Discovery
China ready to send 1st crew: The rocket that will send the first crew members to live on China’s new orbiting space station has been moved onto the launch pad ahead of its planned blastoff next week.
The three astronauts plan to spend three months on the space station doing spacewalks, construction and maintenance work and science experiments.
The main section of the Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, station was launched into orbit on April 29, and a cargo spacecraft sent up last month carried fuel, food and equipment to the station in preparation for the crewed mission.
The Long March-2F Y12 rocket carrying the Shenzhou-12 spaceship was transferred to the launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Wednesday, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a brief statement. Its tentative launch date is next Wednesday.
The space agency plans a total of 11 launches through the end of next year to deliver two laboratory modules to expand the 70-ton station, along with supplies and crew members. Next week’s launch will be the third of those, and the first of the four crewed missions planned.
China said in March the astronauts training for the upcoming crewed missions were a mix of space travel veterans and newcomers and included some women. It has sent 11 astronauts into space to date, all of them pilots from the ruling Communist Party’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Army.
The first Tianhe crew will be all male, though women will be part of future crews on the station, according to Yang Liwei, who orbited Earth in China’s first crewed mission in 2003 and is now an official at the space agency.
The Tianhe builds on experience China gained from operating two experimental space stations earlier in its increasingly ambitious space program. Chinese astronauts spent 33 days living on the second of the previous stations, carried out a spacewalk and taught science classes that were beamed down to students across the country.
China landed a probe, the Tianwen-1, on Mars last month that carried a rover, the Zhurong. It also has brought back lunar samples, the first by any country’s space program since the 1970s, and landed a probe and rover on the moon’s less explored far side.
Beijing doesn’t participate in the International Space Station, largely due to US objections. Washington is wary of the Chinese program’s secrecy and its military connections. (AP)
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Archaeologists dig hilltop:
Archaeologists are giving a grassy hilltop overlooking iconic Plymouth Rock one last look before a historical park is built to commemorate the Pilgrims and the Indigenous people who once called it home.
Braving sweltering heat, a team of about 20 graduate students enrolled in a masters program at the University of MassachusettsBoston began excavating an undeveloped lot on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, this week.
The National Historic Landmark site which contains the first cemetery used by the Pilgrims after they arrived from England in 1620 and was a Wampanoag village for thousands of years before that - has been poked and prodded numerous times over the past century.
But now, as historical organizations reboot pandemic-stalled plans to construct a permanent memorial they’re calling Remembrance
Park, this could be the last chance to mine the soil for Native and colonial artifacts.
“Cole’s Hill is among the most sacred land we’ve got,” said Donna Curtin, executive director of the Pilgrim Society & Pilgrim Hall Museum, which owns the tract. “We want to make it more than just a grassy, empty lot. We want to engage people. And the archaeology is deeply wedded to the site.”
David Landon of UMass-Boston’s Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, who’s leading the effort, said he’s confident his team will recover items of interest from the site.
“You don’t always get the opportunity to do work at sites that are so significant,” he said. “We know we’re going to find stuff there’s no question about that. Anytime you start digging in Plymouth, you find interesting stuff.” (AP)