Date: 12-27-00
EXPLORATIONS #1932 - Space Yearender
By Paul ThompsonVOICE ONE:
This is Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. Today we tell about some of the important space news of the past year. We begin with perhaps the most important story since humans landed on the Moon.
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VOICE ONE:
The year Two-Thousand will be remembered as the year that humans first left the planet Earth and established a permanent colony in space.
An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts took their places as the first crew members of the International Space Station. They entered the space station on November First, Two-Thousand. The three were launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The commander of the crew is American astronaut Bill Shepherd. The Soyuz commander is Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko. The flight engineer is Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. The three men are expected to spend three months on the International Space Station. They will return to Earth on the Space Shuttle Discovery early in February.
Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Gidzenko and Mr. Krikalev are the first of many people who will live and work on the space station. Future crews will be a mix of astronauts from the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency and Japan. They will move in and out of the space station during the coming years.
VOICE TWO
The International Space Station is a cooperative effort by sixteen nations. When it is completed, the space station will include six scientific laboratories. It will provide more room for space research than any spacecraft ever built.
In the years to come, the International Space Station will be an extremely important research center. Experiments can be done there that could not be repeated on Earth. This is because of the extreme lack of gravity in space.
Research plans include experiments in biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and medicine. NASA experts say medical research in space could lead to new drugs to fight against many different kinds of disease.
VOICE ONE:
In early December, the International Space Station became one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Huge structures like wings were added to gather energy from the Sun. They are the largest and heaviest structures to be carried into space. The space station now has five times more power supply than it had before. That bright object in the sky reminds us that people are living in space.
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Scientists have long believed that water may be the best evidence of possible life on another planet. In Two-Thousand, a NASA spacecraft found strong evidence of water on the planet Mars and on Jupiter's Moon, Ganymede.
NASA scientists reported in November that they had found extremely important evidence of lakes and seas on the planet Mars. They said the new evidence is the most exciting discovery ever made about Mars.
The cameras of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft provided the new evidence. The spacecraft is orbiting Mars.
VOICE ONE:
Michael Malin is the chief researcher for the Mars Orbiter Camera. He says the pictures clearly show a number of lines in the rock surface of the planet. He says these are the kind of lines that may have been formed by lakes or seas.
Mr. Malin says scientists have never before had this kind of clear evidence that large amounts of water once existed on Mars. He says the lines show that early Mars may have been more like Earth than most scientists had thought. These lines are very similar to rock formations found on Earth. Different levels of sedimentary rock form these lines. On Earth, they usually are found where lakes or large areas of water had once been.
Mr. Malin says that he never really believed that Mars was once very wet and warm during its early history. But he says his earlier view of Mars has been greatly changed by the new pictures. He says the lines seen in the pictures would be almost impossible to create without water. Mr. Malin says the new evidence has helped to solve one little piece of the mystery that is the planet Mars.
VOICE TWO:
Last week, scientists announced new evidence of what may be an ocean of salt water deep below the surface of Jupiter's Moon, Ganymede. The NASA spacecraft Galileo made the discovery. Galileo has been in orbit around Jupiter since December Fifth, Nineteen-Ninety-Five. It passed within eight-hundred and ten kilometers of Ganymede most recently in May.
During the close visit in May and an earlier visit in Nineteen-Ninety-Six instruments on Galileo gathered magnetic evidence. Scientists say this kind of magnetic information was most likely produced by liquid salt water. It is the third of Jupiter's moons to show signs of liquid water below the surface.
Margaret Kivelson announced the discovery. Mizz Kivelson is a scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her team used the Galileo's instruments to take the measurements that show the magnetic evidence of salt water.
Scientists have known for sometime that ice exists on Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. Mizz Kivelson's work provides the first evidence that liquid water might still exist below the ice on Jupiter's huge moon.
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Scientists who search deep into the universe found ten more planets that orbit stars. They announced their finding in August.
Three teams of astronomers made the discovery. Two of the teams are in the United States and one is in Switzerland. The astronomers say they now have found about fifty planets since the Swiss team found the first one in Nineteen-Ninety-five. The new discovery was announced at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Manchester, England.
Geoff Marcy is an astronomer with the University of California at Berkeley. He worked on one of the American teams that discovered the new planets. He says new planets are being found faster than scientists can investigate them and write about the results of the investigations.
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The ten planets include the smallest planet found outside our solar system. The planet is one-half the mass of Jupiter.
The Swiss research team found this planet orbiting the star where the same team had found another planet early this year. This makes it only the second time more than two planets have been discovered orbiting around one star outside our solar system. The American team from the University of California at Berkeley found the first planet system last year. That team found three planets around the star Upsilon Andromedae.
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Astronomers at McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas discovered a planet that is the closest to Earth yet discovered. It is about ten and one-half light years away from Earth. A light year is the distance that light can travel in one year. Ten light years is about ninety-eight-million-million kilometers.
This close planet orbits a star that can be seen without the aid of a telescope. The star can be seen in the night sky in the constellation Eridani. Its name is Epsilon Eridani. Epsilon Eridani is a star very similar to our own Sun. The planet orbiting it is about three-hundred times the size of Earth. The astronomers say the planet's closeness to Earth makes it an exciting discovery.
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It is not possible to see planets in the far universe because the stars the planets orbit are too bright. However, astronomers have learned to measure very small movements of a star. These movements are called wobbles. The experts say the wobbles are caused by the pull of gravity of the unseen planets as they orbit a star.
The astronomers say this method of finding stars does not permit them to find any that would be as small as Earth. However they hope that within the next ten years new telescopes in space will permit them to find smaller planets.
Jim O'Donnell is a spokesman for the International Astronomical Union. He says the discovery of the new planets suggests that planets that orbit around stars are common in the universe. He says this means that our solar system is not really very unusual. Mr. O'Donnell says the new discovery is further evidence that life could exist in the far distant universe.
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VOICE ONE:
This program was written and produced by Paul Thompson. Our studio engineer was Holly Capehart. This is Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
And this is Ray Freeman. Join us again next week for another EXPLORATIONS program in Special English on the Voice of America.
Source: www.voa.gov/special/