Leap Year Post - The ninth planet, and Mir

I decided to upset the regularity (!) of my posts by creating this special post just for today - because today is that strangest of days, the 29th of February, which only occurs once in every four years.

The tradition of the extra day was instigated by Julius Caesar, although it was his son Augustus who added a day every four years, as opposed to every three years (Julius didn't do the math).
It is a day on which women can propose marriage to their beloved, flying in the face of convention.

In Scotland and Greece, the day is considered bad luck .

Meanwhile, on the outer reaches of our solar system...

The search for the elusive planet 9 continues, with the Cassini craft being roped in , hopefully to reveal the planet through millimetre wavelength recordings.
Having thoroughly imaged Saturns moons, it is now tasked with helping to discover the ninth planet, before being sent to a fiery death in Saturns atmosphere in 2017.

Cassini on extra duties before death in 2017     pic © Lockheed Martin

Mike Brown leads the search ( pantomime boo - hiss ! ) - Yes, he's the guy who demoted Pluto to its dwarf planet status.
So planet 9 better be BIG .
Allegedly it is ten times bigger than  Earth, but on a 10,000 year orbit of the sun, which puts it WAYYYY out there.
Good luck to Cassini !

The Mir Spektr module after being hit        pic NASA

When I first saw the picture above, I did a double take - after all, we expect objects in space to look pristine , clean and new.
Yet here is a battered reality - no mechanics in space - no valet service to wax the bodywork .
Just a working craft with a long and chequered history;
The ancestor of the ISS, no less .
The damage was caused by a Soyuz refuelling craft which hit the Mir twice.


Mir made history in many ways - launched in February 1986,  it was the first long term space station - and it spanned the collapse of the former Soviet republic, with astronaut Sergei Krikalev becoming known as ' The Last Soviet citizen' - he took off from the U.S.S.R., and landed in Kazakhistan.
It gathered unwanted notoriety after falling into disrepair and almost ending the lives of two astronauts, and when it was hit twice by a refuelling Soyuz craft, which struck the Mir module, damaging solar panels and causing depressurisation.
The first astronaut from the U.K., Helen Sharman boarded MIR  in 1991 and reported it as being full of flickering lights and BO.
Probably not well regarded as a venue on AirBnB, or Trip Advisor, then.

The historic and troubled Mir is no more, having been sent to a fiery death on re-entry in 2001, with the bulk of its wreckage burning up in the Earths atmosphere.

On the plus side, it lasted three times longer than expected, (fifteen years as opposed to five), and its legacy survives as the International Space Station,

For completists, the story of Mir is detailed in the books Dragonfly, and Off The Planet .