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Int'l space school opens in Samara

Particiants in the school studies will acquire knowledge of the use of computer-aided technologies for making satellites
Photo EPA/ITAR-TASS Archive
Photo EPA/ITAR-TASS Archive

SAMARA, August 19 (Itar-Tass) - The ninth Internaitonal summer space school opens here on Monday.

The principal purpose of the space school is to form a common inter-university educational space in the field of credited space technologies. Representatives of higher learning establishments of Spain, Germany, Colombia, Estonia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine have arrived here to attend two-week classes, Igor Belokonov, director of the school, professor at Samara state aerospace university (SGAU), told Itar-Tass.

Students at the school will familiarize themselves with the University's programme for scientific experiments, plans for the development of the Samar-based space rocket center TSKB-Progress, and hear a course of lectures on micro- and nano-scale satellites engineeringand control.

Particiants in the school studies will acquire knowledge of the use of computer-aided technologies for making satellites and designing electronic systems of spacecraft

The offered educational programme has been recognized by SGAU's foreign partner universities and may be subseuently taken into account in the Master's Degree curriculum.

The school will end its work on August 31.

International summer space schools have been held in Samara since 2003. The work of the first schools resulted in the implementation of the space mail project "YES-2" financed by the European Space Agency. The essence of the project was in a basically new way to deliver small cargo, the results of space experiments, for example, from space to Earth.

A capsule witha payload was lowered from orbit by means of a superlight rope made from polyethylene fiber --dyneema. This material is both lightweight and highly durable: the 30-km rope, with its own weight being 5 kg, is capable of enduring a cargo of several hundreds of kilogrammes. Following the capsule's descent by several tens of kilometres, a special devices at both ends cut the rope which then burnt up in the dense layers of the atmosphere while the capsule was inflated by gas, increased in size, and moving down at a minimum rate descended to Earth as if by a parachute.

"The project was successfully implemened in 2007 during the flight of the Photon M3 science satellite, with the results entered in the Guinness Book of Records," Belokonov said.