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Crewed Spaceflight Discovery Hubble Space Telescope Space Shuttle Uncrewed Spaceflight

STS-103: return to Hubble

Space ShuttleSpace Shuttle Discovery lifts off on an eight-day mission to retrieve, service and redeploy the Hubble Space Telescope. This routine planned upgrade for Hubble sees the shuttle crew swapping out the $2,000,000,000 telescope’s CPU, installing a new one with 20 times the processing power of the original, during an eight-hour spacewalk; another eight-hour spacewalk sees crewmembers removing an analog data recorder to replace it with a digital device with greater capacity. Christmas 1999 is spent placing Hubble back into its orbit. Aboard Discovery for her 27th flight are Commander Curtis Brown, Pilot Scott Kelly, and mission specialists Steven Smith, Michael Foale, John Grunsfield, Claude Nicollier and Jean-Francois Clervoy.

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Crewed Spaceflight International Space Station Soyuz

Soyuz TMA-07M

Soyuz TMA-07MPart of the 34th full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-07M. Roman Romanenko, Chris Hadfield and Thomas Marshburn take up residence on the ISS for 145 days, becoming part of the Expedition 34/35 crews. All three return to Earth in May 2013 aboard the same vehicle, with Hadfield becoming an internet sensation at the end of the mission with a cover of David Bowie’s “A Space Oddity” recorded aboard the station.

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Television

Mars: Crossroads

MarsThe sixth episode of Mars airs on the National Geographic Channel, bringing the show’s first season to an end. The series is a hybrid drama/documentary about a fictional human mission to Mars in 2033, contrasted against efforts to prepare for such a mission in the present day. The series is renewed for a second season after the conclusion of its first season.

More about Mars in the LogBook