ABSTRACT
The 179-day flight of ESA Astronaut Thomas Reiter onboard the Russian Space Station Mir drew to a successful conclusion on 29 February 1996 with the safe landing of the Soyuz TM-22 capsule near Arkalyk in Kazakhstan. This mission, known as Euromir 95, was part of ESA's precursor flight programme for the International Space Station, and followed the equally successful Euromir 94 mission by ESA Astronaut Ulf Merbold (3 October-4 November 1994). This article discusses the objectives of the two flights and presents an overview of the experiment programme, a preliminary assessment of its results and achievements, and reviews some of the lessons learnt for future Space Station operations.
Subject(s)
Adaptation, Physiological/physiology , Astronauts/education , Space Flight/organization & administration , Weightlessness , Aerospace Medicine , Europe , Extravehicular Activity , Humans , International Agencies , International Cooperation , Public Relations , Research , RussiaABSTRACT
The payload complement on Spacelab 1 included a spectrometer for observations of the brighter cosmic x-ray sources. The primary scientific objective was to study the detailed spectral features of cosmic x-ray sources and their associated temporal variations over a wide energy range from about 2 to 80 kiloelectron volts. The instrument, based on the gas scintillation proportional counter, had a geometrical area of some 180 square centimeters with an energy resolution of about 9 percent at 7 kiloelectron volts. The results presented here show new results from two galactic binary x-ray sources, Cygnus X-3 and Centaurus X-3, and from the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The excellent energy resolution of the instrument permits line features to be identified in these sources with unprecedented quality.
