[彭蒙惠英语] 新闻剪辑(1/3)
NEWS worthy Clips (1/3)
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News worthy Clips
International station going multinational
The International Space Station, which NASA has long as a model of global cooperation, is finally about to become international.
Space shuttle Atlantis is to drop off the station’s first European room, a laboratory called “Columbus.” The delivery of Columbus will add some diversity to an center that, though funded by 16 countries, has so far been strictly bi-national.
The 9-year-old station’s current nine rooms are owned by just two countries, Russia and the United States. Thirty-seven of the 38 astronauts who have lived there are either Russian or American.
Also delivered to the station by Atlantis: French astronaut Leopold Eyharts, whose luggage includes chocolate mousse and an entrée of duck. Expected to stay two months, Eyharts will become the station’s second European resident and will do the first experiments inside Columbus.
The upcoming changes “will finally allow us to realize the full benefit of this international partnership,” says Kenny Todd, the station’s manager. “That’s something we’ve looked forward to for a very, very long time.”
It’s also something NASA has worried about for a long time. A more international flavor on the station also means multiple Mission Control Centers in multiple time zones. It means an onslaught of Earth-to-space chatter and more chances for cross-cultural misunderstandings.
The risk is that “your words are not coming across as you mean them,” Schlegel says, because of “limited knowledge of that language, with [no] eye-to-eye contact.”
The lab that will finally launch on Atlantis is roughly as big inside as an RV and holds gear for experiments in biology, the behavior of in space and other subjects. It will be operated by engineers at a Mission Control near Munich, Germany, who will use English to communicate with the engineers in Mission Control in Houston.
Vocabulary Focus
drop off (phr v) ---to take something and leave it at a particular place
flavor (n) ---a particular quality or character
onslaught (n) ---an overwhelming amount of something that is difficult to deal with
Specialized terms
