| NASA is hoping it will be able to land space shuttle Discovery in Brevard County today.
The crew aboard Discovery is wrapping up a 13-day mission during which they rewired the International Space Station.
Meanwhile the official NASA press release announced that NASA will be helping Santa make his rounds this Christmas:
The Debris Imaging Radar System, used during the night launch of NASA's space shuttle mission STS-116, is a new system at Kennedy Space Center in Florida that will now be made available to Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Based on its success in identifying even the smallest amount of debris coming off the orbiter or the external tank, NASA has strong confidence the system will provide assistance in observing Santa's sleigh. Since the elves have the packages piled high, NASA can determine with great accuracy if any Christmas gifts planned for delivery fall off the sleigh. The radar system is capable of high-definition radar imagery, so the approximate shape, size and weight of the packages can be determined.
This could greatly help Santa recover the packages so that no child is disappointed by not receiving the presents the jolly fellow promised while he made the rounds in shopping malls before Christmas. The radar has an auto-track mode so that it can be left unattended on Christmas Eve and still perform its intended function. The system will be automatically activated once NASA's air traffic control radar located on north KSC has made radar contact with Santa's sleigh.
Also of assistance to Santa this year is the new Differential Global Positioning Satellite System ground station at the Shuttle Landing Facility. These new GPS antennas located near the control tower can help if there is an emergency. Since the sleigh is now GPS equipped, it can guide Santa to a landing within 10 feet of the runway's centerline, regardless of which end of the runway he needs to use.
Though Shuttle Landing Facility personnel will be on holiday leave, officials at the NASA Tower have agreed to provide the customary support by turning the landing lights on before they depart for Christmas, as well as turning on the TACAN radio homing beacon and the visual alternating green and white lighted rotating beacon.
NASA will use the orbiter Discovery to mimic Santa's sleigh during the
STS-116 landing currently planned for Friday, in order to test the ability to operate these two new systems in auto-track mode. If the orbiter is waved off to land on the West Coast, the Shuttle Training Aircraft will be used to simulate Santa's sleigh.
The history of space exploration:
In the early years of space exploration, there have been cases, when the capsule with the photo film, filmed by U.S. spy satellite, accidentally landed on Soviet territory. They could have become a dainty catch for Soviet intelligence, but the locals managed to clear the landing capsules along with their contents from the houses not knowing about the significance of their findings. There was also a danger that a manned spacecraft could make an emergency landing in the territory of a potential opponent. And how would the local authorities treat these uninvited guests wearing foreign flags on their suits? In order to address such matters once and for all, another major international treaty was adopted - the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects, launched into Outer Space, which came into force in 1968. It was signed just in case of an emergency landing on the territory of other states and applies to both astronauts as well as to the spacecrafts. The agreement calls for the immediate return of the crew of a spacecraft to the state which launched it. It is also necessary to return manned or unmanned landed objects and their constituent parts. In this case, the expenditure, spent on the identification and return, should be compensated by the state that launched the object.
Interestingly, the ownership rights of spacecrafts during all these "adventures" would remain unchanged: it was also mentioned in international law, that the ownership issues of space objects should not be mixed with legal issues. For example, a spacecraft, registered in the United States and complies by its laws, can be under the ownership of the state itself, or privately owned by a legal entity of persons, including foreigners, ownership of a foreign state or an international organization.
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Seven astronauts on board of the space shuttle Discovery are coming home for Christmas, while the International Space Station currently houses two men and a woman who will spend all of Christmas in space.
