FINAL EMAIL - NASA AND ANTARCTICA #8

From Tim Page
London
England
6 March 2000, 8pm

Hi there from England, everybody!

PRESENT POSITION: 51 degrees North Latitude, 0 degrees Longitude
AIR TEMPERATURE: 5 degrees Celsius
WIND SPEED: 5 knots

We finally made it back from the Antarctic! It was an unbelievable trip,
even better than last year. I was exceptionally lucky to go to Antarctica
once again. I would love to go back again one day, but it won't be for a few
years at the earliest. I want to spend some time with my new wife!!

We landed at Hobart in Tasmania, which is the large island-state off the
southeast corner of Australia. It has a long history of links with the
Antarctic. Well, actually it's not that long a history. You see the
Antarctic has only recently been explored by humans.

This is very different from the Arctic in the north. One major difference
between the Arctic and the Antarctic is that the Arctic is almost completely
surrounded by land (Siberia, Northern Canada, Greenland) but the Antarctic
is surrounded by open ocean. This means that it was easier for people to get
to the Arctic. There have been people in Arctic regions of Asia for at least
20,000 years. Some of these people crossed over to North America on a land
bridge, which was later flooded at the end of the last ice age. This means
that, unlike in the Antarctic, there were indigineous people in the Arctic
(Inuit, Aleut) long before European and American explorers turned up.

There are very old stories of Polynesians from the Pacific travelling into
the southern frozen seas, but the first people that we know travelled to the
Antarctic were lead by the great English explorer James Cook in 1775. He
sailed below the Antarctic Convergence for the first time and landed on the
sub-Antarctic South Georgia Island. He kept on sailing south, through thick
ice and past huge icebergs. Eventually he had to turn back because wooden
sailing ships were not good icebreakers!! He never saw the Antarctic
Continent but he suspected it was there.

This man, James Cook, was one of the great men of the Eighteenth Century. He
not only explored the Antarctic, but also all around the Pacific, New
Zealand, and eastern Australia. In fact the British settled Australia as a
direct result of Cook's explorations there. As you can imagine, no-one tried
to colonise the Antarctic (too darn cold), but Australia was another matter.
It is a very large place, with lots of wild and weird animals and plants.
And like the Arctic, Australia also has indigineous people, the Aboriginal
people, who have been there at least 60,000 years!!

Anyway, you are probably wondering why I am babbling about the British
colony of Australia. Well there's a good reason. As you all know, America
also used to be a British colony. At the same time that James Cook was
sailing around the Pacific, the Americans were launching a revolt against
the British. This revolution eventually led to the independence of the
United States. This made problems for the British. They had lost their big
colony. One thing they had used the American colonies for was to transport
criminals there because the jails in England were too full. Once America was
independent, the British couldn't work out where to put all their convicts;
that is until someone suggested they send the convicts off to the land
recently discovered by Cook, Australia!! This is exactly what happened, and
in 1788 the first convicts landed at Botany Bay (near present day Sydney)
and the colonisation of Australia had begun. So next time you learn about
the American Revolution, remember that one of the results was the settling
of Australia.

You are probably wondering what happened to James Cook. Well, he met a nasty
end in Hawaii in 1779. Ironically he was killed by Polynesian people, who
were also great early explorers of the Pacific.

OK, OK, you are probably bored now with old stories. So now I'm going to
talk about modern up-to-date stuff, in fact not just modern but
ultra-modern, almost science fiction. You see I'm going to talk about the
relationship between Antarctica and Outer Space!! Yup, that's what I said, I
'm going to talk about Astronauts and Cosmonauts and all that sort of stuff.

It may not seem obvious, but the Antarctic and Outer Space have a many
things in common. For one thing, they are both really, really cold! They are
also very remote and very hard and expensive to get to. This harsh climate
makes it a perfect place for astronauts to train. They can test out their
space suits, which have to be heated to keep them alive.

American astronauts train in the dry valleys in Victoria Land near McMurdo
Base in the Ross Sea. These, as you have probably already worked out, are
valleys where there is very little snow. Continuous wind blows it away and
so makes it a very strange rocky landscape; very much like the moon. These
valleys have another link with space, because they are a great place to find
meteorites.

Antarctic bases are usually very small, remote and self-supporting, very
much like a space ship will need to be in future. So that makes them perfect
places to carry out medical and psychological research. NASA has a long-term
relationship with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions
(ANARE). Doctors on the stations test people to see how they react to the
harsh and remote environment. In fact the Russians also used their Antarctic
bases to do medical research to help out their cosmonauts. Cosmonauts on the
Mir Space Station and scientists on the Russian base on King George Island
were both taking the same heart drug at the same time to compare the
results. Sadly they had to stop because the Russian economy didn't have the
money to keep the tests going.

There is another link with space. The ice cap on top of the continent is
very high and the skies can be very clear, so it's a good place to put
telescopes to scan the skies. The poles are also the best place to see
Auroras. Auroras are amazing lights in the night sky that are caused by
streams of charged particles hitting the atmosphere high up. In the south
they are called the Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) and in the north it's
the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). The Americans have a space research
facility at their base at the South Pole. The Australians also have a
facility at Mawson Station to monitor cosmic rays.

Guess what, our old friend James Cook even has a link with space. His ship
when he explored Australia was the Endeavour, the same name as one of the
American Space Shuttles! Now I've got an a great surprise. I have an old
friend called Nick. I've known him since I was a kid. When we
were children, he used to say that he was going to be an astronaut when he
grew up. And you guessed, he now works for NASA as an astronaut in
training!!!!!! Luckily I managed to catch Nick to tell us a little about his
training.


"Hello. My name is Nick Patrick, and I'm a friend of Tim's.
Actually, Tim and I have been friends since we were about 4 years
old. I grew up in England (Yorkshire and London) and the Northeast
of America (Philadelphia and New York). I attended university in
England (where I studied Engineering), and then spent 10 years living
in Boston.

"In 1998 I was selected by NASA to become a "Mission Specialist"
Astronaut and I moved to Houston Texas, where I started a 2-year
period of training with my class of 31 new astronauts (25 Americans,
1 Canadian, 2 Italians, 1 German, 1 Frenchman, and 1 Brazilian).
Each class of astronauts (NASA selects a new class about every 2
years) picks a name for itself. We chose to call ourselves "the
Penguins".

"Our training keeps us very busy. We have learned how to operate the
space shuttle, which -- according to some -- is the most complicated
vehicle ever to have flown: it takes off like a rocket, orbits for up
to 2 weeks, and then lands like a glider. This means you have to
learn three sets of systems: rocket motors, space-station life
support systems, and systems for gliding back to earth.

"NASA is also preparing to put astronauts on the new International
Space Station, so we have also been learning how to operate that.
Although the Space Station and the Shuttle have much in common (for
example, they both have pressurization and electrical power systems),
they are different enough that they require separate training.

"Some of the most fun training has involved learning how to get around
in so-called "zero-gravity" (there's actually plenty of gravity in
Earth orbit, but you don't feel it because you're constantly
"falling" around the planet!). We occasionally fly in a large
airplane affectionately called the "Vomit Comet". This airplane
flies parabolas (up and down, like a huge roller-coaster in the sky),
and as you go over the top of each parabola you experience about 20
seconds of free-fall or "weightlessness". The attached picture
"floating.jpg" shows the result inside the airplane's cabin -- I'm
on the far right.

"The picture "Space.jpg" shows me wearing a space suit for the
first time. Actually, this isn't a suit to be worn outside the space
craft -- it's a "pressure suit" designed to be worn inside the
shuttle. If the cabin were to leak during the ride up to space or
during the ride back down to earth, then this suit would inflate and
would contain a pressurized breathable atmosphere to keep you alive
and healthy.

"There are many interesting training challenges ahead of us -- like
learning to swim in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (the large pool where
astronauts train underwater for space walks), and learning to survive
in remote and inhospitable environments (NASA currently uses remote
regions of Canada and Russia to train astronauts to survive in
isolated environments).

"I wish you all the best as you discover the fascinating things that
science and engineering have to teach us, and I hope that learning
about them will be as interesting and important a part of your lives
as it has been of mine.

Nicholas Patrick
Houston, Texas, USA
March 5, 2000"


Thanks a lot, Nick. I fully expect to be at Cape Canaveral when you go into
space! If you want to know more about Nick, you can find a short biography
at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/patrick.html .

So, that's about it. There's one more thing to do. Here's a list of species
seen on our voyage:

MOSTLY OCEANIC
-----------------------
Black-browed Albatross (Diomedea melanophris)
Grey-headed Albatross (Diomedea chrysostoma)
Light-mantled Sooty Albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata)
Shy Albatross (Diomedea cauta)
Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans)
Australian Gannett (Morus serrator)
White-chinned Petrel (Procellaria aequinoctialis)
Wilson's Storm Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus)
Fairy Prion (Pachyptila turtur)
Broad-billed Prion (Pachyptila vittata)

Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Long Finned Pilot Whale (Globicephala melaena)
Southern Bottlenose Whale (Hyperoodon planifrons)

MOSTLY SUBANTARCTIC
-------------------------------
Kelp Gull (Larus dominicanus)
Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua)
King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)
Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)
Royal Penguin (Eudyptes schlegeli)
Blue-eyed Shag (Phalocrocorax atriceps)
Sooty Shearwater (Puffinus griseus)
Antarctic Skua (Catharacta antarctica)

Southern Elephant Seal (Mirounga leonina)
Subantarctic Fur Seal (Arctocephalus tropicalis)

MOSTLY PACK ICE
-----------------------
Southern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialoides)
Adelie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae)
Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
Antarctic Petrel (Thalassioca antarctica)
Cape Petrel (Daption capense)
Snow Petrel (Pagodroma nivea)
Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus)
South Polar Skua (Catharacta maccormicki)
Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata)

Crabeater Seal (Lobodon carcinophagus)
Leopard Sea (Hydrurga leptonyx)
Ross Seal (Ommatophoca rossi)
Weddell Seal (Leptonychotes weddelli)

Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalis)
Killer Whale (Orcinus orca)
Minke Whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata)
Sei Whale (Balaenoptera borealis)
Sperm Whale (Physter macrocephalus)

It's been fun doing these emails, I hope you've all enjoyed them. Now I've
got to go and find a job in the city! In a few weeks I will be putting
photographs (including some of Charlie Chowder) from this year's Antarctic
voyage on my website at: http://www.oocities.org/RainForest/Canopy/2681 .

Bye for now.

Tim Page

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