Step by Step 3000 第3册 Unit4:Warming up(2)

4. The United States Space Agency NASA says it's given up any real hope of reviving its Space Probe on Mars.
The spacecraft Pathfinder made its last transmission of scientific data from the surface of Mars at the end of September, 83 days after landing.
5. The US space shuttle Endeavor is preparing to return home in triumph after completing repairs on the Hubble Telescope.
The Endeavor's scheduled to land Monday at the Kennedy Space Center on Florida's Atlantic Coast, returning to the site where the mission began eleven days ago.
B. Keywords.

Mir/peace, cosmonaut, re-entry.
Vocabulary.

collision, microbe, flawless.
Now listen to a news report about the Russian Space Station Mir. Complete the following Mir facts.
Mir means peace in Russian.
The station had a core block of living quarters and six docking ports for supply ships.
Mir was built by the Soviet Union which is now Russia.
It costs 4.2 billion dollars to build and maintain it.
Scientists spent ten years building it, from 1986 to 1996.
It weighs 135 tons, and has a volume of 9,900 cubic feet.
It is 63 feet wide and 85 feet long.
Mir hosted 104 cosmonauts, astronauts and visitors.
46 flights were made to Mir.
Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest day in orbit, which is 438 days.
And cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev totaled 747 days between his three separated missions to Mir, which is the longest total for any human staying in space.
The Mir Space Station has been sailing through space for 15 years.
But Mir doesn't work very well any longer, and its orbit is failing.
It has been replaced by the new Internation Space Station where the USA, Russia and many other countries work together.
So Russia is going to bring Mir down into the Ocean.
They will be careful that none of the Mir's pieces hit places where people live.
This event will be big news as it should be.
Since the Russians began building Mir in 1986, it has survived a fire, collisions with other spacecrafts and even attacks on its wiring by microbes that ate metal and glass.
We have learned a lot from Mir about how to live and work in space.
The Russian Space Agency guided Mir back to Earth on March 23rd.
Fragments of the huge spacecraft splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean just as ground controllers had planned.
It was a flawless re-entry. No one was hurt.
Mir was truly a remarkable achievement of human ingenuity, breaking uncounted records for human spaceflight.
The Mir is gone, but will never be forgotten.