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The View from Space: Of rats and men
By John Holliman
April 29, 1998
Web posted at: 10:34 AM EDT (1034 GMT)
In this column:
- Baikonur, we have a problem
- Two months without a bath
(CNN) -- I've avoided mentioning "From the Earth to the Moon," Tom Hanks' series on HBO about the Apollo moon program, but so many of you have asked me to mention it that I feel I must. What a great series!
Baikonur, we have a problem
I mention this because one of the things the Apollo spacecraft could do is being tried for the first time with an Apollo-sized communications satellite this month. Back on Christmas day last year, the Russians launched a U.S.-built communications satellite from Baikonur. The Asiasat 3 communications satellite was to travel 22,000 miles up and help Asian viewers get even more television. The Proton rocket worked well until the fourth stage, and the satellite was left in an orbit too low to operate.
The folks at Hughes Commercial Satellite are announcing that they've been carefully modifying the satellite's orbit and will slingshot it around the moon next month to bring it into the proper orbit for its communications role. This has never been tried on a commercial satellite before, but as we all know from Apollo 13, that's what
worked to get the crew safely back to Earth.
Cassini The Cassini spacecraft, which is going to Saturn as fast as it can, this week used the slingshot maneuver to get there faster. By zooming around Venus, it increased its speed by 16,300 mph. Now traveling at 87,000 mph, Cassini will get to Saturn July 1, 2004. Let's hope we get to talk about its arrival here.
Andy Thomas really wants a hot shower. Imagine being unable to bathe for three months. That's where Andy, the astronaut on Mir, is today. He has one more month to go. We talked to him last week about his experiences so far, and he says he's counting the days until he can get home and take that shower.
He also says the experiments he's conducting, including growing tissue cultures in microgravity, are working well despite pesky air bubbles that continue to form inside the growth chamber.
Rats in space continues to be a hot topic at CNN. I did a story on the lab rats aboard shuttle Columbia this week that got lots of viewer response. The astronauts are testing the rats to see how well they adapt to microgravity in various stages of life.
Andy Thomas One of the most amazing things they're doing is letting newborn rats spend a couple of weeks weighing nothing, with no frame of reference to gravity. Veterinarian-astronaut Rick Linnehan says he and several colleagues found that they adapt to gravity just like humans do. One rat was holding a piece of food in his front paws. When he got thirsty, he dropped it to go to the water fountain, and when it floated by, he grabbed it and continued eating. No problem.
The purpose of this experiment is to find out what might happen to human children born in microgravity. If the rats are any indication, the human newborns would adapt just fine to what they find in space.
One surprise about the baby rats is that their mothers don't seem willing to take care of them. Nearly half of the newborn rats had died by early this week. The astronauts failed to mention this in their news conference from space, but a ground-based scientist let the bad news out of the bag.
Next month will be a busy one. NASA has scheduled briefings on the new space station for Houston, and Space Day will be the 21st. There's an Internet-related Space Day event that we'll get to talk about, so get your chat fingers warmed up to talk to officials of NASA and the Clinton administration and probably one reporter you read about right here.
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Watch Science & Technology Week on CNN for more sci-tech stories.
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