"Many of these rely on changing the way gravity works over large scales," said paper co-author Jose María Ezquiaga, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the UChicago. Scientists have proposed all kinds of theories for what the missing piece might be. (The search for the exact rate is an ongoing debate in cosmology). The trouble is that something is making the universe not only expand, but expand faster and faster over time-and no one knows what it is. 21 in Physical Review D, the method depends on finding such ripples that have been bent by traveling through supermassive black holes or large galaxies on their way to Earth. NASA officials assigned Rubio to ride aboard the Soyuz MS-22, while Roscosmos put cosmonaut Anna Kikina on a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission that took flight in October 2022 and returned home March 11.ĭespite geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia as the war in Ukraine has escalated, NASA has repeatedly said its partnership with Roscosmos is vital to continuing the space station’s operations and the valuable scientific research carried out on board.A new paper co-authored by a University of Chicago scientist lays out how this might work. Rubio traveled to the space station on a Russian spacecraft as part of crew-swapping agreement between NASA and Roscosmos that was hashed out in the summer of 2022. Rubio’s extended stay, however, was not previously anticipated before the Soyuz MS-22 capsule had a coolant leak last December. That tour of duty was a planned extended mission, designed by NASA to study the long-term effects of spaceflight on the human body. Vande Hei’s return was delayed to allow for the additional traffic to the orbiting laboratory, though he said at the time that he had known his mission might be extended before he arrived.īefore Vande Hei, US astronaut Scott Kelly held the title for longest spaceflight by an American with his 340-day mission. Vande Hei set the current US record last year after NASA and Roscosmos decided to extend his stay because Russia had chosen to send a film crew of two people to the space station to film a movie. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio is shown inside the cupola of the International Space Station as it flew 263 miles above southeastern England. The late Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who logged 437 continuous days in orbit aboard Russia’s Mir space station between 19, still holds that title. If all goes to plan and Rubio departs on September 27, his 371-day stay will not be a world record. Roscosmos launched a replacement spacecraft, MS-23, that docked with the space station on February 23. Instead, the Soyuz MS-22 capsule returned to Earth without a crew on March 28. Officials at Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, later deemed the spacecraft was not safe enough to carry the astronauts back home. But the spacecraft that carried Rubio and two Russian colleagues - cosmonauts Sergey Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin - sprang a coolant leak in December. Rubio’s return trip had been slated for this spring. That tour of duty will beat the previous record of 355 days set by US astronaut Mark Vande Hei in 2022. Rubio will return to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft no earlier than September 27, NASA officials said Wednesday, meaning he will have logged a total of at least 371 days in orbit. But he’ll wind up staying in space for over a year - breaking the record for the longest mission conducted by a US astronaut. Astronaut Frank Rubio traveled to the International Space Station on September 21, 2022, for what he thought would be a six-month mission.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |