Russian Astronauts Land in Kazakh Steppe

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts landed safely Wednesday in the snowy expanses of central Kazakhstan after spending five months on the International Space Station.

The Soyuz capsule carrying Kelly, Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka landed at 1:53 p.m. (0753 GMT) about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the northern Kazakh city of Arkalyk.

Kelly returns to earth just as his twin brother Mark, husband of wounded congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, prepares to take part in the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour's final mission in April.

The capsule came back to harsh conditions, including a stiff wind that blew it on its side and rolled it 22 meters (25 yards) from its touchdown point through fresh snow.

Rob Navias, a spokesman for the U.S. space agency NASA on the scene, described conditions as "like a scene from the North Pole."

The space travelers were bundled into blankets after being pulled from the capsule, then placed in reclining stretchers as they slowly acclimated to the planet's gravity after months of weightlessness.

The capsule landed about 3 1/2 hours after undocking from the ISS. After hurtling through space, it deployed a parachute about 15 minutes before touchdown, slowing its speed from 800 kph (500 mph) to about 290 kph (180 mph).

A second parachute slowed its descent to 25 kph (16 mph). Then with the ground just a few meters (yards) away, six engines on the capsule's bottom were fired, bringing it to a gentle landing in a powdery cloud of fresh snow.

The first out was Kaleri, who has now spent a total of 770 days in space over five flights, making him the second most experienced space flier in history after compatriot Sergei Krikalyov. Navias said Kaleri smiled and winked at him as he was lifted out.

Skripochka and Kelly also appeared to be in good shape.

"Scott Kelly is looking remarkably well," Navias said.

In a break with usual practice, search-and-recovery personnel dispensed with the ritual of taking the returning astronauts to inflatable medical tents for a checkup and instead loaded them directly onto all-terrain vehicles.

"The search and recovery team have decided it's too cold, it's too wintery, it's too Arctic out here in terms of the overall conditions," Navias said.

During his time on the space station, Kelly ran a series of challenges on his Twitter feed in which his followers had to identify locations on earth shown in photographs taken from the orbiting laboratory.

The final photo posted was of snow-covered Kazakhstan.

Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, Italy's Paolo Nespoli and American Catherine Coleman remain aboard the space station; they are to return to earth in about three months.

From : The Jakarta Post

Circling Mercury

For the first time, Earth has a regular orbiting eye-in-the-sky spying on the solar system's smallest and strangest planet, Mercury.

NASA's spacecraft called Messenger successfully veered into a pinpoint orbit Thursday night after a 6 1/2-year trip and 4.9 billion miles (7.89 billion kilometers) and tricky maneuvering to fend off the gravitational pull of the sun. It is the fifth planet in our solar system that NASA has orbited, in addition to the Earth and the moon.

"It was right on the money," Messenger's chief engineer, Eric Finnegan, said. Messenger is in orbit that brings it as close as 120 miles (193 kilometers) above the planet's surface. "This is as close you can possibly get to being perfect."

"Everybody was whooping and hollering; we are elated," Finnegan said. "There's a lot of work left to be done, but we are there."

Mercury is not only difficult to get to, but it's has some of the most extremes in the solar system. Temperatures there swing wildly by 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 Celsius). While it gets up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (425 Celsius) on the planet closest to the sun, it also is so cold and dark in some craters that the temperatures don't get above 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero (184 degrees Celsius below zero). Radar even shows that there is likely frozen ice in those craters, something Messenger will try to confirm.

In the 1970s, NASA sent a spacecraft, Mariner, whizzing by Mercury, but only got pictures of less than half of the tiny rock. Robert Strom of the University of Arizona was a scientist on the Mariner and current Messenger missions and he said for a while he thought he wouldn't get a second peek at the eccentric Mercury.

"I am just so thrilled it isn't funny," Strom said by telephone minutes after NASA confirmed that Messenger was in orbit. "Thirty-six years waiting for this day. It's just unbelievable."

Strom said he and all his colleagues were nervous as the desk-sized spacecraft automatically shifted into an egg-shaped orbit, with controllers on Earth unable to change commands because it took eight minutes for signals to travel the approximately 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from Mercury to Earth.

"This was not easy. This was a very, very difficult maneuver to get into orbit," Strom told The Associated Press.

Messenger was launched in 2004. Next month it should start transmitting pictures and investigate Mercury's mysterious magnetic field and unusual density.

From : The Jakarta Post