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Working staff help trainees with a underwater training at Russia's Star City space training center outside Moscow, March 3, 2010. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Star City space training center
MOSCOW, March 4 -- An underwater laboratory, a centrifuge for adaptive overload training ... all the experimental facilities in Russia's Star City, a self-contained town surrounded by deep forests, have drawn Xinhua reporters'eyes wide open.
As this year marks the 50th anniversary since the founding of Star City, the usually secluded space training center on Wednesday invited journalists to explore the space mysteries behind its high walls.
Founded in 1960 some 32 km northeast of Moscow, Star City is a highly confidential and guarded research and training installation where cosmonauts have lived and trained.
Xinhua reporters first visited an underwater laboratory, whose interior was primarily a 30m-diameter gigantic swimming pool if not for the equipment and machines surrounding it.
Full-size models of Russia's Zar functional cargo module, Pirs docking module and small scientific modules at the International Space Station were hanging right above the pool.
The pool, with the water temperature fixed at 30 degrees Celsius, was used to simulate the state of weightlessness, a staff member said.
When the training started, cosmonauts in spacesuits entered the models immersed into the water and began virtual space work that lasted for hours. Their body data under the state of weightlessness was monitored.
Peeking through an observation hole, Xinhua reporters saw cosmonauts busy working under the blue water as if they were actually floating in space.
Since underwater training currently cannot simulate all characteristics of weightlessness, it is actually much harder for cosmonauts to conduct underwater operations rather than in space. Therefore most of them could easily adapt to real spacework after multiple sessions of underwater training.
The next training was at the centrifuge for adaptive overload. As one of the world's largest and most advanced centrifuges, it has a two-meter-diameter cylindrical rotating arm 18 meters long.
A working staff monitor data during a centrifugal training at Russia's Star City space training center outside Moscow, March 3, 2010. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Star City space training center. (Xinhua/Lu Jinbo)
During the training, cosmonauts would sit in the module at the arm's far side, while the arm rotated around the axis to simulate overload conditions.
With a spinning speed of over 30 circles per minute, the rotating arm could create an overload of gravity some 13 times (13G) that of the average body weight. Usually astronauts would only experience an overload of 3-4G when blasting off or landing within a spacecraft.
Next on the trip was a look at some advanced aerospace facilities that were often shown on TV, such as a Mir module, Soyuz spacecraft, a genuine spacesuit made in Russia and simulators of ISS Zvezda service module and Zar functional cargo module.
To date, hundreds of Russian and foreign astronauts have been trained at the so-called "cradle of cosmonauts."
sumber : http://www.dalimunthe.com/2010/05/visit-to-russias-space-training-center.html
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