Spacewalk!

Go get 'em, Sergei and Oleg.

Pete Conrad

Yesterday was the 9th anniversary of the death of Pete Conrad, so I'll share a few interesting tidbits about him.

The Conrad family lost its fortune in the Great Depression, and soon after, Pete's father left the family. Pete struggled with schoolwork, mostly because of a little-understood condition called dyslexia. After he failed all his 11th Grade tests, he was kicked out of the prestigious Haverford School. (Pete's uncle was financing his education.)
Conrad's mother was determined to find a good school for her son, whom she knew was not "stupid" or "slow." She enrolled Pete in the Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York. Though Pete had to repeat 11th Grade, when he graduated, he was accepted to Princeton. On a full-ride Navy ROTC scholarship. How do you like them apples, Haverford School?

By the time Pete was 16 years old, he had earned his pilot's license. Instead of paying for lessons, he worked odd jobs at the airport in exchange for stick time. As a teenager, Pete once drove 100 miles to repair an aircraft which no one else could fix. He fixed the plane all by himself, to the astonishment of the mechanics and pilots present.

Pete was invited to the application process to choose the first Mercury astronauts. Still having a rebellious nature, he gave 'em hell. During an inkblot test, he told the psychiatrist that one blot was a sex act, and described the act in graphic detail. For the next blot, he simply deadpanned, "It's upside-down." His initial application was (surprise!) denied. He was, they said, "not suitable for long-term flight."

Alan Shepard talked Conrad into reapplying during the next selection process, and since many of the invasive and intrusive and unnecessary tests had been done away with, Pete passed with flying colors and was accepted.

On November 12, 1969, Pete became the third man to step on the lunar surface. Since there was no pressure to make a dramatic statement a la Neil Armstrong, Pete used the moment to make fun of his own height and get a laugh out of everyone. He also won $500 from an Italian journalist, who was certain that NASA gave its astronauts scripts, though Pete denied it and said he could prove it. And so the third man to step on the moon exclaimed to the world:

"Whoopeeeee! Man, that may have been one small step for Neil, but it was a long one for me!"

Pete died in a motorcycle crash in a small town called Ojai, California.
Ojai is a word from the Chumash Indian tribe meaning "moon."
True story.

JSC has an area of planted trees in memory of all the astronauts who have died. After Pete's death, they planted a tree and held a memorial service. Alan Bean, also an Apollo 12 moonwalker, humorously"channeled" his late crewmember at the service and informed everyone that Conrad's message from beyond was that he wished for the lights in his particular tree to be colorful, even though the only lights on the memorial trees are white. To this day, the lights in Pete's tree are the only colored lights in JSC's trees at Christmas.

Pete's personal motto was "If you can't be good, be colorful."

I think we can all agree that Pete Conrad was both.

In which I never leave the computer again.

Have I mentioned how much I love the internets?

Snap.

For cripes' sake, enter your ZIP code, play around with the horizon, the display, etc.

Click and drag the sky to "turn around" 360 degrees.

Here's the thing about having a geek hobby.
Other geeks also have that hobby, and geeks make really cool online toys and gadgets.

Quote

"The ideal crew for an Apollo mission would be a philosopher, a priest, and a poet. Unfortunately, they would kill themselves trying to fly the spacecraft."

-Michael Collins

Seriously?

Hell, all they had to do was Google it.

Scout's honor, my husband and I were just discussing the same thing the other night while watching NASA-TV.

From The Onion, of course!


THIS INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION IS A PIG STY
by Helen Donnelly
Astronaut Mom

Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko, pay attention. And make sure Commander Sergei Volkov and spaceflight participant Yi So-yeon hear this, too. I don't care if So-yeon is taking a space walk to calibrate the solar panels. I want her to listen up. We need to have a serious International Space Station talk.

Just look at this mess! It's a disgrace. Is this any way for humans to live in outer space? There are used food tubes everywhere, dirty space suits hanging all over the place, and the automated transfer vehicle from last week is still in the loading dock. Honestly, I hoped you would take some pride in the greatest orbital research platform in history. But it looks like you're set on treating it like some sort of rumpus room.

For Pete's sake—take a little pride in where you live! Have you been in the transfer compartment lately? I'd be surprised if you could even get in there, since there's not even a path that you can walk through to get to it. I swear, it looks like a meteor shower went through here. That may fly in your countries, but when you're with me in the deep reaches of space, that just doesn't cut it.

All I want is to have a nice, clean space station for two minutes put together. Is that too much to ask?

The crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery is coming over in a few weeks and it looks like a disaster area in here. What am I supposed to tell them, that we didn't know they were coming? Do you want to embarrass me in front of NASA? They're bringing new lab equipment with them, and now there's nowhere to put it!

Read the whole article over at The Onion.

Trivia.

Never in my life had I noticed this until Charlie Duke himself mentioned it in an interview on "When We Left Earth." (At least, I think that's where I saw it.)

Armstrong: "Houston, uh, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed."
Duke: "Roger, Twanq --- Tranquility..."

Audio: "Twanquiwity"

Great tour of the Solar System

Made with Celestia.
Bonus: Fantastic accent.
"Spootnik."
Heh. I keep thinking of Mike Myers as Stuart MacKenzie in So I Married an Axe Murderer:

"I'm not kidding, that boy's head is like Spootnik; spherical but quite pointy at parts! Now that was offside, wasn't it? He'll be crying himself to sleep tonight, on his yuuuge pilla."

Earth Whistlers

From the University of Iowa:

Whistlers are produced by lightning and travel along Earth's magnetic field line from one hemisphere to the other, as shown in this illustration. In the ionized gas that exists in this region of space, the high frequencies travel faster than the low frequencies, thereby dispersing the wave from the lightning stroke into a whistling tone that decreases in frequency with increasing time, hence the term "whistler."

Hear earth whistlers here.


And here is an "earth chorus", which sounds remarkably like my parents' backyard on any given summer night.

Again, from U of I:

Chorus waves in Earth's magnetosphere are generated in the Van Allen radiation belts by electrons spiraling along Earth's magnetic field lines in this region. Once generated, the chorus waves interact with the moving electrons, disturbing the spiral orbit of the electrons and causing them to fall into Earth's upper atmosphere along the magnetic field lines.

Chorus waves consist of a rapid succession of intense ascending tones, rising in frequency over very short time intervals, each tone lasting typically less than one second. The frequencies of these rising tones occur in the audio frequency range and sound like a dawn chorus of chirping birds, a sound which gives these waves their name.

Saturn's Bow Shock

A bow shock is a discontinuity that forms when the supersonic solar winds encounter a planet's magnetic field, similar to the shock wave that forms upstream from a supersonic aircraft.
The bow shock crossing is indicated by the abrupt burst of electric field noise at the time marked by the arrow. The electric field noise is caused by electrical currents that flow in the shock.

In 2004, the Cassini probe crossed the bow shock of Saturn.
Here is the audio clip of the event.

And here is a wonderful graphic explanation, courtesy of the University of Iowa: