October 20, 2002
Consider this: the iron in your blood was forged in a supernova explosion billions of years ago.
The Space Shuttle Docked with Mir
Birthday · October 20, 2002
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APOD published October 20, 2002. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Before there was the International Space Station, the reigning orbiting spaceport was Russia's Mir. Pictured above in 1995, the United States Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the segmented Mir. During shuttle mission STS-71, astronauts answered questions from school students over amateur radio and performed science experiments aboard Spacelab. The Spacelab experiments helped to increase understanding of the effects of long-duration space flights on the human body. Last year, after 15 years of successful service, the decaying Mir space station broke up as it entered the Earth's atmosphere.