January 2009 Archives

How about another question that originated at S&T's Aerospace Camp last summer?

Have you ever seen anything in space that no one else has seen?
-- Tyler (Team Spirit)

MAGNUS: I am not sure. We have had people living on the ISS for six months at a time and they have seen a lot. There is so much to see and it is so beautiful. I remember one moment during my last flight where we were looking out the window and it was night and there was a thunderstorm going by below us. We watched the cloud to cloud lightening and it was spectacular. That is something that you cannot see from the surface of the Earth, but people who have lived on the ISS for a long time have probably seen it many times.

Ben was curious about the following:

How do you plug in your computers if there are no outlets in space?

MAGNUS: Well we have outlets! We get our electricity from the sun through our solar arrays. The power collected from the solar arrays is sent through a distribution system that delivers it all over the space station. Our outlets do not look like the outlets that we have in our houses on Earth so in order to plug computers and other equipment in we had to make special plugs. With the special plugs we can plug all kinds of things in.

This is a question from Rion:

Can you play any type of sport in space? If you can, how do you do it?

MAGNUS: Well we have not yet come up with a space sport. It would be interesting to imagine what one would be and what kind of equipment you would need. You would have to come up with different games, or variations of the game, depending on what type of gravity you have. For example, here on ISS we have micro-gravity, which is essentially none at all. On the moon there is 1/6th and on Mars 1/3rd. It means here on ISS it would be hard to change direction quickly like you need to do in so many sports, but you could completely set up the game field in three dimensions. On the moon and Mars the conditions would be different. We do need to come up with a sport though!

This comes from Rob:

How often do you get time to go online? When you find the time, is it fast and what do you look at? Do you get time to visit your own favorite sites? 

MAGNUS: We do not have access to the internet up here although we do get email via synch with a remote server about three times a day.

And here's an answer to the following from Mrs. Patterson's fourth-grade class:

What does the moon look like from the space station?

MAGNUS: It is big and round and bright but other than that it looks a lot like what you see from the ground.  The main difference is we do not have to look at it through the atmosphere so it is very clear. It is really neat to see the moon just over the Earth's horizon!

Blog Editor's Note: KOLR-10 news went into a Springfield classroom and discovered children learning from this very site. Check it out.

This question was submitted by Becky.

What does it smell like in space?

Well inside the pressurized volume where we live it pretty much is a controlled climate so it does not smell like much of anything (unless we ourselves generate smells with our food, hygiene products, etc.). When people come in from spacewalks it is very interesting because they bring with them a specific smell, which is kind of metallic-burning like. It probably has to do with all of the materials of their equipment and suit out-gassing in the vacuum, but it is a distinct smell.

This question was submitted by Julia:

Can you read books without the pages floating up?

MAGNUS: Good question! No, the pages do float up. It can be really annoying and we have page clips that you can use to hold your place if you need to.

I mentioned before that I am doing some cooking experiments up here and I would like to share some tips with you that I have learned. In the last entry I left you with a question to ponder...how do you cook in space when nothing wants to stay put? We use gravity in so many ways during our daily lives and do not even realize it; like cooking, for example. You gather your tools and ingredients and set them out on the counter or table or whatever your work surface is. You mix things in the bowl, you pour liquids from one place to the other, you throw the dirty dishes in the sink and the food remnants in the trash. All of this is possible because of gravity -- everything stays where you put it. One of the first challenges I had in my cooking adventures was how to manage all of the above.

 

Blog Editor's Note: Here is the latest dispatch direct from the ISS...

MAGNUS: Food is an important part of our lives. Family gatherings center around food, the celebration of major life events and milestones involves food in one way or another and have you ever noticed that when you invite people over somehow everyone always ends up in the kitchen? The same holds true for us here on the Space Station. Food is important and ends up usually being, maybe not an issue but definitely a topic of discussion, one way or another, for almost every crew. The food that we have here on the ISS has to meet many different requirements -- it must last for a long period of time without refrigeration, it has to have the appropriate nutritional value, it has to be appealing and tasty, and it has to be packaged in such a way that we can eat it in microgravity without making a huge mess. That is quite a list! And those are just the "'technical'" requirements. What about variety? How do you meet all of the various tastes and food peculiarities that you come across, especially when dealing with people from a multitude of different cultures? It is important! What about the logistics of getting the right food here at the right time as well as having enough of the right food on board at any given time? So there are a couple of different questions you have to consider when you talk about food and long-duration space flight...

Back to some questions submitted last summer by kids from S&T's Aerospace Camp:

Do plants grow in space?
-- Preston (Team Space Shuttle)

MAGNUS: Yes, they do, and there are several experiments that have been conducted to understand how plants grow and how to help them grow well. It turns out that plants in space do not necessarily grow in straight lines like you see them here on Earth. Both the stalk and the roots get very curly and twisted and have many bends. They do not have to fight gravity and therefore are a bit more free form. We are trying to understand how to get nutrients to the plants efficiently (think about the difficulties of watering them in zero g, for example) and what kind of artificial light they need to grow. Also, you have to make sure that the plants can produce viable seeds that in turn can grow into new plants. These studies are all very important since, when we establish an outpost on the moon and Mars, it will be important to have plants available for food and for atmosphere cleansing.

Here's Cordelia's question:

How do you use electricity in space? 

MAGNUS: We get our electricity from solar power. We have three, soon to be four, solar arrays which collect solar power and feed the electrical system. We have banks of batteries out on the arrays that store the extra power for use when we are in a night pass. Our fundamental voltage is 120V but different experiments and equipment can step that down to 28V, 16V, or whatever is needed.

Today's question comes from Malia via Rountree Elementary (tomorrow's question will be from Cordelia, who was apparently named after the good daughter in King Lear).

What does fire look like in space? 

MAGNUS: We actually do investigate the combustion process up here for a variety of reasons. Basically, without convection, fire stays more or less contained as a little ball and if there is no flow of oxygen to it, it will go out. There are no air currents, unless we introduce them, to move the air towards the fire and re-supply it with oxygen. One of the first things that would happen if we were to have a fire on the ISS is to stop all of the fans from running to keep from feeding the fire fresh oxygen.

This question comes from Mary...

Do you wear normal clothes inside of the station and can you wear earrings?

MAGNUS: Inside the station we are in a normal, sea-level, pressurized environment. You can wear normal clothes (but you do not need shoes) and I do have earrings in, but they are my posts, the ones I got when I got my ears pierced. You would not want to wear anything too long or big, because they would get caught in your hair and other things. When I leave my hair loose (for example after I wash it and it is drying) I end up getting it caught on Velcro of all sorts, and in small places and it is really a pain. It is much better to have it in a ponytail.

A special shout out to Mrs. Keeney's 5th Grade class, which submitted the following question:

What does a sunrise look like in space? 

MAGNUS: A sunrise is very intense. It is amazing how much our atmosphere shields us from the very harsh rays of the sun. What I enjoy watching, though, is when the sun comes up over the horizon and it bounces off the tops of the clouds. The colors are spectacular. I have been trying to take a picture of it, but so far have been unsuccessful. It is not possible to grow tired of watching our world go by.

Blog Editor's Note: Answers to some of your new questions are coming in...This question (which was partially addressed in the last audio clip) was posed by distinguished S&T grad Ted Weise:

How does NASA track "space debris," and if there is a potential encounter with the station or shuttle, what occurs?

MAGNUS: Actually the Air Force does. They have a large facility in Colorado that tracks all objects in orbit above a certain size. We have a group of people who interface with them to keep track of any potential trajectory intersections with the space station. Our mission control team has drawn an imaginary box (and I am sorry, I forget the size) around the station and if anything is projected to enter that box, serious work on orbital maneuvers takes place. The object is tracked for several days and there is a timeframe in which the decision has to be made to move the station or not.