Components
MEEP consisted of four separate experiments mounted in four separate Passive Experiment Carriers (PEC) installed on Mir's docking module. Each PEC consisted of three components; the experiment carrier, which contained the experiment itself, the sidewall carrier, which kept the PEC secure in the payload bay of the space shuttle during launch and return, and the handrail clamp, which was used to attach the PEC to the docking module.
The first experiment, Polished Plate Micrometeoroid and Debris (PPMD), consisted of gold, aluminium, and zinc plates and studied how often space debris hit the station, the sizes and sources of the debris, and the damage the debris might do on hitting a space station. The second, the Orbital Debris Collector (ODC), captured orbital debris in aerogel cells for return to Earth to determine the possible origins and components of that debris. The last two experiments, Passive Optical Sample Assemblies I (POSA I) and II (POSA II), tested various materials intended for use on the International Space Station including paint samples, glass coatings, multilayer insulation, and a variety of metallic samples.
Read more about this topic: Mir Environmental Effects Payload
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“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)