Nauka Module
Context
- Pirs, a Russian module on the International Space Station (ISS) used as a door for cosmonauts to go out on spacewalks, was detached from ISS.
- In its place, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos will be attaching a significantly larger module called Nauka, which will serve as the country’s main research facility on the space station.
What does Russia’s new Nauka module do?
- Nauka — meaning “science” in Russian — is the biggest space laboratory Russia has launched to date, and will primarily serve as a research facility.
- It is also bringing to the ISS another oxygen generator, a spare bed, another toilet, and a robotic cargo crane built by the European Space Agency (ESA).
- The new module was sent into orbit using a Proton rocket — the most powerful in Russia’s space inventory — on July 21, and will take eight days to reach the ISS.
- On the ISS, Nauka will be attached to the critical Zvezda module, which provides all of the space station’s life support systems and serves as the structural and functional centre of the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS).
About ISS
- The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station (habitable artificial satellite) in low Earth orbit.
- It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).
- The station serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific research is conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields.
- The first piece of the International Space Station was launched in 1998 after which more pieces were added.
- The first crew arrived on ISS in November, 2000 after which the space station has been continuously occupied.
- ISS flies at an altitude between 220km and 410 km above the earth. This is the low-earth orbit.
- With the naked eye, the ISS can be seen from nearly every area of Earth at different points in time.
- It travels around the Earth at an average speed of 27,700 kilometre per hour. It therefore completes 15.5 orbits per day. Therefore, it orbits Earth every 90 minutes.
Space Stations prior to ISS
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