Skylab

Reading time about 70 seconds


The International Space Station is the second U.S. space station
to orbit the Earth. Before the ISS was Skylab, launched by NASA after a string of successful Apollo Moon missions.

Launched in May of 1973, it was occupied by three successive crews of three astronauts using an Apollo capsule staged on a Saturn V.

The 100 ton Skylab launched as a 'dry' third stage of NASA's mighty workhorse the Saturn V. It was an aluminum cylinder 118 feet long and 22 feet wide orbiting at an altitude of about 270 miles. Skylab was divided into two compartments with a workstation on the 'top' floor and living, sleeping and kitchen facilities on the 'lower'.

One of Skylab's solar panels was lost on launch and another held tightly against Skylab's thin skin by a troublesome retaining strap preventing it from unfurling and leaving the Lab with a severe power shortage. That and the overheating of the Lab from sunlight led to a harrowing space walk by two Skylab astronauts to jerry rig a sun shade and cut the strap keeping the solar panel from unfurling. The sun shade was rigged successfully and the solar panel was freed and deployed saving the mission.

Skylab was just what it's name implied, it was a lab in the sky. A telescope was used to study the sun and celestial objects while an Earth Resources Experimental Package or EREP was used to study forestation, crops, meteorology and conduct a search for mineral deposits. Skylab's crew's also established that man can live and work in a weightless and space environment for extended periods of time.

Skylab's final mission ended with the return to Earth of the last crew in February of 1974. Skylab reentered the Earth's atmosphere on July 11th 1979. Most of it burned up, but some of the bigger bits landed in Australia where lucky Aussies collected some remarkable souvenirs of Phase One of NASA's space program.

Water, Water Everywhere

Reading time approximately 90 seconds


In Mrs. Irksums English class, I learned some lines from the poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Our old sailor laments, 'Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink'. He was surrounded by a salty ocean and developed not only a mighty thirst, but an appreciation for that vital liquid.

We should all have an appreciation for this remarkable compound which, due to its oddness, makes life possible on Earth.

Water is a very simple molecule made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. This simple combination allows unique chemical and physical properties without which we simply wouldn't be here.

So what makes water so different?

Well for one thing, unlike other liquids, when it freezes, it floats. If ice sank, ponds and oceans would freeze from the bottom up making most life impossible in water. Instead it stays on top forming an insulating layer keeping the water under it from freezing.

Not only that but, unlike other substances, it absorbs a huge amount of heat before it gets hot and releases that heat slowly. Water also conducts heat easily. Heat moves easily in water from hot spots to cold spots reducing extremes in temperature. These two properties allow water to move heat around moderating the Earth's temperature and letting organisms more easily control their tissue temperatures.

One really amazing property of liquid water, putting it in a class by itself, is its ability to act as a universal solvent. It can dissolve just about anything-even gold- better than anything else. It is estimated that about 20 million tons of gold are dissolved in the oceans. Only problem is that it costs more to extract it than it is worth. Darn. This ability to dissolve nearly everything, along with its ability to flow, allows water to carry and move all sorts of things around. Plants, for instance, find this useful when water dissolves nutrients from minerals in the soil and carries them to their roots.

But, as the guy on TV selling the slicer and dicer says, “That’s not all folks.” Liquid water is a great place for chemical processes to take place. It provides a physical and chemical medium which facilitates many vital processes within cells as well as supplying hydrogen for such things as photosynthesis. The oxygen we breathe is what is leftover after green plants split a water molecule to get hydrogen. The very air we breathe comes from water.

As a famous naturalist once said, “There is magic in water.”

Water and Life on Mars

Of all the planets one has inspired emotions and inflamed the imagination like no other. The ancient Egyptians called it the Red One, the Babylonians the Star of Death, to the Greeks it was the Fiery One, the Romans called it Mars.

Humans have speculated about the possibility of life on mars for a long time. One of NASA's stated missions is to find out whether or not life exists or has existed on Mars. A Viking Lander in the 1970’s directly sampled the soil of Mars for microbial life, but found none. So NASA decided to take a different approach and took as a theme “Follow the Water.” If life as we know it does or has existed on Mars then there had to be water. This is not a new idea. Water has played an important role in the search for life on Mars for over a hundred years.

In the fall of 1877 an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, saw through his small telescope fine lines that appeared and disappeared as he strained to see detail on the Martian surface through our atmosphere’s dancing air. He called the fine lines he thought he saw canali, channels or canals in Italian. An English translator chose canal as the meaning of canali implying a construction by intelligent beings.

In 1894 a Boston businessman, Percival Lowell, built an observatory outside Flagstaff Arizona dedicated to the study of his all consuming passion, the planet Mars. Lowell believed that the canals Schiaparelli saw were built by intelligent creatures to bring precious water from the planet’s ice caps to irrigate the desserts of their arid and dying planet. He spent his life trying to prove it.

The writer H.G. Wells further fired the public’s imagination about intelligent life on Mars with his story, War of the Worlds, where Martians in giant machines come to conquer the Earth.

To answer the question of water on Mars NASA took several approaches. They looked for the geological signs such as those found on Earth associated with water. After all they reasoned, the effects of oceans or rivers would most likely leave the same marks on the rocks and soil of Mars as they did on Earth. Probes were launched to photograph and remotely study in detail the surface.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) launched in 2005 employed high resolution photography to photograph the surface for physical features similar to those found on Earth caused by liquid running water such as gullies and river beds. (See Photo - Mars) Ground penetrating radar equipment aboard the MRO probed up to a half mile deep searching for signs of ice and finding it near one of the Martian poles. Another instrument package aboard the Orbiter detected chemical signs of water in the form of carbonates. The scientists at NASA believe the carbonates were formed by the action of water on rocks in the Martian soil. Strong evidence of water ice had been found but more proof was needed.

Finally in 2008 the Phoenix Lander found the proof NASA needed It scraped a small trench in the red soil of Mars and found water ice. The case for life on Mars was now strong.

Following the discovery of water ice on Mars NASA plans to launch the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) in 2011. MSL is a roving chemical laboratory that can drive around Mars similar to the two current rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, but much more sophisticated. One of its objectives is to determine if conditions on Mars now or in the past has or has ever supported life.

Percival Lowell would be pleased.