I re-edited some NASA video from STS-128 and set it to Twisted Nerve by Bernard Herrmann:
Tag nasa
Drinking Recycled Urine in Space
According to NASA, “when it comes out, it’s cleaner than most of the drinking water you have on planet earth.”
Lately I’ve been obsessed with NASA video from STS-128, the current shuttle mission. Some of the video doesn’t have sound, so I’ve played tunes from SomaFM’s Mission Control station, a mix of radio transmissions from Houston and electronic/house music. Last night, when I turned on SomaFM, Mission Control was silent, but the streaming house music was still the perfect soundtrack for watching astronauts float around the space station, affixing things to the walls with velcro and whatnot.
Earlier today, NASA posted the STS-128 Day 11 highlight video. It’s kind of long, so I pulled out a couple of minutes that include a tour of the high-tech toilet that converts urine to drinking water, a bit of zero-g shrimp eating, and a recycled-water toast as the astronauts gather together for their last dinner together.
Tracking Near-Earth Asteroids
It’s about to become an obsession. NASA has just setup a Twitter account, @asteroidwatch, to chronicle the agency’s “efforts to detect, track & characterize potentially hazardous asteroids & comets that could approach Earth.” Launched yesterday, the account already as more than 15,000 followers.
And it’s not just a one-way stream of scare-tweets, either. The NASA employee at the helm of the Twitter account has been answering questions from followers. Yes, it will debunk overhyped false alarms. No, the program can’t watch the entire solar system. And since you asked about it, here’s a link to ways that scientists think they could mitigate a collision.
Awesome. I’ve always been interested in mass extinction events and apocalypse scenarios in general. I got my start in science journalism by writing about how a gamma ray burst could have been the cause of earth’s second largest mass extinction, which occured at the end of the Ordivician period 443 million years ago (think trilobites). The story was part of the application that landed me the Richard Casement Internship at The Economist in London. From the story:
A GRB 10,000 light-years away that lasted just 10 seconds might blind surface dwellers and ionize Earth’s atmosphere. The energy from the burst would tear apart nitrogen and oxygen molecules, smearing the planet in nitrogen dioxide, a brown gas that is a component of industrial smog. The haze would shield Earth from sunlight and trigger a global temperature drop. Nitrogen dioxide would also deplete the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun to bombard Earth for about a year, until the ozone recovered.
Ouch. But ever since this great Atlantic article from June 2008, near-earth asteroids have been on my mind. I mean, really. Take a look at our pock-marked solar system: our moon, Mercury, Mars, and most recently in the news, Jupiter. It’s folly to think that Earth is somehow immune. It’s good to know that someone’s on the look out.