The View from Space: tracking twisters

By John Holliman

April 21, 1998
Web posted at: 3:10 PM EDT (1510 GMT)

In this column:

• Columbia's ocean view
• Back to Spektr

(CNN) -- I spent much of the week following tornadoes. On Thursday, I spent the afternoon at the National Weather Service forecast office outside Atlanta. It was a vivid reminder of how things that happen in space are helpful to people on Earth.

The weather service uses lots of radar to track the movement of killer storms, but they use satellite imagery from the GOES series of weather satellites to monitor overall storm movement. The weather service is continuing to modernize its computers to get to a point where views of the weather from space can help give advance warning of tornadoes and other violent storms.

If you want to look at some of the imagery go to their Web site at www.nws.noaa.gov.

Columbia's ocean view

Astronaut James Pawelczyk hangs over Richard Linnehan in an experiment on board Columbia

While I was in Nashville covering tornado damage, shuttle Columbia lifted off for the 16-day Neurolab mission. This shuttle is filled with animals, including 140 rats and mice, crickets, fish -- you name it.

Taking care of the animals is veterinarian astronaut Rick Linnehan. He talked with CNN viewers and Jean-Michel Cousteau, eldest son of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, about the planet's oceans. This is the Year of the Ocean, as proclaimed by the United Nations and President Clinton. Seventy-two percent of our planet is covered by water, and the astronaut and ocean explorer talked with us Monday night about the effects of El Nino, as seen from the shuttle. Rick says you can see where the ocean is disturbed, and he can see damage on the planet's surface caused by El Nino.

Linnehan has been doing biopsies on some of the shuttle mammals to see how their inner ears adapt to the lack of gravity. He and the other astronauts are conducting experiments on themselves to determine what happens to the central nervous system in people as they change in response to weightlessness.

Back to Spektr

On Mir, a couple more spacewalks are scheduled this week. The cosmonauts have been able to replace the main steering system for Mir, which should help keep the station on course for the next year. Up next for the cosmonauts and astronaut Andy Thomas: more work on the leaking Spektr module. You'll remember it was damaged last June when a Progress supply ship banged into the side. The cosmonauts want to find the leak and fix it so they can use the Spektr for more science research.

Here's an early warning on something coming up next month. Space Day will be May 21, and one of the big events to mark the importance of space to the rest of us will take place at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. If you can get there, you can get on board a scale model of the shuttle, and live like the astronauts. There's also a plan to get Andy Thomas to join us from the base block of Mir.

The organizers will conduct a day-long Webcast from the museum. They're calling it the world's first live interactive Webcast dedicated to space. It will start at 10 a.m. EDT and last until 6 p.m.

We'll keep you posted on the happenings aboard Columbia and Mir all week here on CNN and CNN Interactive. Thanks again for your e-mails, and for checking in here each week.

One more thing. As the column was being posted NASA called to say we'd get another chance to talk live to Andy Thomas from Mir, Thursday at 12:20 p.m. EDT.

You'll remember we tried to talk to Andy a week ago, but Mir lost contact with the Russian communications satellite just before interview time, and we were unable to check in with the astronaut, who is past the halfway point in his four-month stay on Mir. He'll probably have even more to tell us this Thursday.

John Holliman's column appears on Wednesdays.

Related stories:

• Astronauts stay serious aboard orbiting amusement park - April 20, 1998
• Mir's cosmonauts continue work on new engine installation - April 17, 1998
• The View from Space: 'Facing' the facts? - April 15, 1998

Related sites:

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• Year of the Ocean
• National Air & Space Museum
• NASA
  • NASA Neurolab Web
  • NASA Shuttle-Mir Web

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.

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