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Russian actress and a film director returned to Earth Sunday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.

Yulia Peresild, 37, and Klim Shipenko, 38, landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe at 04:36 GMT (10:06am IST), according to footage broadcast live by Russia’s Roscosmos space agency.

Shipenko appeared distressed but smiling as he exited the capsule, waving his hand to cameras before being carried off by medical workers for an examination.

Peresild, who plays the film’s starring role and was selected from some 3,000 applicants, was extracted from the capsule to applause and a bouquet of flowers.

The actress said she is “sad” to have left the ISS.

“It seemed that 12 days was a lot, but when it was all over, I didn’t want to leave,” she told Russian television.

“This is a one-time experience.”

The team was ferried back to terra firma by cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, who had been on the space station for the past six months. 

21st century space race 

The filmmakers had blasted off from the Russia-leased Baikonur Cosmodrome in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan earlier this month, travelling to the ISS with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov to film scenes for “The Challenge”. 

If the project stays on track, the Russian crew will beat a Hollywood project announced last year by Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise together with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The Russian movie’s plot, which has been mostly kept under wraps along with its budget, centres around a surgeon who is dispatched to the ISS to save a cosmonaut.

Shkaplerov, 49, along with the two Russian cosmonauts who were already aboard the ISS are said to have cameo roles in the film.

The mission was not without small hitches.

As the film crew docked at the ISS earlier this month, Shkaplerov had to switch to manual control. 

And when Russian flight controllers on Friday conducted a test on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft the ship’s thruster fired unexpectedly and destabilised the ISS for 30 minutes, a NASA spokesman told the Russian news agency TASS.

The team’s landing, which was documented by a film crew, will also feature in the movie, Konstantin Ernst, the head of the Kremlin-friendly Channel One TV network and a co-producer of “The Challenge”, told AFP.

Russian firsts

The mission will add to a long list of firsts for Russia’s space industry.

The Soviets launched the first satellite Sputnik, and sent into orbit the first animal, a dog named Laika, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, and the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova.

But compared with the Soviet era, modern Russia has struggled to innovate, and its space industry is fighting to secure state funding with the Kremlin prioritising military spending. 

Its space agency is still reliant on Soviet-designed technology and has faced a number of setbacks, including corruption scandals and botched launches.

Russia is also falling behind in the global space race, facing tough competition from the United States and China, with Beijing showing growing ambitions in the industry.

Russia’s Roscosmos was also dealt a blow after SpaceX last year successfully delivered astronauts to the ISS, ending Moscow’s monopoly for journeys to the orbital station. 

In a bid to spruce up its image and diversify its revenue, Russia’s space programme revealed this year that it will be reviving its tourism plan to ferry fee-paying adventurers to the ISS. 

After a decade-long pause, Russia will send two Japanese tourists – including billionaire Yusaku Maezawa – to the ISS in December, capping a year that has been a milestone for amateur space travel.

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New Study Finds Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall Bigger and Nearer Than Thought

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April 23, 2025

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New Study Finds Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall Bigger and Nearer Than Thought

Astronomers have revealed that the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, a massive network of galaxies, might be bigger than they realised. By mapping the cosmos with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)—the brightest explosions in the universe—astronomers found that this structure is even bigger than previously estimated. Surprisingly, portions of it also lie significantly closer to Earth than previously believed, challenging fundamental assumptions about how the universe is structured and evolves.
This cosmic structure was first observed in 2014 — a dense galaxy forming a filament of a supercluster.

A new study now extends the researchers’ previous work, but with a wider GRB sample. Hakkila and Zsolt Bagoly, authors of the study, have refined the measurements. They detected a number of relatively nearby GRBs in their sample. The evidence also shows the Great Wall is larger and wider than previously predicted.

Gamma-Ray Bursts Expose Structure Too Large for Current Models

According to a Space.com report, the GRBs figure prominently in the early discovery and more recent growth of the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall. These explosive outbursts — from either collapsing massive stars or colliding neutron stars — produce powerful jets that can be spotted over cosmological distances. Hakkila told the publication that GRBs act as another bright beacon for identifying galaxies, even those too faint to see directly. Because of their brightness, scientists can follow matter throughout the universe more distinctly than ever.

The Great Wall, over 10 billion light-years long, challenges the cosmological principle of uniform universe appearance. Its massive size indicates gaps in current theories and implies that the universe’s formation time was insufficient for such massive structures.

THESEUS May Reveal Full Scale of Cosmic Great Wall

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Burst observations reveal 542 GRB events, but more data is needed to fully understand the Great Wall’s scope due to misidentified origins and sparse sampling. Hakkila points toward the upcoming ESA mission THESEUS — the Transient High Energy Sources and Early Universe Surveyor — as the next major leap.

The mission aims to dramatically expand the catalogue of known GRBs, particularly at extreme distances. “It could finally provide the observational leverage needed to map the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall to its full extent,” Hakkila told Space.com, emphasising its role in refining our understanding of the universe’s large-scale structure.

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Ancient Greenland Rocks Found in Iceland Sheds Light on Late Antique Ice Age

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April 23, 2025

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Ancient Greenland Rocks Found in Iceland Sheds Light on Late Antique Ice Age

A study published in April 2025 provides new insight into one of the mysterious historical climate change periods known as LALIA (the Late Antique Ice Age). This period is known to last from 536 to 660 AD. The trio of scientists, namely, Christopher Spencer, Ross Mitchell and Thomas Gernon, published in a journal describing the analysis of misplaced Greenland rocks found lodged in the cliffs of Iceland, offering direct evidence of iceberg activity connected to this period of an ice age.

Discovery of the LALIA

The study was published in the journal Geology. As per Phys.org, the earlier research has depicted that the Earth’s northern hemisphere had undergone a chilly spell beginning around 540 AD because of the eruption of huge volcanoes, which led to the rise in debris in the atmosphere, leading to the darkening of the skies. A few historians speculated that the sudden cold weather led the Goths to attack the Romans in Europe, as they moved toward the south, warmer regions led to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Understanding the Misplaced Rocks

The researchers studied some cliffs on the western coast when they noticed that the rocks actually looked out of place. They collected a few rocks to study in the lab. The team crushed the rocks in the lab to study their remnants under a microscope. They pulled the zircon crystals from the centre of these rocks.

In their lab, the team crushed the rocks and looked at their remnants under a microscope, allowing them to pull out zircon crystals from their centres. These crystals can be used as a time capsule. After studying their age and composition, the scientists could trace the original place of these rocks across Greenland. This predicts that these rocks were moved by someone more than 1500 years ago.

The scientists studied the rocks’ age placed at the LALIA, depicting that the rocks were moved after breaking the ice from the large glaciers of Greenland that formed as per the colder scenarios formed during that period.

Scope of the Study

The research stands as a major step forward in understanding the Earth’s climate in the past. These rocks have given clear proof of increased glacial activity at the time of LALIA, indicating the outcomes of modern and future climatic changes.

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SpaceX Sends Europe’s First Reentry Capsule into Orbit on Bandwagon-3 Rideshare Mission

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April 23, 2025

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SpaceX Sends Europe’s First Reentry Capsule into Orbit on Bandwagon-3 Rideshare Mission

A Falcon 9 rocket soared into space from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on April 21 at 8:48 p.m. EDT (0048 GMT, April 22), carrying multiple payloads on SpaceX’s latest rideshare mission, Bandwagon-3. Among the diverse cargo onboard was Phoenix 1, a European-built reentry capsule developed by the German company Atmos Space Cargo. History will be made here in European aerospace with this launch, as Phoenix 1 becomes the first capsule from Europe intending to return from space and splash down on Earth after just one orbit, barely 1,200 miles offshore of Brazil.

Phoenix 1 Debuts as Europe’s First Private Reentry Capsule on SpaceX Bandwagon-3 Flight

According to Atmos Space Cargo, this mission is the first-ever atmospheric reentry attempt of a European private entity. Phoenix 1 is meant to test out essential technologies, including the company’s inflatable heat shield needed to return high-value cargo from space safely, the company noted. “Our mission is to revolutionise space logistics by enabling groundbreaking advancements in microgravity research, in-orbit manufacturing, defence applications, and life sciences,” says the firm’s website. The successful reentry and splashdown will support future commercial applications across these sectors.

Phoenix 1 shared the ride with several other payloads, including 425Sat-3, operated by South Korea’s Agency for Defence Development, and Tomorrow-S7, a weather satellite from the meteorological technology company Tomorrow Companies Inc. These collaborative launches are part of SpaceX’s growing commitment to enabling diverse and cost-effective access to low Earth orbits via its ridesharing programs. The Bandwagon missions, which began in April 2024 and continued with a second flight in December that year, operate alongside the long-established Transporter series, which has completed 13 missions since 2021.

Phoenix 1 Marks Shift Toward Scalable Reentry Missions in European Space Logistics

While the Transporter program is known for launching a large number of satellites—including a record-breaking 143 on a single flight in January 2021—the Bandwagon series focuses on smaller, more flexible ridesharing configurations. The dispatch of Phoenix 1 on Bandwagon 3 is the latest sign of a trend toward greater mission flexibility to develop and operate bespoke space technologies in support of different kinds of space exploration and logistics, and yet another indication of commercial innovation extending the boundaries of the possible in space.

A successful test flight of Phoenix 1 would have significant ramifications for European space companies, being positioned as proof of the Phoenix program—demonstrating mission-critical capabilities regarding return flights and retrofitting, while being the seed for a scalable reaping capability for research institutions and commercial entities.

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