Manned spacecraft docks to the space station

A spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts on Wednesday successfully docked to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz TMA-22 with NASA astronaut Dan Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin onboard docked to the orbiting station several minutes ahead of schedule Moscow time. The three blasted off from the Russia-leased cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday.

The 39-year-old Shkaplerov and 42-year-old Ivanishin are making their first flights into space. Burbank, 50, who will take over command of the space station, is a veteran of 12-day shuttle missions in 2000 and 2006. The three men are to remain aboard the space station until March.

The mission’s launch had been delayed for two months because of the crash of an unmanned Progress cargo ship in August. That failed launch raised doubts about future missions to the station, because the rocket the crashed ship used had the same upper stage as the booster rockets carrying Soyuz ships to orbit. The delay cut the mission onboard to three people.

American Michael Fossum, Russian Sergey Volkov and Japanese Satoshi Furukawa have been onboard since June and are due to return to Earth next week. Another launch next month will take the station back to its normal six-person crew mode.

William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said in a televised news briefing shortly after the docking that “the Russian team did the tremendous job of getting the launch and the docking ready.”

The three men are expected to move from their ship to the space station about two hours after the docking.

                                                                                                                                  Source:The Hindu

Stonehenge may have been a worship site

 

Stonehenge may have been a place of worship some 500 years before the first stone was erected, a research has claimed.

Archaeologists from the universities of Birmingham, Bradford and Vienna claim that the sanctity of Stonehenge’s location may have determined the layout of key aspects of the surrounding sacred landscape.

The research increases the likelihood that the site was originally and primarily associated with sun worship.

The research has also enabled the archaeologists to reconstruct the detailed route of a possible religious congregation or other ritual event which they suspect may have taken place annually to the north of Stonehenge.

In their research, the archaeologists discovered two great pits, one towards the enclosure’s eastern end and the other nearer its western end.

When they modelled the relationship between these newly discovered Cursus pits and Stonehenge on their computer system, they realised that, viewed from the so-called “Heel Stone” at Stonehenge, the pits were aligned with sunrise and sunset on the longest day of the year.

The chances of those two alignments being purely coincidental are extremely low.

The archaeologists then began to speculate as to what sort of ritual or ceremonial activity might have been carried out at and between the two pits. In many areas of the world, ancient religious and other ceremonies sometimes involved ceremonially processing round the perimeters of monuments.

They therefore thought it possible that the prehistoric celebrants at the Cursus might have perambulated between the two pits by processing around the perimeter of the Cursus.

The “eureka moment” came when the computer calculations revealed that the midway point (the noon point) on the route aligned directly with the centre of Stonehenge, which was precisely due south.

This realisation that the sun hovering over the site of Stonehenge at its highest point in the year appears to have been of great importance to prehistoric people, is itself of potential significance.

For it suggests that the site’s association with the veneration of the sun was perhaps even greater than previously realised.

However, the implication of the new evidence is that in a sense, the story may have been the other way round, that the site of Stonehenge was sacred before the Cursus was built, says lead archaeologist Dr. Henry Chapman, who has been modelling the alignments on the computerised reconstructions of the Stonehenge landscape.             

                                                                                                                                  source:The Hindu

NASA TO LAUNCH NEW MARS ROVER

 On the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida is a spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, that is scheduled to lift off on Friday/Saturday and reach Mars next August. It will deliver an S.U.V.-size rover named “Curiosity” that carries an instrument that can detect methane in the air, and if it does, it will unleash new excitement about the prospect of life on Mars.
                                                                                                                                    Source:The Hindu