International Space Station And Russia

Context:

Russia will pull out of the International Space Station after 2024 and focus on building its own orbiting outpost, the country’s new space chief said amid high tensions between Moscow and the West over the fighting in Ukraine.

Relevance:

GS-III Science and Technology: (Space Technology, Developments in Space technology)

Dimension of the Article:

1. What is a Space Station?
2. International Space Station (ISS)
3. What is Russia’s role in maintaining the ISS?
4. Why does the orbit of the ISS need to be corrected?

What is a Space Station?

• A Space station is an artificial structure placed in orbit, having the pressurized enclosure, power, supplies, and environmental systems necessary to support human habitation for extended periods.
• In simple words: a space station, also called an orbital station, is a large spacecraft or man-made station in space which can act as a home where astronauts live and/or receive several spacecrafts from the Earth and/or act as a kind of science lab, etc.
• Depending on its configuration, a space station can serve as a base for a variety of activities.
  • These include observations of the Sun and other astronomical objects, study of Earth’s resources and environment, military reconnaissance, and long-term investigations of the behaviour of materials and biological systems—including human physiology and biochemistry—in a state of weightlessness, or microgravity.

How are space stations set up and how do they work?

Small space stations are launched fully assembled, but larger stations are sent up in modules and assembled in orbit. To make the most efficient use of its carrier vehicle’s capacity, a space station is launched vacant, and its crew members—and sometimes additional equipment—follow in separate vehicles. A space station’s operation, therefore, requires a transportation system to ferry crews and hardware and to replenish the propellant, air, water, food, and such other items as are consumed during routine operations. Space stations use large panels of solar cells and banks of storage batteries as their source of electrical power. They also employ geostationary relay satellites for continuous communication with mission controllers on the ground and satellite-based positioning systems for navigation.

How many Space Stations have we launched?

• Since 1971, more than 10 space stations have been launched into a low orbit around Earth and have been occupied for varying lengths of time.
• Important Space stations in chronological order are Salyut 1, Skylab, Salyuts 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, Mir, the International Space Station, and Tiangong 1 and 2.

International Space Station (ISS)

• The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station (habitable artificial satellite) in low Earth orbit.
• The ISS program is a multi-national collaborative project between five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).
• The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements.
• The ISS serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific experiments are conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields.
• It is the largest artificial object in space and the largest satellite in low Earth orbit, regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth’s surface.
• The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations as well as Skylab from the US.

What is Russia’s role in maintaining the ISS?

• The ISS is built with the co-operation of scientists from five international space agencies — NASA of the U.S., Roscosmos of Russia, JAXA of Japan, Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency.
• Each agency has a role to play and a share in the upkeep of the ISS.
• Both in terms of expense and effort, it is not a feat that a single country can support.
• Russia’s part in the collaboration is the module responsible for making course corrections to the orbit of the ISS.
• They also ferry astronauts to the ISS from the Earth and back.
• Until SpaceX’s dragon spacecraft came into the picture the Russian spacecrafts were the only way of reaching the ISS and returning.

-Source: The Hindu