And of course, you don’t want any of that stuff floating around the cabin. You get better at it with time, but for the first week or so, you have to plan ahead. You have to set aside about 30 to 40 minutes.
#TELESCOPE GLIMPSES FREEFLOATING FREE#
In space you’re in free fall, so that doesn’t happen. It almost looks like the earth has some kind of disease.īiological challenges during space flight: Gravity and exercise play a big role in transporting solids through your system. Contrails from jets crisscrossing all around the earth. Open-pit copper mines in South America that are such a staggering size, they’re visible with the naked eye from space. You see clear cutting and fires burning in forests all around the planet: huge plumes of brown smoke coming off of cities, extending across whole oceans, from the Asian continent to North America.
How’s the view? The unsettling part is you see the tremendous environmental damage that we’ve inflicted on the planet-everywhere you look. I felt a real sense of joy and peacefulness that I rarely feel on Planet Earth. It was a disappointment to have to come home, even though I wanted to see my family and friends. Space flight as transformative experience: For me it was a more of a realization that I finally found a place where I feel at home. We don’t have a clue what 75 percent of the universe is made out of. Or you might say, wow, that’s a really cool opportunity for physics. Well, you might say that’s a pretty big embarrassment for physics. Lo and behold, it accounts for almost three quarters of the entire energy content of the universe-and we have no clue what it is. But you can compute how much energy is contained in that pressure that’s causing it to expand. Nobody really expected that, and nobody knows why. It turns out that Hubble discovered the universe isn’t just expanding-it’s accelerating. The big philosophical question has always been: Will it stop? Will there be a Big Crunch someday? Philosophically that’s kind of attractive. We know that now.Įxpanded consciousness: The expectation was that as the universe expands, it should slow down because gravity is pulling on it. How old is the universe? That’s a fundamental human thing to want to know. Are black holes for real? Sure enough, black holes are for real. Confirming the existence and nature of free-floating planets will be a major focus for upcoming missions such as the NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and possibly the ESA Euclid mission, both of which will be optimised to look for microlensing signals.
From 1993 to the present the scientific output has been unbelievable. Hubble’s scientific impact: The Hubble is this incredible discovery machine-almost indisputably the most productive scientific instrument ever created by humans. I’ve never really experienced gripping fear. But you kind of put that in that little box and leave it there. Launching from the surface of the earth to orbit-going from a standstill to 17,500 miles an hour in eight-and-a-half minutes-is a very violent event. Sitting on a launchpad on top of four-and-a-half million pounds of explosive fuel is a very dangerous thing to do. The chance of losing a crew on one of these missions is about one in 70. Just another day at work: Space flight is never routine.
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