Kepler: Night Sky Network Telecon with Dr. Janice Voss

Bookmark This
Select a bookmarking site.

My NASA	StumbleUpon
Digg	Technorati
del.icio.us	Twitter
Facebook	Yahoo

Or copy the link below:
http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/education/amateurAstronomersResourceKits/nightSkyNetworkTeleconwithDrJaniceVoss30Nov2005/index.cfm

Home > Education > Amateur Astronomy

Transit of Venus 2012

Night Sky Network Telecon with Dr. Janice Voss

Coordinator	Welcome, and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. This conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Miss Marni Berendsen, you may begin.
M. Berendsen	Welcome everybody to the NASA Night Sky Network teleconference with Dr. Janice Voss. We would like to start out first by having a few of you introduce yourselves and tell us which club you're from and what part of the country you're from, what state you're in. If you'd like to just press *1, we'll take five or six of the folks that are on the line; give us your name, your club and the state you're from. Jim, do you want to hook them up?
Coordinator	Aaron Cledenson, you're line is open.
A. Cledenson	Hi, this is Aaron Cledenson. I'm a member of the North Houston Astronomy Club. There are four astronomy clubs in the Houston area, and I'm looking forward to the conference.
M. Berendsen	Thanks, Aaron. Hello.
Coordinator	Louis Pensche, you're line is open.
L. Pensche	It's Chaney, but that's all right. It will happen again, I'm sure. I'm with the Scambi Amateur Astronomers, and good evening to everyone. I'll be looking forward to our conference. We might be able to get a little smart around here.
M. Berendsen	Welcome.
Coordinator	Don Baker, your line is open.
D. Baker	Don Baker with the San Antonio Astronomical Association; looking forward to tonight.
M. Berendsen	Hi Don.
Coordinator	Bill Ahl, your line is open.
B. Ahl	Good evening; Bill Ahl representing Carolina Skies Astronomy Club, Greenville, North Carolina, also, Tar River Astronomy Club in Rocky Mount. The slides on the PowerPoint look exciting, waiting to hear the presentation. Thanks.
M. Berendsen	Excellent. Thank you. Let's take one more.
Coordinator	Darien O'Brien, your line is open.
D. O'Brien	This is Darien O'Brien from the Darien O'Brien Astronomy Club in Colorado, and we're also looking forward to the presentation this evening.
M. Berendsen	Thanks Darien. Janice Voss is a NASA astronaut and science director for the Kepler Mission, which is coming up soon. Who you're talking to is Marni Berendsen of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
	Dr. Voss has supplied us with two mission photographs from the STS-99 crew signed by all of those members of that crew, and together with an STS-99 mission patch, we'll be giving away two sets of these items to two of the clubs with members attending tonight's teleconference. Since this teleconference is a little like a radio program, like the last time with Dr. Squires, we'll handle the drawing like they do on the radio, by caller number at the end of the talk.
	Following Dr. Voss' talk, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions, and at the end of the Q&A, we'll announce the procedure to select the winners of the photo and patch.

	I know that many of us have dreamed of going into space at one time or another in our lives, and tonight, we have the opportunity to hear from Dr. Janice Voss, NASA astronaut who has flown five space flights and in doing so, she's logged over 49 days in space; welcome, Dr. Voss.
J. Voss	Thank you, Marnie. It's a pleasure to be here. We should all have access to the slides. I thought since this is an astronomically related group, and I'm sure a lot of you take pictures of various things in the sky, and I would share with you the kinds of things we see from upper, which is a perspective you don't get a chance to share with us. It's very cool, the pictures.
	I'll just start going through the slides, and at the end, we can take questions on this or on anything else about flying in space or being an astronaut.
	Starting with slide one, that's just a general introduction to the idea that there are several classes of things that we can study from space about the Earth. This shows an example of several things that are very valuable about the space shuttle and the station, which are where all these pictures are taken from.
	We are at an altitude that puts us well above airplanes, so we get a larger area view, yet well below weather satellites, so that we still have angles that allow you to see heights and other information that tells you a lot about the structure and evolution of different things going on in orbit.
	A hurricane is an excellent example of that; from this perspective, you see that height is clearly shown. You can tell that there's altitude in the clouds, and you can use the knowledge of the altitude of the spacecraft to learn a lot about the structure and how big these things really get and how they evolve with time, and yet we're high enough that you see essentially the whole thing, and you can watch the evolution of large areas at the same time. That's the big advantage of these kinds of pictures over orbital satellites at the weather altitudes or airplanes or people on the ground.
	If you go to the second slide, there are lots of interesting effects that you can see in addition to the weather itself. This group might actually be able to guess what this is, but this was taken from the space station, and it's an eclipse as seen from above. This was a lunar eclipse, and you can see the shadow moving across the Earth; that big black area at the top of the frame is the shadow moving across the Earth as the eclipse progresses. That's not a view of an eclipse I've ever seen before, and I thought this was a pretty spectacular shot.
	The next one is one that was actually taken on one of my flights, my third flight in April of 1997, so this crowd again probably could tell me what that's a picture of because April of 1997 would mean something to you all. This is the Hale-Bopp Comet. What you see that's clear in the top center of the frame, the bright band in the lower center is the Earth's atmosphere. The sun is setting off to the left of the frame, so you get the bright band of the edge of the sunset as the sun goes down, and that shows you about how tall the atmosphere looks from shuttle altitude.
	This picture is intended to clearly show Hale-Bopp, so it's inertially stabilized, which means that the Earth is rotating in the frame. Hale-Bopp is stationary, but the Earth is rotating, so at the bottom right corner, for example, you'll see this picture was taken over Africa and that red streak is a forest fire that shows up in the frame. You can get not only cool shots, but cool shots that show interesting things about astrophysical phenomenon.
	The next slide, slide four, you'll see - again, it can be seen from the Earth, but it's seen very differently from orbit, which is the Aurora Borealis. The bright green is oxygen ionization occurring in the upper atmosphere. From orbit, these are very stationary. I have never managed to see an Aurora Borealis from the ground, but I've seen videos of them, and it's very much a dynamic, very alive looking light show. From orbit though, it's very still. It looks just like this pretty much all the time. It kind of glows a little bit more a little bit less, but it doesn't have all of the dynamic motion of seeing it from below.
	I actually flew through Aurora Borealis on one of my flights, and it's just like flying through clouds. It looks like you're about to come up on some really bright thick thing, and you feel like you're going to go through a bright glow, but when you get to it, there's nothing there. You have it behind you and in front of you, and when you're in it, you can't really see it, but it is a really pretty thing to see from orbit.
	In slide five, you see that in different parts and different times depending on what's going on in the atmosphere, you do see different colors and that reflects the different elements in the atmosphere that are combining and recombining as they get ionized by the radiation, so you see not only the green that we saw in the previous slide, but also some red and other colors.
	In slide six, you'll see that you can get a lot of information about the atmosphere in other ways from orbital shots. This is a side view of the thickness of the atmosphere again; very similar to the Hale-Bopp shot, but in this case, you're seeing just the air itself. One thing I always found startling, when you read about the atmosphere, they talk about the layers of troposphere and all of those different layers, and you think isn't that kind of arbitrary? Okay, so they saw these nice temperature changes and that caused them to group these things differently, but still; and yet, when you look, actually look to the atmosphere, it almost draws a straight line.
	You see between the red and the blue? It's almost drawn with a ruler. That's between different layers of the atmosphere. Those temperature inversions that really do make a huge difference in the way clouds form and different things happen, and then the colors puts the elements in the atmosphere so that you see the red with a lot of black in it. The black is all of the clouds and thunderstorms going on, and then the blue is a layer of atmosphere above it. Again, this illustrates the value of a shuttle altitude where you get a large area shot, but the angle is such that you get a lot of information through altitude that you don't get from other kinds of viewing places.
	Slide seven, you'll see another atmospheric effect that we can use to learn information. This is the moon setting through the atmosphere. We know a lot about what the moon looks like, which means as it goes down through the atmosphere, we can learn a lot about the composition of the atmosphere by how it changes the way the moon looks.
	You can therefore monitor, over time; when you have something like a station up that's flying all the time and taking pictures like they see you can monitor over time how the atmosphere is changing by how it changes doing a moon rise or a moon set.
	In slide eight, you'll see another interesting effect. We get a lot of questions about can you see the Great Wall of China from orbit? The answer to that question is very nicely illustrated in this slide. If you look in the very center of the slide, you'll see two little dark dots. Those are pyramids in Egypt. The answer to the Great Wall question is that the wall is long enough that we can see it. Cross-wise, it's not really big enough for us to see from Orbit naked eye, but your eye is very good at connecting pieces of information. Just as you can see a hair that's on the floor as long as it's long, you can't see a little piece of hair, but it connects all the odd bits and pieces of pixels that it sees, and draws the line.
	Similarly, the Great Wall of China is long enough that even though it's too skinny you wouldn't be able to see it from orbit, but it's the same color. It's built from surrounding material, so there's no contrast to see it by. You can see that illustrated here in this picture. You really can't see the pyramids. You can see the area that's been tromped around the pyramids by all the people and the parking lots and stuff, but you can't see the pyramids themselves because they're the same color as the dirt. You can see the shadows that the pyramids cast. This was taken at low sun angle, and that dark area shows up very clearly.
	The Great Wall of China is not tall enough to cast a shadow like that, and it's surrounded by trees, so it doesn't have the big open area, and it's the wrong color, so you can't see the Great Wall of China naked eye from space. You can see the pyramids if you get the sun angle right and get the nice shadow.
	Slide nine, you see another area effect that we can see. This is a sandstorm in Qatar. You see that towards the bottom. One of the really amazing things to see from orbit is a thunderstorm because the perception I've always had from the ground is a thunderstorm is this lump that sits over you, and it maybe lasts a mile in each direction, but it's this big lumpy thing that sits over you.
	There's a large number of phenomenon including thunderstorms that extend for hundreds of miles. Somebody in a sandstorm like this would probably assume it's a local effect that covers a couple of miles, and some of them are, but you do get some like this where the sandstorm, actually the front of the sandstorm goes on for hundreds of miles, and you can see that from orbit and watch how that passes across the land.
	Similarly, you'll see thunderstorm lines -- I've watched lightning from orbit where a lightning bolt goes off, and again, you have the sense that there's a lightning bolt that goes off in your cloud and strikes the ground or doesn't strike, but you can watch from orbit a lightning bolt go off in one end of a hundreds of miles long front, and the lightning bolt will run the whole length of the front. It will start at one end and run down the whole front, which is really spectacular.
	Slide ten; another thing we can do from orbit is monitor things that happen very quickly. Since we go around and around the Earth and cover lots of latitude very regularly, we can get pictures back very quickly that you can't get from other resources. This is an example of a glacier slide. The trick of it of course is if you're not used to looking at pictures like this is to register the angles aren't exactly the same; the lighting isn't' exactly the same, and the framing in the picture isn't exactly the same, so you have to get used to adjusting to that.
	There's some writing in the pictures to help. You can see the left-most red line lays on top of this deep valley that you can see in the left edge of the right frame as well, and the big change is the horizontal red line to the right of the left-hand image, if you look at that same section, in the right-hand image is a much bigger gap in the valley, and that whole front edge is slid down into the valley in a glacier slide. We can monitor things like volcanoes and other disruptive events through this kind of imagery.
	The next slide, slide 11 is a geographical view to show you where we're going to be looking at. This is a lake called Lake Poopoo in Bolivia, and that's just to orient you. The next slide, slide 12, you'll see a picture of that, which illustrates a couple of things; one is the use of this to do wide area looks at changes in climate that are not human induced, but just natural drops and other things like that will change lakes contours and the spread, and we'll see more of that coming up, and that can have a huge effect on the local inhabitants. Monitoring that change with time is a very valuable contribution that our observing does.
	The other fun thing about this slide, this was taken by Mike Fink on exhibition eight on orbit, and when he sent the picture down, he radioed down that he had such a great job where he can say I'm looking at Lake Poopoo and Lake Titicaca on air to ground talking to the world and not have his mother yell at him. That was cute. Mike was very clever about things like that.
	Slide 13 you can see an example of an area where the lake has gotten much, much smaller, and it's leaving behind these salt flats around the edges. You see that especially at the left edge of the lake. This is a lake in Northern Africa. The lake itself is getting much more shallow and much more salty, and all of that is having a big effect on the local inhabitants.
	Slide 14 you'll see one of the interesting challenges of orbit, you're used to seeing a globe, and you think of the map of the world as pretty distinctive, and Africa doesn't look like Asia, and everything looks different, and there's mountain ranges here, and you think you can identify things pretty well. It's amazingly difficult. You don't have as big of view as you see, and of course they aren't all color-coded with nice country boundaries to break up the land and things like that.
	Things that seem to be very obvious can often be very hard, and the folks give us visual cues to help us pick out particular landmarks. This happens to be -- it just went out of my head. What's the tallest mountain?
M. Berendsen	Mount Everest.
J. Voss	Everest, yes. This happens to be Mount Everest. You look at this, and you think of Mount Everest as being so tall, and yet where is it? Which is the tall peak? It's very hard to pick it out, especially when your angles are changing. They tell us if you look for the valley, which you see right in the center of the frame going vertically in the frame, that valley points right to Mount Everest, which happens to be the cloud covered one in the center top of the frame. You can just run up that valley and find Mount Everest, but without that clue, it's almost impossible to find Mount Everest in this mountain range because there are so many high mountains around it.
	Slide 15 is one taken by Don Petit, who was determined to deal with the rotational effects of the Earth that we talked about in the Hale-Bopp frame. They don't have any automated trackers onboard the station for taking that out, and he spent a lot of time during his flight practicing manually tracking the rotation of the Earth, so he could get clearer shots. This is one that he took of London. A shot like this can be used to look at urban growth and to watch how things spread out and grow with time. You can see that he did a great job of tracking this and getting a very clear shot of London despite the fact that the Earth is rotating.
	Slide 16, another advantage of the station is it goes very far north and south, so we can see things down in Antarctica and up in the Arctic, or other way around, that we hadn't been able to see much of in previous missions or any other method in earlier years except by ships that sailed that way.
	This is a glacier down towards the South Pole, and again, with the angle that the shuttle is at, you can see if you look at the top of the glacier tip, so in the center of the frame, a little bit to the right, you do see a shadow of the glacier, which can be used again knowing the altitude of the spacecraft to determine how thick the glacier is, and you can monitor that with time how they thin and melt and grow and recede. Glaciers are a very sensitive indicator of some of the global warming issues, and so being able to monitor them on a regular basis using the station has become a very valuable contribution of Earth ...
	Slide 17 is another lake one that shows -- this is one where you can see that the lake is actually getting, in the very center of the frame, that piece of land is slowing closing. Eventually, you'll end up with two lakes and very isolated populations that weren't that way before.
	Slide 18 shows a color that I find the most beautiful from space, which is the coral reefs. The Bahamas are miles and miles of really beautiful colors from space, and they're very saturated and electric looking from orbit. The practical application of the coral reefs, as I'm sure you're aware, are very fragile environments, and they're being heavily damaged by what we're doing with the water in the oceans. You can monitor how the coral reefs are progressing by shots like this and taking pictures over time and watching what happens to the coral reefs and the water around it.
	The last one, slide 19, is just a really cool slide. Every so often, things are useful, but they're also just really cool, and a picture like this with the crescent moon and the atmosphere showing all the layers is just a beautiful picture to have; sunrises and sunsets are the most gorgeous things to see from space. They're very memorable. I thought I would close with that, and we can go to questions.
M. Berendsen	Wow! What a spectacular bunch of images. I want more now. It's amazing the effects that can be seen from space. Now let's open the line for questions. One question per person, please. We have quite a bit of time left for answering questions, so please feel free to open it up. Jim, are you ready?
Coordinator	Yes, ma'am. First we have Brian Tobias; your line is open.
B. Tobias	How are you doing, Dr. Voss?
J. Voss	Great. How are you?
B. Tobias	Doing well. Can you shed a little light on how crews are put together for a specific shuttle mission? I mean now I know they're all going to be ... construction missions for the ISS, but was 18 put together for going for a specific flight?
J. Voss	There's lots of different things, and it changes with time as the missions change and the constitution of the astronaut corps changes. For example, when I joined in 1990, the shuttle program was in midstream, very well established, very well understood. We weren't doing very many space walks. We were doing a lot of science missions.
	You have the commander and pilot, and the commander and pilot are generally just picked in a seniority kind of sense. The commander has always flown at least once, generally twice, and the pilot, of course, is a rookie or flown once. They come in, and they do a little bit of mixing and matching of strengths and weaknesses, but not too much. Mostly, that's seniority in the shuttle era.
	We have a flight engineer position that sits between and behind the commander and pilot during launch. That person is generally an ops oriented person like a flight test engineer or someone with that kind of background rather than a heavy-duty scientist. If you have a mission like a Spacelab Life Sciences Mission, the other members of the crew were generally MDs as best we could arrange that to have -- say if you had a seven-person Spacelab Life Sciences crew, you have five -- you have the commander and the pilot and the flight engineer, and the other four people might well be all MDs.
	We had an astronomy mission where the other four people were astronomy, geography, astrophysics related background, so they do a little bit of mix and match like this when you have a single dedicated mission. Most of our missions were more mixed, and then they pick out a very mixed crew of scientist, and again, they try to mix experience levels. My first flight, for example, a crew of six in a mixed mission, we had the flight test engineer; I was a PHD in engineering; we had a PHD in physics, and we had a payload commander. The three of us, we were all from the same class, so that was Nancy, at the time, Sherlock and me and Jeff Wisoff were that three, and we were all rookies, so they had one experienced person, David Lowe in that group, and he had a master's degree -- came from JPL, an engineering kind of background, and then we had the commander and pilot; both happened to be Air Force, but that is not a factor, generally.
	It's heavily seniority, and then within the seniority band, it's plus or minus two or three flights to try to mix skills and backgrounds, but many of the flights were so mixed that they actually try to get a mixed group of people, and you'll see that generally in the way the corps is selected. That was 1990.
	Now, as you pointed out, we're in the station construction phase; there's a lot of space walks going on, and right now, every flight crew would have to do some space walks, and you have space suits, and you have to think really hard about who fits the suit. When they have a planned space walk, they have to have a backup suit, and if you have two people that are about the same size, you can make due with one backup suit.
	There's not as much flexibility in the hardware so that people who are kind of in the mid-size range generally do better in the suits. Because that's such a risky thing, they work very hard to match skill levels and backgrounds. There, they'll always put an experienced EVA crewmember with a less experienced EVA crewmember.
	That's changed the criteria for what they're looking for and also made it a lot more difficult to match up crews. We now have a lot of robotics operations in support of the space walks. We do robotics on every flight, which didn't used to be true, but now you have to look for robotics skills too, and it's often true that the people who are really good at EVA aren't really good at robotics. Besides which, when the EVA people are outside, they can't be doing robotics, so you have to have a crew combination that has the inside people able to do robotics and all kinds of everything, so it becomes much more challenging to match up skill mixes. Seniority has become much less of a player because the skill mix has become more challenging.
M. Berendsen	That's amazing. Next question.
Coordinator	Chuck Jansen, your line is open.
C. Jansen	Good evening from your hometown of Rockford, Illinois.
J. Voss	It's nice to talk to Rockford.
C. Jansen	I was curious on your sighting of the Aurora and flying through it being a pilot, flying IFR into the clouds, and you reminisced that how it feels to go into the Aurora. Do you see that that gives you any problems with the radio telemetry and things that you're sending back and forth with the electrical interference and the things going on in the atmosphere there?
J. Voss	Not with the Aurora specifically. It's just not thick enough to make a difference. It indicates, obviously, a little bit more activity going on in the atmosphere, but it's very minor change. The one area we do have a lot of problems with is something called the South Atlantic Anomaly, which dips down a little bit where the Van Allen belts dip down a little bit closer to the Earth, and when we fly through that, that does create problems, and is sufficiently more radiation dense that they try not to do space walks through there any more than they have to because people outside are less well shielded than the people inside.
	It doesn't generally give us com problems that are noticeably worse, but they are aware that -- we have attitudes of the shuttle and/or station where communications can be marginal because of the blockage of the antennas, and when you get in that situation and you go through the South Atlantic Anomaly, the com is much worse.
M. Berendsen	Thank you. Next question.
Coordinator	Next question from Scott Forester; your line is open.
S. Forester	Dr. Voss, I'm very interested in the Kepler Mission. Can you tell us how Kepler is progressing and what you hope to find out about it?
J. Voss	Kepler is doing very well. We're in the process of ramping up for a critical design review, which is a series of reviews starting now for the smaller elements and culminating in the ground segment critical design review at the end of April, so we are in the hardware build phase and just finalizing the last details of design. Currently plan to launch in June of 2008. It's a single instrument spacecraft. It's just the photometer, and it's looking for Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of distant stars.
	The Earth size gives us a planet that we think would retain an oxygen atmosphere, so best defined as half an Earth to ten times an Earth in mass. Venus would be included as an Earth-size planet. Mars would not. The habitable zone tells us it's a distance around the star where we think liquid water might exist around the surface, so we're looking for -- given our knowledge of the star that we're looking at, an orbit of a certain length of time tells us whether or not it's in the habitable zone.
	We're looking for planets by the transit method, which is when the planet comes in front of the star, it causes a decrease in the light output of the star, so we can tell by the depth of the transit, again, given knowledge of the star, how big the planet is.
	All it does is stare. We're looking in the Cygnus region of the sky, a ten by ten degree square field of view, we hope to find about 50 planets that would be potentially just like Earth in the four years of the baseline mission. That's really cool.
Coordinator	Naomi Apercat, your line is open.
N. Apercat	There's been a lot of talk recently about space tourism. This is to be provided by private industry. What are your thoughts about this and is this a new career path for would-be astronauts?
J. Voss	Absolutely a new career path. I would expect by the time people who are in high school now are my age that there will be way more commercial astronauts than NASA astronauts just as happened with the aircraft industry.
	I think it's completely appropriate, just like with aircraft, that the big driver for getting the cost down was when it became a commercial tourism kind of vehicle. There is some business travel or whatever, but there's still a lot of it driven by people who just wanted to go fly places. I think that's fine. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's the only way we're ever going to get off this planet, which I think is well worth doing.
	I think as a species we need to expand and find new horizons all the time, and this is an excellent way of doing it. Realistically, there's no way of having that progress at any reasonable pace if you don't get the private industry pulled in. The only thing that's going to fund that in the early phases is tourism, so I think that's fine.
	There's obviously a whole list of issues they're going to have to deal with like liability if they have a problem -- those are the serious ones. How do you handle the people to make sure that it's safe for them to go physically? When do you draw the line and say this person is just not healthy enough to go? It's much harder to do when you're in a commercial environment, down to the trivial ones like what are they going to do about astronauts and astronaut wings.
	I don't know if you noticed when I had the launch last fall of the Spaceship 1, the FAA decided to give them astronaut wings, but they made them different because they were sub-orbital and commercial and that's going to be an interesting little piece of trivia to watch as we get more and more -- when we get to the point where we have real pilots and real passengers, are they going to give them all astronaut wings, or are they going to care that one was flying and one was just a passenger? I have no idea, and I don't really care, but it will be interesting to watch small things like that evolve as well as the much more important issues.
Coordinator	Next we have Barry Beaman; your line is open.
B. Beaman	Good evening, Janice. Carol and I wanted to say hello from Rockford, Illinois, but Chuck Jansen already beat us to the punch.
J. Voss	Wow! Rockford is obviously heavily supporting this telecon.
B. Beaman	Very good to hear you on this telecon and very interesting information. I do have one small question. Can you see stars through the view ports of the shuttle?
J. Voss	Absolutely, and you could see in those pictures -- the Hale-Bopp one is the best one. I think you can see a few stars in that shot. There's a couple of things; just like on the ground, if it's bright, your eyes don't iris down enough, so you want to dim the shuttle or the station if you really want to see a lot of stars. The second thing is that stars don't twinkle.
	One of the fun things about being in space is to observe all of the things that your body has made decisions about that you aren't consciously aware of and how it therefore interprets things in ways that you just don't think about. In this case what happens is you look out the window and the stars don't twinkle. Your mind immediately says, "Oh, that's a picture," because the only stars it knows of that don't twinkle are ones that are photographs. It takes a while to convince your brain that you're really looking at a real sky and not at a picture glued to the window, which is kind of fun.
	In terms of the density, it's just like being in a national park or high altitude. If you look out a plane window at night when they have the lights turned down because people are sleeping, that star density is pretty much the same as what you see in orbit. You can pick out constellations, but it's hard because there are so many other starts.
Coordinator	Louis Chaney, your line is open.
L. Chaney	Dr. Voss if there was a color called envy green, that's exactly what you're looking at in my skin. I really had a hard decision on what question to ask you. I cornered the pilot that flew the SR-71 that was presented down here to our museum at Eglin back in around 1990, and I need to ask you the same one; when you're up there, the very first thing that gave you the feeling of how fast you were really going? A scale. Like in this particular case, the pilot -- I had asked him, was it how fast the ducks went by? What really gave you the feeling, the idea? What hit you that gave you a sense of the speed going around?
J. Voss	I don't really remember speed per say. One of the challenges of doing a lot of public speaking is that a lot of your real memories get overwritten with your public speaking memories, and when you say speed, what really pops into my mind is a scene from my second flight where we're doing a fly around of the space station, and you see the Earth go by in the background. That's the speed memory that pops into mind. I'm sure there was a time before that when I was looking out the window and saw speed, and it mostly will be when you're looking straight down and you're seeing clouds that go by.
	I don't specifically remember the first time I did that and thought speed. I don't really remember thinking speed per say. The strongest memory that I have of looking down and going "Wow" in terms of first ones like that -- of course there were many over several flights, but the first one like that was on my first flight. I was in the mid-deck for launch, so there's only the little side hatch, and you can't see out of that unless you go right up and put your face up next to it, so I hadn't seen anything. I was busy taking things down from launch and putting things up for orbit, and I had a lot of things to do.
	The first thing that took me up to the flight deck was an experiment that had to be turned on, and the timing was such that I came up to the flight deck just about as we were coming around the first orbit on Kennedy Space Center, so my first view out the window was of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and you can see the Causeway where all of the guests, the large majority of your guests stay, and to look down there and know that all of my family and friends were right there, they were in this little bitty spot right in front of me, was an outstanding experience.
M. Berendsen	How small everything was.
J. Voss	Yes. My first big memory was altitude, not speed.
Coordinator	Next we have Ron Ziss; your line is open.
R. Ziss	I have my nine-year-old daughter here, and she has a question for you.
J. Voss	What's her name?
Margo	Margo.
J. Voss	Hello.
Margo	How do you eat in space?
J. Voss	Eating is an interesting experience in a couple of ways; the narrow answer to your question is we have, as a general rule, wet food. We hydrate our food so it sticks, and you can eat it with a knife and a fork and a spoon just like you do on the ground because it sticks to the utensils.
	The things that we have that are dry like peanuts, you don't need utensils to eat. Eating is pretty much just like on the ground. You have to be a little bit careful because you don't want to go gesturing with your utensils, or your food will go flying. Drinks are a bit more of a challenge. The drinks are all in drink bags that are similar to the cartons like the juice cartons you can buy at the grocery store; you stick a straw in them and drink out of the straw. The straw has a special clip on it so you can close the straw when you're not actively drinking or the liquid would just leak right out of the straw. It won't stay down at the bottom of the container.
	The other piece of eating in space though that people have somewhat different reactions to, although I think everybody has a somewhat similar one, it just depends on how much they notice it, is that you're food doesn't settle in your stomach. This is back to what your brain makes interpretations for you based on its long lifetime experience. Your brain interprets food not settling in your stomach as you're doing something active like running, and your brain has very strong memories that if you run when you're eating, you're going to get sick, so it makes you feel sick to that you'll stop doing what you're doing before you really get sick. It's a most amazing thing because you know you're not sick and you haven't eaten anything yet.
	You have a little bit to eat, and it's not enough to make any difference, and yet your body starts making you feel really queasy. You don't feel like throwing up. You don't feel like anything. You just feel like stopping doing something even though you can't stop, right, because the food is bouncing around.
	I remember asking the more experienced people on my first flight, "What should I do?" They said, "Just eat. As long as you're feeling fine, just eat," so I ate. That lasted for about two days, and your mind is starting to rethink this problem and it's going eating is not much fun anymore, and you don't want to eat, but you're hungry so you eat anyway, and then you feel bad for like an hour. You just feel bad. Nothing happened. I didn't throw up. My body is telling me to stop, but after a few days, it figures out your not going to get sick. This is okay, and the feeling just goes away.
	You don't notice that the food doesn't settle anymore. It's still bouncing around in your stomach, but your body stops noticing. It stops telegraphing those signals and then you stop feeling badly when you eat. Two days is the standard. You'll hear a lot like if you read about the space sickness, people will get space sick. They say it takes about two days. The whole adaptation process on a fairly superficial level takes about two days. Everything kind of comes together after about two days.
	The more serious ones like calcium loss in your bones and such go on for much longer, but the ones that you perceive right away settle down after about two days.
M. Berendsen	Fascinating.
Coordinator	Chad Ellington, your line is open.
C. Ellington	Your ... position with the space program, do you see any indication of expansion of the ... program or general direction that the international space community is progressing towards if any?
J. Voss	I see two ways; international is one. You probably have read that the Chinese just had their second human space flight, and the space activities around the world are very active and growing, which I think is very encouraging. I think space is a very valuable place to learn new things, and ultimately expand to other places, and I'm glad to see that the whole international community is working that way because you'll get much better results if you have all that cross fertilization of knowledge.
	The second one is one that we touched on earlier, which is the commercial space industry. Given the launch last fall, I think you're going to see that progress very fast assuming we don't' have any big problems with it. There are a lot of people -- it's amazing to me how many people will pay $20 million to go into space. We'd have a lot more if they didn't worry so much about their health, which of course is completely appropriate.
	When they get the price down to a million dollars or so, they're going to have people more than they can handle. I think that's where the big growth is going to be. As is true with everything else that the science and the technology and the development will piggyback on that. That will bring the price down to the point where you can now afford to do other things that are really going to help out.
	We haven't talked much about spin-offs, but there are lots of things like an area that's getting a lot of attention in the current space program because the products are small and lightweight, yet very expensive, is you can grow protein crystals that are more perfectly formed and larger in space. You can do a much better job doing analysis of them and using that to develop drugs that are more effective with your side effects because they're better targeted. You understand better the structure of the protein they're trying to interact with.
	You don't have to produce the drugs in space. You can just produce these small protein crystals and use that knowledge to make much better drugs on the ground.
Coordinator	Next we have Bill Ahl; your line is open.
B. Ahl	Your slide number three of Hale-Bopp was quite impressive. Most of the pictures that I've seen from the shuttle or station have been towards the Earth. Very few that I've seen have been of objects in the sky, and that leads me to a question concerning the feasibility of using the space station as a platform for a visible telescope.
J. Voss	We have Hubble, as you know. It's a visible telescope, and that's a much better platform. There's some good reasons for that. People move around a lot, and so they create motion, and they have machinery likes fans, and they have to exercise, and all of those things are very unhelpful for telescope kinds of missions. You want very stable, still platforms for telescopes, so they have talked about off and on and there were some early designs for putting telescopes that would point to deep space on station, but it never happened because the free flying spacecraft are so much better platforms.
	What may eventually happen, and what I would hope would happen at some point, we'll see where the space program goes from here; I think it will certainly happen with the commercial world is that -the station we currently have up there doesn't -- is to have the station be a staging point for free flyers. They wouldn't be on the station, but they would be near the station, which allows you easy servicing access and retrieval of products; say if you're doing some kind of laboratory environment, but yet gets them away from the interference of having people onboard.
M. Berendsen	Didn't think about that one.
Coordinator	Linda Prince, your line is open.
L. Prince	I'm from the Amateur Observer Society in New York, and I was wondering with all the missions that you've flown on and the experiments that have been performed, what are, in your opinion, some of the most interesting or significant experiments done on the space shuttle?
J. Voss	We talked about one already, the protein crystal growth, which was on all of my space shuttle flights. I was very privileged that my last flight, a STS-99 in February of 2000 I think has a fair chance of being the single most important flight in any space program perhaps ever and that means that in terms of a single flight; there were a series of flights that are very valuable, but in terms of getting information from a single flight, I think that one might set a record.
	What we did is we made a three dimensional map of the Earth and covered all the land from 60 degrees south to 57 north, which is 80% of the land where the people live. There was an existing three-dimensional map, but it had a number of flaws; one is it was at much lower resolution as a whole.
	The resolution on our map was a data point every 100 meters for the general public and a data point every 30 meters for the more restricted maps. The previously existing general maps had one every kilometer, so it's a factor of ten in each direction, a factor of 100 less dense. There were parts, there was about 5% of the existing map that was at the resolution that we got the entire map at, so that's one is high resolution.
	Second, is we made the entire map all in 11 days. The other maps were pieced together from different sources over different periods of time, and so you get a lot of variations due to time that there going to be confused at the variation to the altitude.
	The third thing is that not only were there variances in time by piecing it together, but the different groups used somewhat different processing techniques, and so you had lots of artificial cliffs in the data where you connected the two data sets together. That data set that we produced is going to affect the lives of everybody on this planet whether they know it or not because it's going to do things like improve airline safety because they can now do virtual reality training in places they didn't have enough data in to do before.
	We had a trucking company call up during the mission and ask when they'd have the map available because trucks are interested more in altitude changes than they are in distance because going up and down costs them a lot of gasoline, so they wanted to be able to plot alternate routes when there's construction going on, and a map like this would be invaluable.
	Firefighters trying to keep down fires having much better topography information can do a much better job. The list of cell phone towers finding what's the absolute highest peak and what blocks it and what's near by can bring the cost of cell phone towers down by locating them in better places. That was a huge valuable experiment that we did, and if you see -- you'll see it -- I'm very sensitive to it of course, but if you see anything in the press about SRTM, which stands for Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, or a shuttle flight in 2000, or STS-99, that's data from that mission, and you'll see it everywhere in the press once you get sensitized to it. It's being used all over the place.
	There have been medical experiments done on my flight. It's hard to tell which ones are going to end up long-term being the most valuable. That's probably enough on that topic, so I can let some other questions. We're getting close to the end here.
Coordinator	Next we have Darien O'Brien; your line is open.
D. O'Brien	Dr. Voss, I really appreciated your presentation this evening. Those photographs are really spectacular. One of the questions I had for you was I'm a private pilot, and one of the concerns I've always had when I fly myself or with one or two passengers in a small aircraft is the pilot really doesn't have much of an ability to even enjoy the view, so to speak, because you're constantly looking out for other flying aircraft especially with smaller aircraft in very congested areas.
	My question to you was when you're in space with the space shuttle, with all of the satellites -- you know when I look from the ground up every night, it's just amazing to me how many satellites you can see in an evening. Is that a constant problem in terms of for the pilots of the spacecraft to be able to make sure that you aren't flying accidentally into one of these satellites, or are they so few and far between at this point that it's not as big of a concern?
	When I see the images on IMAX film of the space shuttle flights over flying the Earth, it seems like it's traveling at such a tremendous rate of speed relative -- the Earth is rotating underneath at such a tremendous rate of speed that the ability for pilot to truly enjoy the flight might be hindered.
J. Voss	Fortunately for us, unlike you when you're flying, we have a huge ground team, Mission Control in Houston, that monitors things going on and does a lot of work for us. A lot of the routine monitoring is done by them. There actually are -- NORAD continuously tracks objects in space, things from baseball size up, and if anything like that is coming near the shuttle, they call up mission control and mission control does some calculations for us and tells us what to do, so we don't have to do any of that monitoring onboard, which you're right, would be very tedious.
	It is still true that space is a big place, and mostly you miss things. I had five flights, and I've forgotten the number, although Marnie I think said at the beginning, I think she counted up 49 days, and we had encountered one satellite that was close enough that we had to maneuver to stay away from it. It was going to be about a mile away from us if we didn't do anything, and about a mile was close enough that they were nervous, so that's in terms of things that we can see. They just gave us a maneuver, and we did it, and it was over.
	We did have, on my third flight, an incident; Don Thomas actually was up on the flight deck when it happened. He was sitting there and all of a sudden there was this starburst in the overhead window, and we were worried. We took a picture of it and sent it down. We were worried maybe we had cracked the pane, and the ground looked at it and said even if it is cracked, there's actually three layers there.
	It looks like A), it looks like it will hold, and B) if it doesn't, the others will hold, so you're fine. We didn't worry about it. When we got down to the ground, they analyzed the pit that was left by the center of this starburst spray and decided it was a piece of paint off of a booster that had presumably ruptured and sprayed out a whole bunch of debris.
	The medium/small things like smaller than the baseball can't be tracked and we can't see them. When they come by, we're just going to hit them. Fortunately, space is a big place. The problem is getting slowly worse; enough that they're really worried about as especially the launch market gets better and we're talking about commercial space and all these different things going up there about how we're going to protect from debris. That's getting to be a very serious problem.
Coordinator	Joyce Bryn, your line is open.
J. Bryn	Marnie, thanks for doing all you're doing.
M. Berendsen	Thanks.
J. Bryn	Janice, I wanted to ask you if you had any idea about what they do for vertigo? People have to have vertigo when they go up there sometimes. Is there anything they do for that?
J. Voss	People don't have vertigo as such because they're inside the shuttle. It's not the same kind of experience. It's like people flying on airplanes don't have vertigo as a general rule. In fact, it turns out -- of course there are a lot of pilots in the astronaut corps, and the pilots know that an atypically large number of pilots have vertigo experiences. They're afraid of heights; it's more acrophobia born than vertigo.
	For whatever reason, whatever the combination of neurons, apparently whatever creates acrophobia effects, altitude, ... make good pilots, which is kind of odd. The closest we come to it on orbit is the guys doing a space walk, when they make the transition from being inside the shuttle, through the hatch into the payload bay, and have a very different effect of the view that all of a sudden, and they often feel -- when you're in the shuttle, you feel like you're in an airplane. Even though you're very high and very fast, it feels just like being in an airplane.
	I haven't done a space walk, so I can't speak from experience, but the guys that have tell me when you go outside, it feels like you're hanging from the shuttle above the Earth, and there's a very strong feeling of falling at the beginning. It's so common that they now have a bit of an orientation period. They give you a couple of minutes. They explicitly put in the timeline an orientation period when you get outside the hatch, so that you can let your brain reprocess that and get reoriented.
	It doesn't make people sick partly because by the time -- we never do space walks the first day or even the second day. Even if you were inclined to do so, it takes so much effort to prep for them that trying to do that would be really hard when you're also doing all of the reconfiguration stuff.
	That means by the time people go out the door, they're pretty well adapted to the space environment. They've already learned all kinds of strange things the last couple of days, and their body is more happy to learn another strange thing.
M. Berendsen	It's amazing how adaptable we are.
J. Voss	It is.
Coordinator	Abby Chan, your line is open.
A. Chan	When looking for new astronauts, does NASA accept people who have not had experience flying planes or who are not pilots?
J. Voss	Being a pilot is not a requirement at this point to be an astronaut. They do look for things in your background that help them learn things like how do you perform in high stress situations? They don't want someone who panics. They want someone who stays calm. Having been a private pilot for 200 hours, they expect that you've been through situations like that and therefore have demonstrated your ability to deal with that in situations.
	A high percentage of the astronaut corps is pilots. All of the pilots are pilots of course, and they're about one-third of the corps. About one-third of the mission specialists are pilots by choice, and that makes about half of the astronaut corps is pilots, but it's not a requirement unless you want to be a pilot. Obviously, if you want to be a pilot or commander, you have to be a pilot.
Coordinator	Next we have Scott Forrester; your line is open.
S. Forrester	This is for Marlene; Marlene would like to know has anyone on the international space station had the opportunity to observe meteorites entering the atmosphere? Do they have any photos of that, and what data could be gathered from that?
J. Voss	I'm sure they have because I've seen them from the space shuttle. If I've seen them from the shuttle, I'm sure they've seen them from station. I don't think that there's anything particularly valuable that you couldn't learn from ground-based photos of that kind of thing. I'm not aware that there's much scientific value to the picture of the meteorite going through the atmosphere. It's really in collecting the meteorite after it has fallen.
Coordinator	Next question is from Naomi Apercat; your line is open.
N. Apercat	We're an all-teen astronomy club, and many of us are looking into astronomy and aeronautics in our future, and we were wondering when did you first realize that you wanted to be an astronaut and what inspired you?
J. Voss	I first got interested in sixth grade. I've always been a big reader. I started reading even before I was in kindergarten. Whenever I would go on summer vacation, I would pick up a whole bunch of books from the library so I'd have plenty to read, and I happened to pick up A Wrinkle in Time, which if this is a typical audience, most of you have probably read, and they also made a movie out of it not too long ago on television. I was just fascinated by that book. I thought it was the neatest stuff I had ever read, and I thought if there's anything going on like that in the real world, I want to be a part of it.
	My parents say that after that point I never talked about being anything other than being an astronaut. I still read a lot of science fiction.
M. Berendsen	Great question.
Coordinator	Robert Lynch, your line is open.
R. Lynch	Have you ever seen the so-called genies, electrical discharges from thunderheads? I've heard about these things. They're rather spectacular.
J. Voss	I have not personally seen them. They have been observed from orbit, and it's an area of very active research. I'm trying to remember; there's some controversy about that like there was some phenomena that some weather observers had claimed existed, and other people didn't believe, and then they got pictures of it from orbit. There are some things that are actually easier to see from orbit and have caused some changes in their understanding of the upper atmosphere phenomena. I have not personally seen them, but I know that they have been seen.
Coordinator	Daniel Ramirez, your line is open.
D. Ramirez	Just a follow-up question to the earlier question about you being inspired to be an astronaut. My question is who were your astronaut heroes while you were becoming an astronaut?
J. Voss	I didn't have individual heroes. I read every biography I could get my hands on, and there were books that I really liked. Walter Cunningham's All-American Boys was one of my favorite books. It really gave me, I felt, a sense of what it was really like to be there.
	My dad took me to a talk at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronaut lecture where the Apollo 16 crew spoke and that was a highlight that I remember. The first space flight happened to be that crew, and I remember being so puzzled because the crew was John Young, Charlie Duke and Ken Mattingly, and so the announcer was often saying Young, Duke, Mattingly. I'm sure they were saying Young, Duke and Mattingly, but I just heard the Young, Duke, Mattingly, and I'm thinking why do they always put "young" in front of his name. Why don't they just call him Duke Mattingly. I thought it was one person. I remember being amazed by that.
	In my adult years, of course, I met John Young in Houston. He only retired last Christmas, a year ago, from the NASA corps. He was there the entire time that I was in Houston. He's just an amazing person.
M. Berendsen	Shall we take just one more question, and then we'll have the drawing.
Coordinator	Next we have Dennis Hausch; your line is open.
D. Hausch	I'm just curious is there a maximum age on astronauts, or do you retire or go out to pasture?
J. Voss	There is no official maximum age. I left the astronaut corps last fall, and they were just starting to really struggle with what they should do about astronauts. What's happening is we've only had astronauts since basically 1960, so it's only been 40 years. That's one adult lifetime. The astronauts that they started with had no expectation of ever being astronauts. They were military test pilots.
	The next group coming up are saying astronauts are all military test pilots, so the first groups of scientists had no expectations of being astronauts. That was in the late 1960s, early 1970s. We're just now getting to the point where there are people in the astronaut corps who have always wanted to be astronauts; don't want to do anything else; have planned for it their entire life, and aren't going to leave.
	They're just starting to think about do we need a policy? Do we say you fly so many times? You can see that in what recently happened; two of my classmates, Terry Wilcutt who has been pulled off a crew and probably ... who's coming up, were assigned to flights as commanders before Columbia happened, and during that, one of the things they did during those years that Columbia wasn't flying was think about the composition of the astronaut corps. Even though Terry Wilcutt had been assigned to a crew and had been with the crew for several years, because of Columbia, they pulled him off the crew.
	They had to shuffle to cr

132