The Apollo Wives

I recently watched a documentary about the Apollo missions according to the wives of the astronauts. The wives felt that they had to create the perfect family because they were on the television so much and since the astronauts were seen as heroes, whom Americans could look up to.

However, I was quite surprised to learn that seven out of the ten women interviewed for the documentary had been divorced. The wife of Donn Eisele, from Apollo 7, said that she and her husband were divorced shortly after Apollo 7 returned home because he had been with another woman. Clearly, it was a stressful life for the Apollo wives, between the cameras constantly infiltrating their lives and the worry of not knowing whether their husbands would return home or not.

“The Things They Carried” [into Space]

We have taken many missions into space over the last fifty years since NASA's founding, and we have not hesitated to bring along some of our most treasured historical mementos. For instance, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber prop from the Star Wars movies.

Besides that, a few small pieces from the Wright Flyer, which made its debut flight in 1903 and only managed to get a few feet off of the ground. Sixty-six years later, the airplane managed to fly all the way to the moon. Also, a lead cargo tag, which made the journey from England to Virginia in 1611, was uncovered at the Jamestown colony and then flown aboard the space shuttle.

Of course, we have left several things on the moon, including the first flag erected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Also, after hitting it with an improvised club, Alan Shepard left a golf ball during Apollo 14, while Charles Duke left a portrait of his family.

Furthermore, thousands of names have been brought into space aboard certain spacecraft, like Stardust and Dawn, via microchips.

A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words

Okay, so if one picture is worth 1,000 words, then that means that 100,000 pictures are worth 100,000,000 words? That's a lot of zeros. That's a lot of words. But that was the goal of the Expedition 22 crew aboard the International Space Station, which just landed on March 18, thus ending Commander Jeff Williams' five-and-a-half month stay on the station. Williams was actually trying to break his previous record from Expedition 13 in 2006, when he snapped 83,856 pictures.

Among the 100,000 photos taken by Commander Williams, an image of the Houston metropolitan area at night


The number of pictures taken by all the crews that have manned the International Space Station totals 639,000 pictures.

Visit the 2008 "top ten" pictures taken from the International Space Station here.

Russian Mission to Mars

Phobos, meaning "fear," is a tiny moon, only spanning about 25 kilometers across, that orbits around Mars. Phobos is so small that it does not even have enough gravity to allow it to acquire a round shape, like our own moon. The Red Planet's other moon Deimos, meaning "panic," is even smaller. We have some theories about how these tiny moons came to orbit Mars, but we are still unsure. That's where Russia comes in with their new spacecraft, Phobos-Grunt.

The name comes from the Russian, Fobos-Grunt, for "Phobos Soil" because the primary objective for the mission is to collect and study soil samples and then bring them back to the earth. The last time material was collected from another world was in 1976, by Luna 24. The craft will also observe Mars and its environment, looking for past or potential life.

Furthermore, the craft will carry the LIFE experiment, which stands for the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. This experiment consists of sending some selective microorganisms—representatives from bacteria, eukaryota, and archaea—for a three-year interplanetary trip to see if they will survive. This experiment is designed to simulate a Martian meteoroid on a journey to the earth.

The idea for the Russian mission to Phobos came about in 1999, three years after a devastating loss when the Mars-96 craft broke up in the earth's atmosphere during launch.  It was scheduled to launch in October 2009, but the mission was delayed and the next launch window is not until 2011. Below is a model of the spacecraft.

“Hubble 3D”

A new film, called "Hubble 3D," was released on March 19, 2010. This film, documenting the flight of STS-125 in 2009, is narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, starring the astronauts and the stars. Its run time is approximately 45 minutes.

The documentary was made possible by the IMAX 3-D cameras, which the astronauts were trained to operate in Houston, that were launched aboard the Atlantis shuttle mission, whose goal was repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. The cameras were running as the astronauts took five spacewalks to work on the telescope so that it could continue producing its amazing photographs of deep space. Also included in the documentary are the astounding images taken the Hubble telescope. And, of course, it is in 3-D, so all the stars in the telescope's stunning photographs come to life.

This is not the first time that IMAX 3-D cameras have captured images of work out in space: in 2001, the camera first ventured to the International Space Station.

Shrimp Surprise

In November 2009, at nearly 600 feet below the Windless Bight on the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica, NASA scientists dropped a borehole camera, hoping to capture some of the first images of what life is like beneath an ice shelf. The borehole camera actually consists of three cameras: one that looks forward, one that looks to the side, and one that looks backward. The scientists drilled an eight-inch diameter hole in which to drop the probe, and what they found below the ice shelf really surprised them: one little, orange shrimp swimming about.

The shrimp, who was seen via the backward-looking camera, has been identified as a  three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod. The Windless Bight is 12.5 miles away from any open water, and while all kinds of life forms can thrive in the Antarctic waters, the lone shrimp was still quite unexpected. One of the scientists explains, "We were like little kids huddling around, just oohing and aahing at this little creature swimming around and giving us a little show. It was the thrill of discovery that made us giddy; just totally unexpected."

So, of course the scientists have to wonder: if we can find life in some of the most unexpected places here on Earth, why could life not exist elsewhere in the universe?

Watch the video of the shrimp and read the NASA article here.

March 20: Sun-Earth Day

This year, Sun-Earth Day takes place on March 20 and will be celebrated with a live webcast  at 1:00 p.m. EDT, discussing electromagnetic force and magnetism, and specifically, magnetic storms. Sun-Earth Day actually consists of several events throughout the year designed to engage students in science and give them the opportunity to talk with scientists.

It is useful to learn about the sun, our closest star, because the sun dictates the space weather in our solar system. In fact, NASA says that "the largest, single, challenge for astronauts traveling to Mars will be to overcome exposure to solar storms and radiation." Also, in one second, the sun can convert 4 million tons of matter into energy.

View the Sun-Earth Day website here.

No News from Phoenix

In the dawn hours of August 4, 2007, NASA’s latest Mars lander, designated Phoenix, awaited its departure from Earth. Then, in a burst of fire and smoke, Phoenix rose into the air, fastened to a Delta II rocket and headed for the arctic region of the Red Planet. After traveling about 423 million miles, the craft landed on Mars on May 25 of 2008. It began to dig through the surface of the planet to reach the ice beneath. With equipment such as cameras, microscopes, and even ovens, Phoenix will study the history of the frozen water and attempt to identify conditions possible for microbial life. A weather station is also attached to Phoenix, used for tracking Mars’s atmosphere and weather. With the help of the Phoenix mission, humans will be ever closer to understanding the mysteries of Mars.

However, the Martian winters are always hard for the landers, like Phoenix, because of the lack of sunlight, which is needed to power the craft. The Phoenix lander was not even designed to withstand the winter, and it has already exceeded its mission length by two months. The Mars Odyssey orbiter is listening in for signals coming from Phoenix: listening periods were scheduled for January and February and Odyssey heard nothing. One final listening period is yet to come in early April, and maybe Phoenix will wake up by then.

NASA “Webb-cam”

NASA has installed a new webcam so that we can watch the progress of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope right on our computers. The Webb telescope is designed to observe deep space, and it is expected to launch sometime in 2014. It is a joint project between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.

The webcam is located in the Building 29 clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and the image is updated once every minute. Of course, people will be visible mostly during normal work hours from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST. What an interesting way to actually view the work happening at NASA.

View the webcam here.

Biofuel from Space Fruit

"What if space held the key to producing alternative energy crops on Earth? That's what researchers are hoping to find in a new experiment on the International Space Station." That is the recent headline on NASA's website, and it certainly caught my attention—surely it would entice the general public around the world.

The experiment, called National Lab Pathfinder-Cells 3, is utilizing the fruit jatropha curcas, which produces oil adequate for converting into biofuel, to determine if the effects of microgravity can help the plant cells grow faster, thus allowing for more biofuel production.

Some of the jatropha plant cell cultures went up to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Endeavour (STS-130) last month and they will come back on Discovery (STS-131) in April. A set of control cultures is located at the University of Florida. Scientists will compare the two sets of cultures to see if microgravity induces any changes on the plant cells.

See the full article from NASA here.

No Electricity: Apollo 13 vs. Earth

After last weekend's wind storm, leaving us without electricity for two and half days, and now having read Chaikin's chapter on Apollo 13, I can appreciate the astronauts' struggle to return home. The explosion in the service module forced the crew to shut down power to the command module so that they might conserve what little battery power they had. They had to withstand forty degree temperatures—compared to our house which only got down to fifty degrees. They had to soar away from the earth—from home—and head towards the moon, which no longer seemed quite so appealing since the astronauts were instead just trying to survive.

However, even through all the stress of the precarious situation, the astronauts finally made it home, and I am so glad they did. If the lunar module descent engine burn had been unsuccessful, I could not imagine zooming past the earth, missing it by thousands of miles, and suddenly being deserted in space.

Maybe loss of electricity on the earth is inconvenient, but loss of electricity in space is life-threatening.

Planet Earth

NASA has released some wonderful new images of the earth. A series of pictures, taken between June and September 2001 by the Moderate Resolution Imagining Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the Terra satellite, were then stitched together to form this one, high-resolution image:

See some more pictures, new and old (compare the above recent image with the 1972 image from Apollo 17!), here.

Response: Compelling Rationales for Spaceflight?

Roger Launius' essay, "Compelling Rationales for Spaceflight?" inspired some thinking on whether it is worthwhile to venture into space or not and I noticed a lot of parallels between his paper and my paper—how we have the same, basic arguments:

"1) Human destiny/survival of the species."

Though I certainly think that humans ought to pursue our inherent desire to explore space, this, I think, causes me the most trouble. Is it worth spending all that money just because we feel the need to explore? Wernher von Braun said that space travel was "as inevitable as the rising of the sun; man has already poked his nose into space and he is not likely to pull it back." I think that we may as well pursue those passions that give us pleasure and fulfillment. However, I do not think that it is necessary to colonize space: we were given the earth and I do not think it is right of us to "own" the rest of the universe.

"2) Geopolitics/national pride and prestige."

Do Americans need to be spurred by international competitiveness in order to pursue human spaceflight? If China begins making huge advancements in space travel, will we want to continue with our work? Are we still proud of our work, like we were in the 1960s? Will we do science for science's sake or for politics?

"3) National security and military applications."

Sending up satellites has become so commonplace, everyone does it. I am sure that the military finds space very useful for reconnaissance purposes, particularly during war. If we do not keep up, everyone will be spying on us and we will be spying on no one, and we may get left behind.

"4) Economic competitiveness and satellite applications."

Is "space tourism" a good incentive to go into space? Will that get people interested in human spaceflight, or will it cost so much money that only a select few will have the pleasure of experiencing weightlessness? Launius talks about space as a utopia: "In essence, the advocates [of spaceflight] have long believed that it is human destiny to become a multiplanetary species, not just as an end in itself, but because of the desire to create a utopian society free from the constraints of cultures on Earth." I do not feel that we should spread ourselves out across the solar system, colonizing the moon or Mars, for whatever problems we have on the earth, they will surely follow us into space.

"5) Scientific discovery and understanding."

Of course it is a nice amenity and it is a good idea to continue expanding our knowledge and our technological capabilities, but we cannot rely so heavily on technology. This was made clear during the power outages over the weekend due to the wind storm. It is quite difficult to take care of our basic needs, like food and water, when we rely on technology and suddenly lose it.

Most people can probably identify these five basic issues. But is there anything else? Are there any other motivators or deterrents, or can we no longer be original in our thinking? I almost just with there was a black and white answer, and yet there when it comes to talking about human spaceflight, there are so many shades of gray in between.

"The American public is notorious for its willingness to support programs in principle but to oppose their funding at levels appropriate to sustain them. Most are also in favor of NASA as an organization but are relatively unfamiliar with the majority of its activities and objectives and sometimes question individual projects."

I think one of the most important things is for NASA to continue working to educate the public on their projects so that we will not forget about the importance of astronomy and spaceflight. Additionally, perhaps the human spaceflight program will be a success if we try not to be one extreme or the next: we cannot abandon spaceflight, nor can we colonize the universe or go overboard with space tourism. Spaceflight, like food, is good in moderation. Therefore, since Americans never like their tax dollars to be wasted, even though they are anyway, maybe it would be more useful if we focus on NASA's principles, not their budget. Maybe it would be really useful if the government stopped spending so much money altogether. Maybe, I am just idealistic.

Chile Earthquake Changes Earth’s Rotation?

NASA scientists are claiming that the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile last week has changed the earth's rotation, shortening the length of the day to 1.26 milliseconds. Apparently, the earthquake has caused the earth's figure axis to shift by three inches, but the figure axis is different from the north-south axis around which the earth rotates. The figure axis is offset from the north-south axis by thirty-three feet and represents the axis around which the earth's mass is balanced. The quake caused some of the earth's mass to shift vertically, hence shifting the figure axis.

Read the full article posted at Space.com.