NASA is preparing to destroy the International Space Station (ISS) and has awarded US company SpaceX a contract worth up to $843 million to safely bring it out of orbit and back to Earth.
The International Space Station glows in Earth's atmosphere in the background. (Photo: NASA)
The International Space Station glows in Earth's atmosphere in the background. (Photo: NASA)
According to NASA's plan, SpaceX's specially designed suborbital vehicle will pull the football-field-sized ISS back to Earth sometime after its operational life ends in 2030. The ISS will plunge into Earth's atmosphere at speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour before landing at a splashdown point in the ocean.
Ken Bowersox, NASA's Deputy Administrator, said in a statement that recovering the ISS will support NASA's plans for future destinations and enable continued use of near-Earth space.
The first components of this floating laboratory were launched in 1998 and have been home to astronauts from the US, Japan, Russia, Canada and Europe since 2000, who have completed more than 3,300 scientific experiments in low-Earth orbit.
But the space station is showing signs of age: technical faults and leaks continue to cause problems for the crew, and its contract will end in 2030.
The ISS also faces a growing threat from space debris. On June 27, nine astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to take shelter in a Boeing Starliner crew capsule after hundreds of pieces of debris from a Russian satellite threatening the safety of the space station.
The ISS being ready to be destroyed is not the first case. In 2001, the Russian space station Mir was re-launched and its remaining debris fell into the Pacific Ocean.
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Scientists are getting closer to proving the existence of the multiverse.
The vast universe with countless galaxies lies beyond our reach, but could there be more than one universe? The multiverse theory, which proposes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of branching and infinite universes, has attracted great interest in the scientific community.
Since the 1980s, inflation theory, which explains the sudden expansion of the universe after the Big Bang, has become the basis for the multiverse hypothesis. Inflation not only explains why the universe is flat and uniform, but also predicts the existence of many other independent universes.
Scientists are about to find evidence of the multiverse.
Scientists are about to find evidence of the multiverse.
In addition, scientists also consider other hypotheses such as the cyclic universe, which suggests that the universe continuously goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, creating multiple universes at different times.
To find evidence of the multiverse, scientists have focused on studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the light left over from the Big Bang. They believe that other universes may have left traces on the CMB. In 2011, four unusual regions in the sky were discovered that may be “scars” from other universes.
If these "scars" are proven to be the imprints of other universes, it would be a major step forward in proving the existence of the multiverse, opening a new door to our understanding of the universe and ourselves.
