This website is kept for archival purposes only and is no longer updated.
 | |
| ||||| Saturday, March 09, 2002 - 01:23 am When you touch the viewing windows, are they hot or cold to the touch? What about the surface temperature of the suits, once back inside. Do they get hot? What does the air inside the shuttle smell like after a few days? | |
| ||||| Saturday, March 09, 2002 - 01:57 am To get an expert opinion, you could ask the astronauts, but in the meantime I'll provide a best guess (we call them SWAGs in the business). I would guess that both the windows and the suits would be somewhat warm if they've been in the sun, or somewhat cool otherwise. Thermal control in space is something you have to work at, but if you do work at it you can keep everything somewhere around room temperature. For example the suits aren't white because some fashion designer liked it, it's so the suits reflect most of the radiation from the sun (and reflected sunlight from the Earth) which otherwise would make them very hot. As for the freshness of the shuttle interior, if we get a shot of the cabin you'll notice a little pine scent air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. Just kidding. I hear it gets kind of thick in there by the end of a mission -- but I couldn't say from personal experience. | |
| ||||| Saturday, March 09, 2002 - 10:02 pm There are a lot of intetesting parallels between the atmosphere on the orbiter and that of submarines. Both are closed environments in which management of oxygen, carbon dioxide, moisture, and flammable gases are just part of the puzzle. I've never seen much in print, but I'll bet that the STS program people did a lot of talking to us in the Navy submarine community about atmosphere control and the like. J.R. Frysinger, CAMS (LCDR, USN-Ret.) Dept. of Physics and Astronomy College of Charleston Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj | |
| |
