My Science School

On August 22, 1993, just days before the Mars Observer spacecraft was to enter orbit around Mars, it lost contact with the bases here on Earth. The $400 million spacecraft with an estimated overall project cost of $1 billion was designed to study and photograph the Martian surface, but ended in failure.

Following the success of the Mariner programme in the 1960s and early 70s, the Viking programme was the U.S.'s next foray towards our neighbouring planet, Mars. After the probes Viking 1 and Viking 2 successfully landed on the red planet in 1976, over a decade went by before America's next mission to Mars. That came in the way of the Mars Observer, which was launched in 1992 and had things going well until its ill-fated end.

The mid-1980s saw a high priority mission to Mars being planned to act and expand on the information already assimilated by the Viking programme. With the preliminary mission goals of studying and taking high-resolution photographs of the Martian surface, the Mars Observer spacecraft was initially to be launched in 1990, before being rescheduled to 1992.

Based on Earth-orbiting spacecraft

Based on a commercial Earth-orbiting communications satellite that had been converted into an orbiter for Mars, the spacecraft was built at a cost of $400 million. The payload was made up of a variety of instruments that included a Gamma Ray Spectrometer (GRS), Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer (PMIRR), Thermal Emissions Spectrometer (TES), Mars Observer Camera (MOC), and Mars Balloon Relay (MBR) among others.

The specific objectives of the mission were to find out the elemental characteristics of the Martian surface: defining Mars topography and gravitational field: establishing the nature of Mars magnetic field finding out the distribution and sources of dust and volatile material over a seasonal cycle: and exploring the Martian abmosphere. The MBR was designed to receive information from the planned Mars Balloon Experiment to be carried by a Russian mission for retransmission back to Earth.

Contact lost

The Mars Observer was expected to achieve all this by orbiting the planet for one Martian year (687 Earth days), giving it a chance to observe the planet through the different seasons. The science instruments in the payload were thus designed to study the geology, climate, and geophysics of Mars.

Following a successful launch on September 25, 1992, Mars Observer was scheduled to perform an orbital insertion manoeuvre 11 months later on August 24, 1993. Just days before it, however, on August 22, 1993, communication was lost with the spacecraft even as it was preparing to enter orbit.

When the Mars Observer failed to respond to messages radioed by the ground controllers here on Earth, further efforts to communicate were made-once every 20 minutes. Even though they were met with silence, further attempts were made, less regularly, until the mission was declared a loss on September 27, 1993 and no further attempts to contact were made after that

Propulsion system failure

In 1994, an independent board from the Naval Research Laboratory announced their findings regarding the failure. They suggested that the most probable cause of the communications failure must be a rupture of the fuel pressurisation tank in the propulsion system of the spacecraft

Regardless of what the reason was, an estimated cost of $1 billion, which included the price of the spacecraft along with the costs of space shuttle launching and processing of scientific data was lost. While the science instruments were reflown on two other orbiters, Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey, there is no telling if Mars Observer followed the automatic programming to go into Mars orbit flew by the planet, or even if it continues to operate.

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On May 5, 1961, barely three weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's historic orbit of the Earth, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard waited, strapped into the Freedom 7 spacecraft. He would become the first American in space. What NASA officials hadn't anticipated was that Shepard would have to endure five hours of delay cocooned in his shiny silver spacesuit before his 15-minute orbit.

"Man, I got to pee," he frantically radioed launch control. Allowing Shepard to urinate in his suit would destroy the medical sensors he was wired with, but eventually launch control had no option but to let him go. Shepard had to suffer the discomfort of a wet suit till the cooling system inside evaporated the liquid.

Early efforts

NASA hadn't solved the problem entirely even in 1963 when Gordon Cooper blasted off on the last Project Mercury flight. There was a urine collection device inside the suit, but the urine leaked out of the bag and the droplets seeped into the electronics, leading to a systems failure towards the end of the mission.

If wayward pee was a problem, think of what its twin, poop, could do in the cramped quarters of a spacecraft!

The Gemini project was launched to prepare men for the Apollo moon mission. In 1965, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman spent 14 days flying in Gemini 7, the longest manned mission at the time. They had to poop into a cylindrical plastic bag and add a substance to kill the bacteria and odours. Though the pee could be sent out directly into space through a valve-operated hose, the poo bags had to be stored in the craft till they landed.

By the time the Apollo missions came around, the system hadn't improved much. The Moon men's toilet ordeal lasted 45 minutes to an hour. They had to undress completely in a corner of the spacecraft and stick a faecal collection bag to their bottom. Low gravity meant that the poop wouldn't fall down. The astronauts had to manually help it along with a finger cot, a glove-like covering for a single finger. They also had to knead a germicide into it to prevent the growth of gas-forming bacteria that could cause the bags to explode.

Hit and miss

Accidents did happen. Houston once heard the commander of the 1969 Apollo 10 mission Tom Stafford say, "Give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air!"

On the first Space Shuttle mission in 1981, astronauts had to unclog smelly blocked toilets. Frozen urine ejected from the Russian Mir space station, damaged the station's solar panels over time, reducing their effectiveness by around 40%.

Today, on the International Space Station (ISS), each astronaut is given his or her own funnel for peeing. It attaches to a hose. Urine is sent through a filtration system and recycled into drinking water. There is a proper sit down toilet for more serious business. The waste is sucked into a canister, which is stored and later shot back towards Earth along with other trash, where it burns up in the atmosphere.

Did you know?

Astronauts go through 'positional training' on Earth to perfect their aim since the toilet on the ISS has a narrow opening. The mock toilet has a camera at the bottom. Astronauts don't actually go, but watch a video screen in front of them to check that their alignment is spot on. The toilet costs millions of dollars, so missing the target is not an option.

 During a spacewalk or an EVA (extravehicular activity), astronauts wear a maximum absorbency garment, which is essentially a large diaper.

NASA'S 2020 Lunar Loo Challenge, which invited designs from the public for compact toilets that would work well in both microgravity and lunar gravity received tremendous response. The Artemis program plans to land a man and the first woman on the Moon by 2024.

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If we talk about ringed planets, more often than not every one of us will be talking about Saturn. This, despite the fact that all four giants in our solar system Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - in fact have rings.

This is likely because Saturn has spectacular rings. While the rings of Jupiter and Neptune are flimsy and difficult to view with stargazing instruments traditionally used, the rings of Uranus aren't as large as that of Saturn's.

As Jupiter is bigger than Saturn, it ought to have rings that are larger and more spectacular than that of its neighbour. As this isn't the case, scientists from UC Riverside decided to investigate it further. Their results were accepted by the Planetary Science journal and are available online.

Dynamic simulation

A dynamic computer simulation was run to try and understand the reason why Jupiter's rings look the way they do. The simulation accounted for Jupiter's orbit, the orbits of Jupiter's four main moons, and information regarding the time it takes for rings to form.

The rings of Saturn are largely made of ice, some of which may have come from comets also largely made of ice. When moons are massive, their gravity can either clear the ice out of the planet's orbit, or change the ice's orbit such that it collides with the moons.

Massive moons

The Galilean moons of Jupiter Ganymede, Callisto, lo, and Europa- are all large moons. Ganymede, in fact, is the largest moon in our solar system. The four main massive moons of Jupiter would thus destroy any large rings that might form around the planet. This also means that Jupiter is unlikely to have had large. spectacular rings at any time in the past as well.

Ring systems, apart from being beautiful, help us understand the history of a planet. They offer evidence of collisions with moons or comets, indicating the type of event that might have led to their formation. The researchers next plan to use the simulations to study the rings of Uranus to find out what the lifetime of those rings might be.

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On August 8, 2007, space shuttle Endeavour’s STS-118 mission was successfully launched. Among the crew members was Barbara Morgan, the first teacher to travel into space. Barbara Morgan, in full Barbara Radding Morgan, (born Nov. 28, 1951, Fresno, Calif., U.S.), American teacher and astronaut, the first teacher to travel into space. Morgan earned a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1973.

Among the many new things during the COVID-19 pandemic was the school classroom, or the lack of it. During the height of the pandemic in the last two years, students were often seen attending virtual classrooms from homes with the teachers conducting the classes from their houses.

A group of students in the U.S. experienced something similar 15 years ago. Only that their teacher, Barbara Morgan wasn't teaching virtually from the comfort of her home. Morgan was the first teacher to travel into space and she did do some teaching while in space!

Born in November 1951 in Fresno, California, Morgan obtained a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University in 1973. Having received her teaching credentials by the following year, she began her teaching career in 1974 in Arlee, Montana, teaching remedial reading and maths.

She taught remedial reading, maths, and second grade in McCall, Idaho from 1975-78, before heading to Quito in Ecuador to teach English and science to third graders for a year. Following her return to the U.S., she returned to McCall, Idaho, where she taught second through fourth grades at McCall-Donnelly Elementary School until 1998.

Teacher in Space

Morgan's tryst with space began in July 1985 when she was selected as the backup candidate for NASA's Teacher in Space programme. As the backup to American teacher Christa McAuliffe, Morgan spent the time from September 1985 to January 1986 attending various training sessions at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. After McAuliffe and the rest of the crew died in the 1986 Challenger disaster, Morgan replaced McAuliffe as the Teacher in Space designee and worked with NASA's education division.

Morgan reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1998 after being selected by NASA as a mission specialist and NASA's first educator astronaut. Even though Morgan didn't participate in the Educator Astronaut Project, the successor to the Teacher in Space programme, NASA gave her the honour of being its first educator astronaut.

Following two years of training and evaluation, Morgan was assigned technical duties. She worked in mission control as a communicator with in-orbit crews and also served with the robotics branch of the astronaut office.

Further delay

Even though she was assigned as a mission specialist to the crew of STS-118 in 2002 and was expected to fly the next year, it was delayed for a number of years following the 2003 Columbia disaster. It was on August 8, 2007 that Morgan finally flew into space on the space shuttle Endeavour on STS-118.

The STS-118 was primarily an assembly-and-repair trip to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew were successfully able to add a truss segment, a new gyroscope, and external spare parts platform to the ISS. Morgan served as loadmaster, shuttle and station robotic arm operator, and also provided support during the spacewalks. All this, in addition to being an educator.

Answers from space

For the first time in human history, school children enjoyed lessons from space, conducted by Morgan. Apart from speaking to the students while in space, she also fielded questions. For one question from a student on how fast a baseball will go in space, she even had another astronaut Clay Anderson throw the ball slowly before floating over to catch it himself. While that opened up the opportunity of playing ball with yourself while in space, she also informed the student that the ball can be thrown fast, but it is avoided in order to not cause any damage to the craft and the equipment on board.

Following the first lessons from space, the Endeavour returned to Earth on August 21 after travelling 5.3 million miles in space. Having carried 5,000 pounds of equipment and supplies to the ISS, it returned with 4,000 pounds worth of scientific materials and used equipment.

As for Morgan, she retired from NASA in 2008 to become the distinguished educator in residence at Boise State University. A post created exclusively for her, it entailed a dual appointment to the colleges of engineering and education. As someone who strongly believes that teachers are learners, she continues to teach and learn, be it from space, or here on Earth.

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Scientists have achieved yet another historic feat by discovering a dormant black hole. It is for the first time that a dormant stellar-mass black hole orbiting a star has been detected in a nearby galaxy.

This new black hole is nine times the mass of the Sun and revolves around a blue star in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. Researchers have termed it "the first to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy". The binary system has been christened VFTS243. This finding is cardinal because it will help us get more insights into what happens during the death of a star and how black hole pairs are formed.

Astrophysicist and the lead author of the new study Tomer Shenar remarked that they have found a 'needle in a haystack. The study was published in the Nature Astronomy journal.

How it was detected

In a binary system, two stars revolve around each other and when a star dies, it will lead to a black hole in orbit with the other companion star. Scientists detect black holes from the X-ray radiation they emit as they feed on the companion star.

In this case, the scientists found a massive star orbiting something that couldn't be observed.

Following further studies, scientists found out that it was a dormant black hole.

The stellar mass black holes are formed when a massive star dies and collapses in a supernovae explosion. But strangely, in this particular case, the star that led to the formation of the black hole in VFTS 243 went away without any explosion and literally vanished into a black hole. Scientists have termed it a direct-collapse scenario. This has led scientists to understand that all stars do not end their lives in supernova explosions and it gives insight into how black hole pairs are formed.

What is a Black Hole?

A black hole is a celestial body that has an immensely huge gravitational pull, so huge that nothing escapes it. Not even light can escape it! The black hole grows by accumulating matter that falls in it. An image of a black hole was captured for the first time in 2019.

What is the size of a Black Hole?

The tiniest black hole can be as tiny as an atom but it can have the mass of a huge mountain. The other is the stellar black hole and these can have a mass of more than 20 solar masses, which is 20 times more mass than our sun. And the biggest black holes are christened supermassive. Sagittarius A is a supermassive black hole.

How are Black Holes formed?

Black holes are formed at the end of the life of a big star. When a massive star, say one having more than 20 solar masses, collapses after its nuclear fuel depletes, it will collapse onto itself and become a black hole. This collapse leads to a supernova and a part of the star gets blown off into space.

So will our Sun turn into a Black Hole?

The Sun cannot turn into a black hole. For us, the Sun is big, but on a celestial scale, it is too small to collapse into a black hole! So, our Sun will only turn into a white dwarf.

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