MIR CRAMMED WITH 11 YEARS WORTH OF STUFF.Byline: Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. In space, you can't just roll down the window and toss stuff out. Which is why Russia's 11-year-old Mir space station has come to resemble the cluttered dashboard of an old Dodge Dart The Dodge Dart was an automobile built by the Dodge division of the Chrysler Corporation from 1960 to 1976. The Dart was introduced as a lower-priced, shorter wheelbase, full-size Dodge in 1960 and 1961, became a mid-size car for 1962, and finally was a compact between 1963 and . After a four-month stay aboard Mir, U.S. astronaut John Blaha couldn't find a small, broken fan that he had removed from a refrigerator. He listed it as lost in space when he moved his belongings into the docked space shuttle Atlantis on Thursday. ``I have no idea where I let go of it,'' Blaha sheepishly sheep·ish adj. 1. Embarrassed, as by consciousness of a fault: a sheepish grin. 2. Meek or stupid. sheep told Mission Control. ``My experience being on this Mir for four months is we could spend hundreds of hours and find nothing.'' Engineers wanted Blaha to bring the fan from the Russian space station when he returns to Earth next week so they can figure out why it broke. This isn't the first time a NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. astronaut has left something behind in space. The late astronaut Manley ``Sonny'' Carter misplaced mis·place tr.v. mis·placed, mis·plac·ing, mis·plac·es 1. a. To put into a wrong place: misplace punctuation in a sentence. b. his watch aboard Discovery in 1989. It popped up five months later on Discovery's next flight - weightlessness weightlessness, the absence of any observable effects of gravitation. This condition is experienced by an observer when he and his immediate surroundings are allowed to move freely in the local gravitational field. caused it to float out from wherever it was. On Mir, though, lost-and-found is commonplace. Until Atlantis began ferrying crews and cargo to Mir in 1995, the Russians had no way of returning unwanted items; the Soyuz capsules were simply too small. As a result, 11 years worth of stuff is crammed into the 298,189-pound station, made up of six modules. NASA astronaut Jerry Linenger, Blaha's replacement, said it's ``like going up in an attic and finding interesting things from the past.'' |
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