Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and previously held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS in 2010. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days on the station from 1994 until 1995. Mir's typical crew size was 3, though larger short-term crews made an appearance, peaking at ten during STS-71. Occupied for twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, 105 cosmonauts and astronauts from 12 different nations visited the station, and conducted 80 spacewalks.
Glynn S. Lunney (November 27, 1936 – March 19, 2021) was an American NASAengineer. An employee of NASA since its foundation in 1958, Lunney was a flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and was on duty during historic events such as the Apollo 11 lunar ascent and the pivotal hours of the Apollo 13 crisis. At the end of the Apollo program, he became manager of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first collaboration in spaceflight between the United States and the Soviet Union. Later, he served as manager of the Space Shuttle program before leaving NASA in 1985 and later becoming a Vice President of the United Space Alliance.
Lunney was a key figure in America's manned space program from Project Mercury through the coming of the Space Shuttle. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Space Trophy, which he was given by the Rotary Club in 2005. Chris Kraft, NASA's first flight director, described Lunney as "a true hero of the space age", saying that he was "one of the outstanding contributors to the exploration of space of the last four decades".
A transit of Earth by the Moon, as photographed by the Deep Space Climate Observatory from the Sun-Earth L1Lagrangian point. This animation was compiled from a set of 60 frames—20 distinct images, each compiled from monochrome images taken in red, green and blue filters—taken over the course of five hours on July 16, 2015. Each monochrome frame was taken every 30 seconds. Due to the speed of the Moon's motion, this results in a slight green shift in some frames of the animation.
