|
   |
 |
                 
|
UPDATE # 91 - September 13, 1999 PART 1: Hurricane Floyd headed KSCward HURRICANE FLOYD HEADED KSCWARD
I received an email today from Brandt (our correspondent at Kennedy Space Center). It read: It was just announced that KSC will be closed with mandatory evacuation in effect for Tuesday and Wednesday this week due to hurricane Floyd. The weather guys are saying that if we experience the full storm surge that the water level will reach the bottom of the second floor of the HQ building. Today all personnel are instructed to begin HurCon preparations. There will not be any work conducted at the center other than that. I will be here for the day .... And then, in typical Brandt humor, he closed with, "Surfs Up!" I think we can be pretty sure of some great journals coming out of this experience. Hopefully, it will be an experience of preparing for nothing more than a little storm as we all wish Floyd back out to sea. Stay tuned! Linda UPCOMING EVENTS
Please be sure to visit each site before the scheduled time. Usually these events require pre-registration and some include preparation. Remember, you can get help if you've never chatted online before. Join your chat host Oran Cox during one of his weekly practice sessions. http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/qchats/practice/ ->Wednesday, September 15, 1999: 11-noon PDT (2-3 EDT, 6-7 GMT) QuestChat with Steven Daugherty. Steven ensures the active thermal control (ATC) system functions properly on the ISS. This is part of our Focus: International Space Station series. Read Steven Daugherty's profile at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/daugherty.html Pre-register at: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/iss99 ->Wednesday, September 22, 1999 10-11 a.m. PDT (1-2 EDT, 5-6 GMT) Webcast from the International Space Station Mock-Up and Training Facility at Johnson Space Center. This is a virtual tour with opportunity to ask questions, part of the Focus: International Space Station series. See: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/events/iss99 ->Thursday, September 23, 1999, 9-10 a.m. PDT (12-1 EDT, 4-5 GMT) Ken Schrock, radio frequency engineer Today, Ken works as a radio frequency engineer, designing equipment to help launch vehicles and space craft navigate. But he has also worked as a technical writer (writing flight manuals), a flight test engineer, an instrumentation engineer, a telemetry engineer, and a data communications engineer. Whew! There is plenty to learn about Ken's diverse career history. Read Ken Schrock's profile at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/schrock.html Register on STO Chat page: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/chats ->Wednesday, September 29, 1999, 10-11:30 a.m. PDT (1-2:30 EDT, 5-6:30 GMT) Introduction to KSC Shuttle Countdown: Landing to Launch YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, WE HAVE ANSWERS
I am always delighted to hear from you, but I need to let you know that I am in no way a NASA expert! At NASA Quest we have a terrific resource available to get REAL answers from REAL experts. Here's an example of a recent one: QUESTION: Do satellites cast a shadow on the Earth? How large is the shuttle's shadow? ANSWER from A. Epstein on September 10, 1999: No, shadows are not cast. Air scatters light, and the shadow is blurred out. The further away you get from the object, the smaller the shadow. Sometimes these question and answer pairs are so compelling that we share them in the updates (like the one from Patty Currier below). To see more examples and find out how to get an answer that I cannot offer, please visit: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/ask/question.html [Editor's note: Patty works with scientists who want to fly biology experiments aboard the space shuttle. She helps to be sure that they get an accurate result from their experiments. In this journal she steps outside of that role to answer a question from a student.] A BABY BORN IN SPACE http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/currier.html August 26, 1999 I was recently contacted by Brandt Secosh who had received a question from Nur Agustinus, a student in Indonesia, regarding the birth of a baby in space (microgravity). I thought this was an interesting question that should be shared with all of the Space Team Online followers! First, the question: If a baby were born in space (microgravity) and grew up there, would it influence the structure of the bone or body? Would microgravity cause the muscles to be smaller than a child growing up normally on Earth? I work with a lot of students here at Kennedy Space Center, but before I started doing this, I worked in a bone lab. So I think I can help you with your question. This is for a lady who is going to have a baby as soon as she gets in space. Things will be more complicated if the fetus develops in space and is then born, so I'm not going to try to answer that one yet. If a pregnant woman flies in space and gives birth almost right away, the baby will be born pretty normal because it will develop in the womb very normally at Earth's gravity. What happens then is very interesting. The bone cells are programmed to grow--they don't stop until you are a teenager or so. But it is gravity as a stress that makes the cells in the bones have the right alignment, or stack up properly, and pull the bone so that it forms straight. Without gravity, the baby's bones won't get long and thin like adult bone. They will be very easy to break, and they won't grow as fast. This is true for arms and legs. The bones at the top of the baby's head will actually grow thicker and stronger than on Earth. This is because your heart does not have to work so hard to move blood and other fluid from your feet to your upper body because there is no gravity. What happens is that the heart still pulls on the fluid in the legs, which now comes out much more easily. This causes the upper body to have more fluid and more pressure, which causes stress. Stress is always what makes bone grow and change. So, more pressure, more growth in the skull. The bones in the hands will probably be normal because the baby/child/adult will use his hands just like on Earth. The feet will probably not grow much because they don't get the stress from having the weight of your whole body on them--no stress, not much growth. Ribs are interesting. Ribs protect your lungs and give support to your body so they don't collapse. They would probably be okay, but they'd develop thinner than on Earth so they wouldn't be nearly as strong. The spine is really going to be affected. The gravity won't push / pull down on you, so the vertebrae don't feel the stress, so they won't grow. But they will get stress from the spinal cord as it grows and pushes out. So you would probably end up with thinner, very easily crushed vertebrae. Muscles work the same way. They need stress to grow and develop. Gravity is a stress force that pulls in one direction causing the muscle to develop in the right shape. So, if it is a muscle that won't be used much (say, the muscles that move your feet), they won't grow nearly as strong. Some muscles will be almost the same, such as your hand muscles. They aren't much affected by gravity--they are more affected by how the other muscles in your hands contract and release. They are stressed independently of gravity. Other muscles, like your heart, will be different. Your heart won't have to work as hard because there is no gravity to make blood circulation difficult. This takes a while to happen though. With a baby just born, probably the heart will never develop nearly as strong as a baby's on Earth will. Muscles and bones work together. The muscles are attached to bone, and they are very tightly connected. If you exercise a muscle, it pulls on the bone and causes a pulling stress. This helps the bone grow stronger in that area. This is why kids are told to play around outside when they are young--their bones grow very fast, and if the child does a lot of exercise, the muscles get strong, making the bone very strong. So, a baby born in space is going to have pretty strange and weak bones in most parts of their body. This shouldn't affect them too much if they spend their whole life in space, but they will be in a lot of trouble if they come back to Earth. Their leg and feet bones will be too weak to hold them, and the spine will probably crush under its own weight. The heart muscle will not be strong enough to pump blood around the whole body because of gravity pulling the blood down, and leg muscles will be too weak for them to stand. Basically, your bones and muscles will be much too heavy to support, and you will fall down in a big heap and die - (unless the mother is very insistent and special equipment is made so the baby can exercise muscles and bones to make them similar to the ones on Earth -but you still have the heart and other things...). But if you are a baby born in space and someone drops you on your head when you return to Earth, your skull will be nice and thick. Isn't bone a really neat thing? [Editor's note: Lori is STO's correspondent at Johnson Space Center. As such she is often allowed to observe events that are typically reserved for project participants. Here she shares a bit about a student oriented project that we discussed a bit in our chat with Sally Ride. http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/frontiers/chat_archives/ride03-23-99.html ] EARTHKAM FLIES ON STS-99 http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/keith.html September 1, 1999 It's that time of year again, time for a new school year to start -- new friends, new interests, new teachers, new subjects, and new opportunities. Last week, I had an opportunity to sit in on a meeting concerning EarthKAM. I had heard about the project, and I wanted to find out more about it. EarthKAM is an acronym for Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students. The first flight flown was STS-89, with 37 schools participating. It just so happens that the principle investigator (person who oversees the project) for this payload is astronaut Sally Ride. She headed up the meeting. It was exciting sitting less than an arm's length away from someone who has been in space. Sally Ride was the first American woman to go up in space, and I'm sure her background is fascinating. She seemed very excited about this project. The next working mission for EarthKAM is STS-99, with about 100 middle schools and about 10,000 students taking part in real time. A few of the participants are international schools from Japan, Germany and France. Schools are chosen to participate by proposals sent in by the teachers. Those chosen to participate are sent curriculum materials ahead of time to allow them to plan their classroom lesson plans. What a cool thing to be learning about at school! They didn't have neat stuff like this when I was in school. EarthKAM is a payload sponsored by NASA's education branch. An electronic still camera will be programmed to take specific pictures from space. The truly neat thing about this project is middle school students are actually controlling the camera from all over the world. Participating schools send in requests via the Internes to photograph a certain area or location on the Earth from space. Would you be interested in doing something like that? The middle school students are involved with the mission planning. The pictures they want taken must be requested two orbits ahead (it takes about 90 minutes to orbit the Earth once). Once the picture is taken from the shuttle or the International Space Station (ISS), it is saved on the hard drive until it is downlinked back to Earth. It takes about four hours from the time the picture is requested until it is actually seen. Can you imagine -- just four hours to set up and receive pictures of the Earth taken from space? Isn't that amazing?! Undergraduate students, at the University of California at San Diego, have set up an EarthKAM Mission Control Center (EarthKAM MCC) to make sure everything is working right with the camera hardware and software. When the students use the Internet to send information about where/what they want photographs of, the EarthKAM MCC takes this information (for each orbit) and relays it to the camera via computer. Once the photographs are taken, they are downlinked back to the EarthKAM MCC and then sent back over the Internet to the students. It is planned for EarthKAM to go onboard ISS in the spring of 2000, working with students that fall. Though the project is geared for middle school students, the information gathered can be utilized and enjoyed by students of all ages. EarthKAM began as KidSat, and it was flown on three shuttle missions: STS-76 with three schools participating, STS-81 with 17 schools participating, and STS-86 with 52 middle schools participating. Following are a few links to different websites where you can learn all about the EarthKAM project. Do your own research and see what you come up with. This is certainly a project my family and I want to keep an eye on . . . I hope you all have a fun and exciting new school year -- LaunchPad, the official EarthKAM Web site http://www.EarthKAM.ucsd.edu/ List of the KidSat images http://kidsat.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ks_unc.pl Search for KidSat Images http://kidsat.jpl.nasa.gov/kidsat/datasys/forms.html STATUS OF COLUMBIA PROCESSING
Below, we provide reports on the processing of Shuttle Columbia taken from
the detailed daily reports found at the NASA Shuttle Status web site at
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/status/status.htm
At times these reports will contain jargon and unfamiliar terms; our
intent is not to confuse you but to provide a glimpse at all the steps
involved.
To read more about the damage to wiring in the orbiters you may have seen
reported, see:
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/status/stsstat/1999/sep/9-02-99s.htm
For Columbia, other than initial inspections associated with the short
experienced during STS-93, full wiring inspections will be performed when
Columbia arrives at the Boeing North American shuttle factory in Palmdale,
Ca., late this month.
Initial wiring inspections are complete on the orbiter Columbia in Orbiter
Processing Facility bay 3. Work continues to prepare the vehicle for its
ferry flight to Palmdale, CA, for its scheduled Orbiter Maintenance Down
Period (OMDP). Columbia is scheduled to be towed to the Shuttle Landing
Facility on Sept. 22 where it will be mated to the modified Boeing 747.
The ferry flight from KSC is scheduled to begin on Sept. 23 with an
overnight stop at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. Columbia will depart
Luke the following day, arriving in Palmdale on Sept. 24. Because the
orbiter can not be flown through precipitation of any kind, ferry flight
plans are contingent upon weather conditions in the flight path. The
vehicle could be diverted to other facilities with little notice.
|
||
|
|
|
