Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space 60 years ago next week.

He was one of several stars of the Cold War space race between the Soviet Union and the United States who would became heroes to millions.

But the technology that sent them into orbit had less glorious origins in the dying days of Nazi Germany.

The Germans

Many of the key rocket scientists behind both the American and Soviet space programmes were Germans, who had worked on Adolf Hitler's "secret weapons", the V-1 and V-2 rockets.

Some 1,600 German rocket experts were secretly taken to the US in the dying days of World War II, while the Russians rounded up about 2,000 in one night at gunpoint and sent them to work in the Soviet Union.

Wernher von Braun

The inventor of Hitler's V-2 rocket—the world's first guided ballistic missile—was the architect of the US Apollo programme that would put a man on the Moon.

Brought across the Atlantic with his brother Magnus, he came up with the Saturn V rocket that powered the American lunar missions.

A three-man crew blasted off to the International Space Station Friday in a capsule honouring the 60th anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first person in space.

Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei lifted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at the expected time of 0742 GMT, footage broadcast by NASA TV showed, with docking expected at 1107 GMT.

A NASA commentator citing Russian Mission Control reports confirmed that the Soyuz capsule had entered orbit, with all stages of the flight proceeding as expected.

"Hey, Expedition 64 –- set the dinner table... Can't wait to join you on @Space_Station in a few hours!" Vande Hei tweeted to the crew on board the ISS before blast-off.

The launch came just ahead of Monday's anniversary of Gagarin's historic flight on April 12, 1961.

Calibration and validation (CAL/VAL) is a key technology for quantitative application of space-borne remote sensing data. However, the complex space environment can cause many uncertainties and degrade calibration accuracy. In-flight calibration is always needed. The thermal emission of the Moon is stable over hundreds of years because there is no atmosphere and no significant physical or chemical change on its surface. The deep space view of the Microwave Humidity Sounder onboard NOAA-18 has viewed the Moon many times every year. Under solar illumination, the lunar surface shows stable and periodical variation in microwave brightness temperature (TB). The Moon is a potential calibration source for thermal calibration

The related work was published in Science China Earth Sciences as "Calibration of the space-borne microwave humidity sounder based on real-time thermal emission from lunar surface." Based on the heat conductive equation, the temperature profiles of lunar regolith at different regions and local time are simulated numerically with the real-time solar radiance and angle of incidence.