Plumbing Clog May Cut Length of Astro Mission
A mission to explore the heavens is expected to end a day early because of the most down-to-earth reason: The space shuttle’s toilet is jammed.
“The plumbing is stopped up,” declared chief flight director Randy Stone. “And there’s no Roto-Rooter.”
Unless someone figures out how to empty the shuttle’s holding tank, the Columbia will have to land Monday night instead of Tuesday, curtailing the long awaited Astro astronomy mission that was just hitting high gear Saturday.
The decision on landing early, expected to be made this afternoon, could be another blow to scientists, who have been on an emotional roller coaster. The mission recovered miraculously Friday after teetering on the brink of failure Thursday when the second of two computers that command the Columbia’s telescopes failed.
A program involving literally hundreds of workers resolved that problem when control of the telescopes was taken over by technicians on the ground, with a little help from the four astronomers who are in the shuttle’s seven-man crew.
The mood of the entire mission was summed up earlier by Randy Kimble, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, who bemoaned: “If you don’t like your mood now, wait 10 minutes.”
The news that they were expected to lose a full day of observations came just hours after scientists announced several dramatic discoveries. The historic mission has placed telescopes in orbit where they are able to study the universe in light that does not reach the ground, giving scientists a chance to look at celestial targets in ways that they have never been seen before.
Saturday morning, one scientist, Frank Marshall of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., announced results that could help scientists in their long quest to define the “dark matter” that makes up at least 90% of the universe but cannot be seen. Then he was told that the mission would probably be cut one day short.
“We would be greatly disappointed,” he said. “We are looking forward to every day.”
But a noble search for answers to cosmic questions appeared headed for an early end because of the blockage of a small pipe from the Columbia’s holding tank to a nozzle that spews waste water into space.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate what’s in there clogging it up,” Stone said.
The tank holds only about 20 gallons, and it must be dumped once a day. In addition to its obvious contents, it also holds moisture removed from the air inside the cabin. That keeps the humidity in check, and if the humidity rises too much it could cause problems for the critical electronics gear aboard the shuttle.
The crew is now using a plastic bag that holds about the same amount as the holding tank, but the bag and the tank only have enough room to take care of needs through Monday.
Stone said the crew was not being asked to make any sacrifices, such as consuming less water.
“That would be non-productive from a physiological point of view,” he said.
Scientists were already expecting to miss some of their observations because of problems in controlling the telescopes, but the results that have been achieved have left them ecstatic.
In a briefing Saturday, Marshall said that an X-ray telescope aboard Columbia provided clues about the “invisible universe.” Astronomers know that most of the mass of the universe cannot be seen. When they look at galaxies of swirling stars, they can infer that the galaxies must have far more mass than can be seen or they would not have enough gravity to keep from flying apart. That is known as the mass-to-light ratio.
The X-ray telescope allows astronomers to determine the temperature of very hot objects, and Marshall said the instrument “provided the first good temperature” reading of gas swirling around a galaxy known as NGC 1399. It turns out that the gas was exceedingly hot, and that measurement allows scientists to determine how fast atoms within the gas are moving, the so-called thermal velocity.
The velocity in turn tells scientists how much mass is present, because if the atoms were moving fast enough they would escape from the system, just as a spacecraft that achieves its “escape velocity” can fly free of the Earth.
The telescope told Marshall that the temperature of the gas around NGC 1399 is so hot that the atoms are moving so fast that the galaxy must have at least 20 times more mass than had been thought.
“There is some dark mass there that has not been detected by any other instrument,” he said.
As they study the data collected by the X-ray telescope, scientists expect to be able to determine something about the mysterious dark matter.
“There is hope that we may be able to measure the distribution of the dark matter--where it is in the galaxy,” Marshall said.
Scientists will spend the next few weeks, and possibly even years, studying the data for answers to questions about mysterious objects, or materials, that cannot be seen.
But waiting, for many of them, is nothing new.
Warren Moos of the Hopkins team said he has been waiting for more than a decade for data collected early Saturday by the Hopkins telescope. The instrument, which determines the chemical composition of distant objects by analyzing the light they emit, focused on one of the most enigmatic objects in the solar system, Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io.
The Voyager spacecraft visited Io in 1979 and found sulfur volcanoes spewing gas high into the region above Io, creating a doughnut of gas around Jupiter in the path followed by the active moon.
Since that discovery, scientists have been trying to understand how the volcanoes work. It would be easier to figure it all out if scientists could tell how much of which chemical elements are in the doughnut around Jupiter, because that would tell them much about the dynamics of the system, but the data was not good enough, Moos said.
The Hopkins telescope, by contrast, supplied enough information that Moos said he and his colleagues “have got the total picture.”
“This was the missing key,” he said.
Moos talked with reporters after spending the preceding 12 hours nursing the experiment, and, like nearly everyone associated with the Astro observatory, he was nearing exhaustion. He would not even guess when he will finish analyzing his data. He said it could take years.
But at least he has what he needs now.
“I have been waiting 10 years to get it,” he said.
If the mission has to be shortened by one day, the telescopes will have to be packed away early Monday morning in time for Columbia skipper Vance Brand to land the spacecraft at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California just before 10 p.m. Monday.
The other members of the Columbia’s crew are Guy S. Gardner, the pilot; civilian astronomers Samuel T. Durrance and Ronald A. Parise, and astronauts Robert Parker, John M. (Mike) Lounge and Jeffrey A. Hoffman. Parker and Hoffman are also astronomers.
The science mission is being controlled from the Marshall Space Flight Center here.
