STS-67

STS-67 was a human spaceflight mission using Space Shuttle Endeavour that launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on 2 March 1995.

Crew

Mission highlights

Astro-2 was the second dedicated Spacelab mission to conduct astronomical observations in the ultraviolet spectral regions. It consists of three unique instruments – the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT), the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT) and the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo-Polarimeter Experiment (WUPPE). These experiments will select targets from a list of over 600 and observe objects ranging from some inside the solar system to individual stars, nebulae, supernova remnants, galaxies and active extragalactic objects. This data supplemented data collected on the Astro-1 mission flown on STS-35 in December 1990 aboard Columbia.

Because most UV radiation is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, it cannot be studied from the ground. The far and extreme ultraviolet region of the spectrum was largely unexplored before Astro-1, but knowledge of all wavelengths is essential to obtain an accurate picture of the universe. Astro-2 had almost twice the duration of its predecessor, and a launch at a different time of year allowed the telescopes to view different portions of the sky. The mission was designed to fill in large gaps in astronomers' understanding of the universe and lay the foundations for more discovery in the future.

Astro Boy

Astro Boy, known in Japan by its original name Mighty Atom (Japanese: 鉄腕アトム, Hepburn: Tetsuwan Atomu), is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka from 1952 to 1968. The story follows the adventures of an android named Astro Boy and a selection of other characters.

The manga was adapted for TV as Astro Boy, the first popular animated Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiar worldwide as anime. After enjoying success abroad, Astro Boy was remade in the 1980s as New Mighty Atom, known as Astroboy in other countries, and again in 2003. In November 2007, he was named Japan's envoy for overseas safety. An American computer-animated film based on the original manga series by Tezuka was released on October 23, 2009. In March 2015, a trailer was released announcing a new animated series.

Plot

Astro Boy is a science fiction series set in a futuristic world where Robots co-exist with humans. Its focus is on the adventures of the titular "Astro Boy" (sometimes called simply "Astro"): a powerful android created by the head of the Ministry of Science, Doctor Tenma (aka Dr. Astor Boyton II in the 1960 English dub). Dr. Tenma created Astro to replace his son Tobio ('Astor' in the 1960s English dub; 'Toby' in the 1980s English dub and the 2009 film), who died in a car accident (ran away in the 2003 anime; vaporized in the 2009 film). Dr. Tenma built Astro in Tobio's memory and treated Astro as lovingly as if he was the real Tobio. However, Dr. Tenma soon realized that the little android could not fill the void of his lost son, especially given that Astro could not grow older or express human aesthetics (in one set of panels in the manga, Astro is shown preferring the mechanical shapes of cubes over the organic shapes of flowers). In the original 1960 edition, Tenma rejected Astro and sold him to a cruel circus owner, Hamegg (the Great Cacciatore in the '60 English dub).