CONSTELLATIONS

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The fascination for Space comes from the beginning of humanity. In the Greek mythology, Earth is represented by Gaïa, mother land, and the sky is Ouranos, another divinity. It shows the clear division between the human world and beyond. In the Bible, the sky often refers to the paradise where angels live. Then, we discovered that the sky was quite bigger than we thought. Then came the notion of a wider space, with other galaxies and the idea of another life. We wanted to explore it further and further, and maybe discover a. First plane in 1903.

First satellite, Spoutnik 1, in 1957. First dog in space, Laïka, a month after. First man in space, Youri Gagarine, in 1961. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969. Among all these big events, Alexei Leonov, a famous astronaut, stepped into the void in 1965. He stayed 12 minutes in the void, with only a 5 meters cable to attach him to the spaceship. His scope was to show the world and especially its greatest rival, NASA, the supremacy of URSS in terms of space technology.

During the expedition Alexei Leonov and its peer, Pavel Ivanovitch Beliaev, encountered many issues. First, the spacesuit was not completely adapted to a dive in the void and it dilated, creating difficulties for the cosmonaut to enter back in the spaceship. He decided to let go a part of the air in his spacesuit to be able to pass through the trap. Then, there were issues in the navigation board, which led to a deviation of more than 380 kilometers of the initial landing position when they came back on Earth.

Alexei Leonov took many risks to spend only 12 minutes in the void. Speaking of void, this term is not quite correct as space is not completely empty. The truth is there are particles in the void, but so few that we consider it as empty.

The void is also composed of what physicians currently call dark matter. This matter is not really consistent, it is supposedly a form of energy composed of WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) that would explain the movements of galaxies. Nowadays, we cannot prove the presence of dark matter as it is undetectable. It is just a supposition that will be confirmed if we succeed to interact with it in the future.