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| ||||| Wednesday, March 06, 2002 - 08:51 pm How do you get water in space with out pipes? I am a six year old boy named Michael. Hope to hear from you soon. I watched the launch at 6:22am with my Mom. | |
| ||||| Wednesday, March 06, 2002 - 10:11 pm michael: the shuttle makes water using fuel cells. in fact, water is a waste product from these fuel cells whose main purpose is to generate electricity by combining one atom of oxygen with two atoms of hydrogen. in order to do this, the shuttle has to have many pipes. (in fact, if you look inside the shuttle, it is just full of plumbing and electrical wiring.) you are probably referring to the water in the suit from last night. this water is kept in the astronaut's suit, and is used to keep them cool while they do their work. unfortunately, a valve opened up when it should not have, and caused the water to leak out. hope this helps! | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 12:22 am evil-ed, you certainly know your plumbing. When you are finished with Hubble, i know that there is an opening at the I45 Home Depot. It sure would be great to have someone over there that knows a valve from a shuttlecock. One thought came to me as I was trying to imagine a water leak in space. Some how I picture it vaporizing immediately and not spilling onto the floor. Wouldn't that be great to have at my weekly poker party, when some of the good old boys get liquored up and not to careful with their drinks. Keep up the good work and keep those answers coming. | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 08:58 am The spill occurred in the airlock, while it was still pressurized. As a result, the water just created a mess. If it occurred while outside in vacuum, it would have vaporized (or partially frozen depending on how cold it was). | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 02:26 pm I have a related question. I have been watching the NASA TV coverage of the shuttle mission and I think they have made daily reference to replenishing their onboard water tanks and then dumping the excess water. Given the conditions of space, what happens to the water when it is dumped from the shuttle? Is it squirted out in a stream? If so, does it freeze like an icecicle? If it is sprayed, does it form a cloud of ice particles? Which ever dump method is used, is there a potential for the water/ice to attach itself to portions of the shuttle or other nearby objects (like the Hubble)? Will the dumped water "hang" in the orbital path of the shuttle and pose a potential problem for future encounters with other shuttle missions or sky objects? Great TV coverage. NASA should consider studying the voice communications patterns between the shuttle crew and ground team. All of the exchanges demonstrate an amazingly clear and concise ability to communicate both ideas and instructions. I marvel at the clarity of the information that is conveyed in these exchanges -- it is meaningful without volumes of extra words. Perhaps the Administrator can organize a workshop for congressional members??? Thanks for being available online. MDCalvert Oak Ridge, TN | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 05:39 pm MD: Onboard water tanks are replenished from the fuel cells. Occasionally, they may need to be drained if water usage is unusually low. I think you are probably referring to the waste-water dumps, which occur regularly. they are as you would expect. water ejected into space will eventually evaporate into a gaseous state. it may freeze into a solid first, and then sublimate. all this depends on how much water, how fast, etc. of the dump. occasionally, icicles will form on the side of the shuttle from this. if they need to be removed, the robot arm can be used to knock them off. the water does not remain in orbit for very long once it evaporates. small amounts of ice may stick around until it sublimates, but it does this fairly quickly, especially in sunlight. i fully agree with your observation about the air-to-ground communications. it takes years of training, and it helps to have the ground end (the CAPCOM) be an astronaut as well. i do not think that this kind of communication would be possible, or even beneficial for politicians. after all, their mandate is to obfuscate so that everyone hears what they want to hear. that would be very different from what we're after here. | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 06:45 pm evil-ed, you are an expert in the field of science and technology, however I believe that you are naive in the manner of politicians As I under stand the meaning of obfuscate it is to make an issue so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand. This would be very hard to do by most politicians as have no idea what they are talking about anyway, let alone be able to obscure it. I would venture to say that the more appropriate phrase would be: "The politician's mandate is to talk incoherently, yet continously until everyone hears what they want to hear." | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 07:23 pm george: indeed you have a good point. obfuscate is what politicians do most intensely when they get caught. normal operating procedure calls for them to bore the audience into submission, so perhaps a description would be "The politician's goal is to drone incoherently until everyone hears what they want to hear (so that they can then go relieve themselves). | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 09:26 pm This reminds me of a concern I have. Very few of our congressional representatives have any significant background in the sciences, especially the physical sciences. That plus the recent attitude towards the Office of Science and Technology helps explain the current problems non-health sciences are having with funding. Politicians (and most other people) fail to see how heavily the health sciences have depended and will depend on discoveries made in the physcial sciences. The latter group includes NASA, for the most part. J.R. Frysinger, CAMS Dept. of Physics and Astronomy College of Charleston Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj | |
| ||||| Thursday, March 07, 2002 - 11:43 pm J.R Frysinger has provided a reality check that we in the NASA business often miss. While we are hyping the marvels of Hubble Servicing, beating our chests on our ability to build powerful instruments, and telling one another that NASA is good for the nation, Congress, the funding source, is not listening. Every year, at each of the centers, a NASA spinoffs brochure is carefully compiled, reviewed, and published only to be added to the various shelves of the center libraries, never to be seen by the man in the street. Where are the visionaries that are proud of their accomplishmnets? Why are they not promoting their accomplishments to every trade magazine that will publish them? The answer is BUREAUACRACY. "We are above the likes who grovel for funds." "We do good work and the system takes care of us." "Don't make waves or they will punish us" These are the concerns of management within NASA. The NASA funding has been flat in real dollars over the past 2 decades. That is a 4% per year decrease in spendable income. Couple that with he fact that NASA must use 80% of its' funds for infrastructure, there isn't much left over for new science. Where are the NASA heros of yesteryear who took congress head on and compelled them to do good by NASA. The biggest irony of all is that NASA is preparing to terminate HST after the next servicing mission. Not because it is obosolete, indeed, it now is more powerful and science gathering capable than at any time in it's history. It is because there is not enough funding to pay for servicing a national asset. Suprisingly HST servicing consumes only o.7% of the annual NASA budget. Yet there decision makers who throw it away because they need that $100 million a year to jump start new initives. Where did we lose our way? | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 02:14 pm Where did we lose our way? Maybe it was the attitude of a generation. Remember this is the me generation. Selfishness abounds. How is a congress person suppose to supply everyone with money for every little thing? Maybe rather than blaming the government, the people should blame themselves. If we want to find our way, maybe we should go back to the "you" generation. "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 03:08 pm JFKx has awaken my semses and I remember the sage words of Pogo from the yesteryear generation: "We have met the enemy, and it is us". I will not try to blame Government for limiting exploration by maintaining the something for everybody mentality. I will not try to blame Government for finding $60 billion dollars to fight terrorists and yet stifles science exploration with a flat budget line item. If JFK had made it to the 21st century, he may have revised his statement to: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what your country can do for the world." | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 04:06 pm Pogo -- I remember, boy, that was long ago. In conclusion: The government is elected by the people, it is not appointed or comes about by magic. A government that has a something for everybody mentality is only a reflection of the people who elect it. | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 07:06 pm Somehow this thread on {water in space} kicked off a concern about the shortage of funding for the non-health sciences, and my displeasure with bureauacracy in general. JFKx conclusion on democracy is merely another indicator of the movement toward mediocrity within the country. I believe that we do not elect our officials, they are selected in a "beauty" contest. In order to be elected, those candidates "must" promise something for everyone. This process has not changed much however the big difference nowadays is that our elected officials actually believe the jibberish they proposed and really try to make it happen. Thus these officials are becomming less and less leaders and more and more bureaucrats. A bureaucrat is someone who has no vested interest in any thing he is doing, therefore he can afford to obey all of the rules. If indeed our evolving bureacratic government is truly a reflection of the country, then our spitit of exploration and discovery is gone. It would not even suprise mr to find that there are people in our government who are against a 5th Hubble servicing mission. | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 08:03 pm I think you both have legitimate points in your discussion. As a young member of the so called "me" generation, rest assured we don't all have our heads buried in our PS2's. Some of us have a very deep interest in what NASA is doing. Granted, not a lot. Seems to me NASA really needs to come up with something to excite the public imagination. The Hubble does it for me, I think it's the coolest thing since frozen yogurt, but unfortunatly, the media doesn't seem to feel the same way. Bureacracies and politicians don't help much, for sure, but I think the media has the biggest effect on the populace, wich in turn determines what our politicians do to get re-elected. The media seems to care not at all to the great and underappreciated achievments of NASA, and gives it almost no coverage at all, until it looks like there's some kind of problem. What a bunch of gouls. Of course, some would say this is merely the reflection of society as a whole, and I guess they might be right. But with the constant barrage of negative reporting, coupled with a lack of intellectual showcasing, it's no wonder so many don't give a damn. With all that's been learned, and how little it costs in comparison to other government spending, I'd say the Hubble's a pretty good bargain. | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 08:10 pm I, too, remember Pogo and JFK. In fact, I have some memories of the Eisenhour Era. The late '50s are really what kicked it off and Sputnik's launch lit the fuse. But you must remember that in those days, capital ("hard") manufacturing was considered to be the backbone of a strong economy. Of course that required technological leadership. We Americans prided themselves on our steel and automotive industries. (Of course, that meant that our economy rose and fell with the price of steel!). Nowadays, we have a "soft" economy based on "information". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that information is a lot more volatile than steel. A graph I saw in a recent Science (AAAS) magazine showed that over the last few decades our energy cost per dollar of GNP had dropped steadily by some 40%. Sounds great until you realize that this is partly a result of our movement from producing steel billets to producing information bytes. And bytes are a lot lighter -- as well as being more volatile. So, where has this led us? Technology's appeal has fallen to such a point that in the fall of 2001, over 50% of our engineering graduate students were here from other countries, studying on student visas. We've reduced our pollution, to be sure, but we've also reduced (relatively to the GNP as a whole) our manufacture of large capital goods (cars, ships, airplanes, cranes, etc.). What a clean, knowledgeable society we now have here as we teach engineering to people who will go back to their countries to out-manufacture us -- especially since we have outsourced our heavy industry to other countries to get around EPA regulations. That's not all bad, of course, because it helps third world countries become self-sufficient (at the cost of polluting their country more, as we used to). But we are in danger of giving away much of our leadership in the area of technology. (Nokia is the world's leader in designing and manufacturing cell telephones, for example.) And, as our citizens become less interested in developing our own technology, the congressional candidates slant their pitches accordingly. No wonder that physical sciences and agencies cannot get an ear in Congress. That, and saddling our students with an archaic measurement system on top of getting up to speed in the international language of measurement, is also related to our continuing poor scores on international tests (e.g., the TIMSS and TIMSS-R). J.R. Frysinger, CAMS Dept. of Physics and Astronomy College of Charleston Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 08:15 pm Congrats!! You have managed to score more cans of worms in a single post than anyone here (and you got metric in there too). | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 09:50 pm You've got to feel sorry for poor 6 year old Michael who started this thread. | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 09:54 pm In our solar system our earth has got a strange position of having water.if it is nearer to sun due to high temperature water will evaporate,if it is father from sun,water is in ice state.so this is the exact position of earth.i thought that mars having ice due to this reason | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 10:12 pm Dave is obviously overwhelmed with any thought that doesn't fit in a single "Add a Message" box. I did not find any cans of worms but I did hear a sobering listing of causal relationships that if not held in check will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the American Revolution. 1)We have practically moved to a Services economy. The Enron fiasco shows what happens when a services company falters. With no hard assets there is nothing to soften a market scare. 2)The decline American applications for engineering degrees is way down. Every one want to earn the big bucks and enroll in finance, law, communications and other services related curriculum. That leaves a big void for Universities needing to fill empty seats. They go to those countries thirsting for Technical educations, the mid East and the far East. 3) We have become so full of ourselves because of our past peformance that we believe that the "good Times" will last forever. We are now lacking other countries in manufacturing, losing ground in education, and starting to be less than the best in technology development. If we don't do something soon, it will be done for us. Could it be that the recent colaspe of the USSR is a preview of what is to come? JR recommends metrication as one small step to recovery. A recommitment to the physicsl sciences as a viable career paves the way. The establishment standardized tests wouldmake us face up to our slide in the global schoolhouse. These are not cans of worms, they are food for thought. We better start eating before we are eaten. | |
| ||||| Friday, March 08, 2002 - 10:35 pm Dick, I was simply commenting to our dear friend JRFrysinger, (who we have known for two missions now) that he covered many topics which are each controversial in a single post. If you do not think that the metric vs. US system is controversial, please peruse the last 5 days' postings on this board. The information vs. manufacturing issue, free trade, labor is highly controversial. Just ask any union representative or politician. Finally, the whole educational issue. I am particularly sensitive to the TIMSS (this is an international study in math and science) results. The US rated rather low against other industrialized nations. Do you not think education is controversial? Bottom line, I was not criticizing, I was applauding. | |
| ||||| Saturday, March 09, 2002 - 08:50 am This is by far the coolest friggin discussion board I've ever been on. I love it.Keep pluggin, guys! | |
| ||||| Saturday, March 09, 2002 - 09:51 pm I took it that way, Dave. Thanks for making it clear to others, though. Yes, you're hitting two for two on providing a great public forum focused on science! It's important for people to know that science and technology are not academic mind games played somewhere away from society. They provide the arteries and veins that our society's economy pumps blood through. At this hour of the night I start to wax philosophic and start viewing "the big picture" -- as I see it, at any rate. I guess I've gotten old enough not only to have an opinion but also to express it. Your web site here provides a lot of inspirational opportunity for that. I enjoy reading the posts from the young kids who are in the "gee whiz" phase (so am I, actually!) and ask questions of the sort "why can't we ...?". I sure hope that our education system prepares them and that our economy supports them to try those dreams out. I grew up on Mr. Wizard's Science Secrets and Buck Rogers. They've got Bill Nye the Science Guy and NASA. May the net force be with them. J.R. Frysinger, CAMS Dept. of Physics and Astronomy College of Charleston Charleston, SC 29424 http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj | |
| ||||| Sunday, March 10, 2002 - 11:16 am The trouble with this thread is that you have to have an interest to begin with to find this link. As with all great thoughts, it doesn't do a whole lot of good when you can't find it or the thought doesn't get to the people and places that actually need to hear it. | |
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