The View from Space: Big preps for solar eclipse

By John Holliman
February 24, 1998
Web posted at: 4:27 PM EST (1627 GMT)

In this story:

• Knowledge from above
• Mir dockings go smoothly
• Price tag for space station rising
• Mars Surveyor pictures streaming in

(CNN) -- So much going on ... so little time to talk about it.

Lets start with the eclipse. CNN will provide live coverage of the solar eclipse all day Thursday, February 26, both on TV and on the Web site. NASA has sent teams around the world to Curacao and The Galapagos.

There are lots of places to get ready for the eclipse. NASA has a great page with lots of links if you want to get prepared. The address is http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/eclipse/eclipse.htm

I've already been there and can tell you we'll see this eclipse live from the ground on Curacao, live from space via a new GOES weather satellite that's being tested this week, from other weather satellites that look down at the Caribbean region, and from SOHO, the international satellite that's a million miles out in space and looks at the sun all the time.

The raw data from many of the satellites will be available on the Web before anywhere else, so during eclipse time 1500 GMT to 1900 GMT (10 a.m. to 2 p.m. EST) we'll have a lot to look at and talk about on TV and on the Web.

Knowledge from above

I'm sometimes amazed at what we get from space. For example, NASA has been looking at El Nino for months and says the news from space is that the warm water pool that drives the weather system is getting thinner.

Last week we talked about my travels to U.S. space command, one point made by Gen. Howell Estis, who runs the command, is that we know a lot more than we used to about the world around us, and much of what we know comes from space.

But for the military and many of us in civilian life, we don't know that lots of new information we use every day comes from space. Estis says one of his biggest jobs is convincing the military that space can do amazing things for it.

I did a TV story this week about spy satellites and how they have been used in the past to monitor compliance with international agreements in the past. In the story I reported that with additional U.S. attention being paid to the Middle East right now, it would be easier than ever for U.N. weapons inspectors to know if Iraq was moving suspicious items from place to place.

Spy satellites are wonderful tools, and they're getting better and better with each new launch.

Mir dockings go smoothly

One of the more interesting stories from the Mir space station this week was a group of events that happened last Friday. Mir turned 12 years old and mission controllers in Moscow called up to the station to remind the three-person crew that their home in space had passed another milestone.

Moments later the two cosmonauts and astronaut Andy Thomas got into the Soyuz rescue ship and left Mir. Nope, they weren't bailing out; they were moving the Soyuz from one end of Mir to another. For the past couple of months, an almost empty Progress supply ship has been orbiting next to the space station. The crew has accumulated more garbage to load into Progress and for them to do that the Progress had to redock. With Soyuz plugged in at one end, the Progress could dock at the other.

You may remember that a Progress docking last June went terribly wrong and caused a leak in Mir's Spekter module. Monday's docking was described by Russian controllers as "an ordinary event for us as well as for the Mir crew."

Astronaut Andy Thomas reports he's set up a series of experiments on Mir that may make a difference to us on Earth. One of the downsides of flying in space is that your likelihood of getting a kidney stone goes way up. It has something to do with concentration of urine because you lose much of your body's water volume during the first few days of weightlessness.

Andy is taking urine samples from everybody on Mir to see how that process is working. There are various things you can do to avoid the stone problem, and several of these countermeasures are being tested on this flight.

Price tag for space station rising

A story we've been working on for several months involves the cost of building the international space station. When the latest version of the station was approved in 1993, Congress insisted that NASA not spend more than 17.4 billion U.S. tax dollars on the project. The rest of the station's funding had to come from other countries. Now NASA is projecting that the station's cost to U.S. taxpayers will be 3.6 billion more than promised.

Congress is complaining about the cost overruns but can't do anything about them, without canceling the station altogether. That's not going to happen.

How do you spend an unexpected $3.6 billion? First the Russians get into much deeper financial trouble than expected, and NASA and its contractor Boeing decide to pay for a Russian-built station segment. Then Boeing itself runs into major cost overruns with the station elements that are being built in this country.

Sen. John McCain, who heads the Senate commerce committee, has asked the General Accounting Office to investigate and report back within a few weeks. I'll let you know what the GAO report says, but don't expect much in the way of major change in the station program. The first piece will still be launched in June from Baikonur, Khazakstan, with the second piece going up on a shuttle in July.

Jerry Ross is a veteran NASA spacewalker, and he'll lead the team of astronauts that will put the first two pieces together. He's been training in a spacesuit in the underwater tank in Houston for the past months. He says it's hard work to get the spacewalk choreographed in the water, and he knows if he doesn't get the first two big pieces connected in July, the future of the project will be delayed.

Mars Surveyor pictures streaming in

Been to Mars lately? Almost every day, somebody comes up to me to talk about the Mars rover landing last July. The next spacecraft to go to Mars, Global Surveyor, is still looking at the Martian surface and sending back fabulous pictures of the red planet's surface. Most of what Surveyor is sending is black and white, but the surface of Mars is obviously very different from the surface of Earth and you can see it in these pictures.

While we look at these pictures, consider what's going to happen next on Mars. The next lander to travel to Mars is being built at the Lockheed Martin Astronautics factory in Denver. The new lander will touch down near the south pole, and the next Martian orbiter will study the climate of Mars from above, something like a weather satellite above the Earth. We'll talk more about the next series of Mars missions that will be launched by the end of this year.

Finally, I'm going to try to take next week off. I'll probably check in from the road, but if the news in this column seems very old to you, its probably because I've been off the case for a week.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.

Related stories:

• The View from Space: The Mir diet
• The View from Space: Life on Mir
• The View from Space: "City in Space" moving toward reality

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