into northern Canada, scattering radioactive fragments over the wilderness. The following year, the U.S. Skylab space station hurtled into western Australia when its orbit deteriorated faster than planned. In 1991, the Russians lost control of the Salyut-7 space station over Argentina when it ran out of fuel in the final stage of its descent.
Koptev said a crew will be sent to Mir in late January to switch on all its equipment. Mir is now flying automatically. The two cosmonauts will return home two or three days before the station is hurtled toward Earth, he said. As it enters Earth's atmosphere, Mir will break up into thousands of fragments flying with enough force to smash a six-foot-thick slab of concrete.
Anatoly Kiselyov, head of the Khrunichev space center that designed and built the station, said Mir's pieces will scatter across an area 6,250 miles by 125 miles. He said he could not guarantee that every fragment will fall safely into the water.
"To calculate precisely the mathematical model . . . of passing through the atmosphere and falling into the ocean of a 130-ton multi-module orbital complex with enormous paneling is not feasible", he said.
In Mir's heyday, cosmonauts set a string of space endurance records, including Valery Polyakov's 437-day mission that ended in 1995. The Russian public remains mostly loyal to the station. In a recent poll, more than 60 percent of those surveyed said Mir should remain in orbit. Still, Koptev said the choice for the space agency was clear. "Nothing can last for eternity", he said, "even the Mir".

After numerous resurrections, Russia's Mir may finally be headed for a fiery death. President Vladimir Putin's cabinet agreed last week to deorbit the space station, launched in 1986, in February 2001. The decision is bad news for Amsterdam-based MirCorp, which wanted to lease the station for science and tourism. But company officials still hold out hope, with one noting that Russian officials have "killed the station at least four times" before.

Затерянные в космосе

SATURDAY, Nov. 11 (HealthScout) -- Space, the final frontier, may pose the last scientific challenge in an unexpected arena: exercising. Faced with loss of muscle mass and bone density during extended space flights, scientists are working on ways to substitute exercise for the daily tug of gravity.
"You're strength-training yourself all the time simply holding yourself against gravity", says astronaut Jim Pawelczyk, a professor at Penn State University. "We could treat exercise from a systems point of view. We want to combat the loss of muscles. We want to combat the loss of bone. We want to maintain cardiovascular system integrity and the one thing that does all of that for you is exercise, he says. Pawelczyk and fellow astronaut Jay Buckey spent 16 days aboard the space shuttle Columbia in April. Buckey, a professor at Dartmouth College, says the big problem is loss of bone density. "You could actually build muscle mass in space. And you can certainly maintain aerobic fitness. The problem is loss of bone mass", he explains. According to Pawelczyk, space travelers can lose bone in certain parts of their bodies 15 times faster than postmenopausal women can. And things get worse the longer people are in space.
"What we do see in the longer space missions of say, up to three months, is that we don't detect a plateauing of the rate of bone loss. It appears to be continuous. So if you extrapolate that out to what we think it would take for a mission to Mars, we're talking about losing up to 45 percent of our bone in certain areas", he says.
Studies of cosmonauts who have stayed for months aboard the space station Mir are ongoing, Pawelczyk says. "The most recent reports indicate that only about half of those people have recovered their bone mass. And the ones who have gotten it back quickest are the ones who have engaged in a very aggressive exercise program after space flight", he says. So the answer might seem to be more exercise. But it's not that simple, Pawelczyk says.
Currently, treadmills and a resistance exercise device that can be reconfigured to hit the major muscle groups are in use. "This is the challenge before us. Though exercise makes a lot of sense, what we've seen from the Russian program is that despite a very aggressive exercise countermeasure program, that we still have these high rates of bone loss. And so we are not doing it as well as we need to if, for example, we want to keep people healthy for a trip to the planet Mars", he says. Another problem is that although it is possible to reverse the losses in muscle and bone, it's not easy.
"I don't know what's an appropriate level of muscle atrophy", says Buckey. "But muscle loss is reversible to a large degree. But it takes a lot longer to get the bone back than it does to lose it" There may an alternative, says Buckey: "The other thing is pharmacological".
Buckey says there are drugs that reduce bone loss in patients with osteoporosis, and there is a reasonable chance those drugs or drugs like them can be useful in space.
But with or without drugs, there will still be a need to exercise in space. Pawelczyk says that just like on Earth, you have to make exercise in space a pleasant experience and motivate people to work out.
And Buckey says that, like most things, more isn't always better. "You don't have to necessarily exercise more", he says. "You have to exercise better".

NEW YORK, (AP) -- With the holiday season approaching, Dale Richards and Robert Twiggs say they may have just the item for that special scientist in your life - a personal satellite.
At four inches across, the so-called CubeSats that Richards' Utah company plans to launch aboard decommissioned Russian missiles, will fit neatly underneath any tree. And at $45,000, they are a relative bargain, the pair said Wednesday, in announcing the project.
"Somebody's going to come along and say 'I'd like one of my own", said Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. "I'd like my own satellite".
At least, that's what a group of American investors and their new Russian partner are hoping. Richard's company, Ogden-based One Stop Satellite Solutions Inc., signed a deal Wednesday with ISC Kosmotras, a Russian company that is trying the turn the swords of the Soviet military complex - in this case, nuclear missiles - into capitalist plowshares.
Together they hope to cultivate a market for low-cost minisatellites, primarily geared to university researchers or other scientists but ostensibly for sale to anyone with a use for it.
One Stop plans to send up 18 to 24 of the tiny satellites next November, aboard a Russian Dnepr rocket launched from Kazakhstan.
The minisatellites weigh about 2.2 pounds. Typical communications satellites weigh about10,000 pounds and launching one can costs millions of dollars.
It's not entirely clear how useful such the tiny satellites might be. They're particularly well-suited for space testing microprocessor or other components, or could be equipped with sensors for taking measurements in orbit, said Richards, whose company is an outgrowth of the Center for Aerospace Technology at Weber State University.
They'd also be nifty for ham radio operators who want to beam voice messages to one another from the cosmos or for globetrotters who want to send their personal information into space, for easy retrieval in case of a medical emergency, said Twiggs, who invented CubeSat.
Novel ideas, but minisatellite ventures have actually been around for years, occupying a mostly overlooked niche of the industry, said Neil Dahlstrom of the not-for-profit Space Business Archive.
One such company, Houston-based Celestis Inc., even offers "a celestial journey to space for departed loved ones", using small satellites to carry cremated remains into orbit.
While minisatellites are relatively inexpensive, there are severe limitations to their use, said Scott Chase, chairman and CEO of The Strategis Group, a telecommunications research and consulting firm.
The CubeSat might be so small, that once outfitted with a communications link, there would be little space left to conduct a meaningful experiment, Chase said. Instead of spending the money to miniaturize technology, scientists might opt for a larger satellite, he said. Twiggs said his minisatellites are a valuable tool, even if their utility is not yet clear.
"To me, it's kind of like the Internet. What could you do with the Internet five years ago?" he said. "And now look at all the applications they've got".

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