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American Morning
NASA Astronauts Take a Space Walk
Aired August 16, 2001 - 11:09 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: Now that first step, which can be a doozy: A pair of spacewalking shuttle astronauts are out now on a 6 1/2 hour tour of duty today. They got started just last hour.
Our space correspondent Miles O'Brien has just joined us this very second to bring us up to date on this. What is this stroll, Miles, all about? You're going to have to be over here so folks can see you OK.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is the, believe it or not, this is the 25th space walk of the space station era on this, the 1000th day of the space station. I bet there are a lot of people out there who are going: what space station? This is the International Space Station. We're not talking about Mir. It went into the drink a few months ago.
NASA and 15 other nations are building this space station and it will take in total 160 space walks to build it, which is an astounding number when you start adding up the numbers on that, given the number of space walks that have happened to date.
Today, two spacewalkers, Dan Barry and Pat Forrester, are outside the space station. We're looking at some pictures right now of mission control because we don't have a good live signal from the space station. But they're involved in a six and a half hour sojourn to attach a couple of things. First of all, a big container of ammonia. Now, you may ask why ammonia? To keep the place clean?
No, no. It has nothing to do with that, although a lot of people ask what does it smell like on the space station? Maybe ammonia. The ammonia actually is there as a chilling aid to help with keeping it cool because the temperature swings on a space station are tremendous, from 250 degrees plus to 250 degrees minus from night to day. And, of course, the spacewalkers are out there in their suits experiencing that same tremendous temperature swing. So they're, you've got to imagine them in the world's smallest spacecraft, $14 million spacecraft with many, many layers.
In any case, they're going to attach this big ammonia container, take care of a few cables and also put out a couple of boxes with some materials which might be used later on the space station, some polymers, some plastic, some switches, to see how well it holds up. They'll just leave it out the for a year, bring it back and see what switches worked best. FRAZIER: These are, in effect, like when you drive down the highway and you see different paints that they've striped on to see how traffic can handle...
O'BRIEN: Perfect analogy. Perfect analogy. That's exactly what it is and, you know, the only way to do it is to put it in space and when you think about the cycles and the temperatures of things that we're talking about, you know, a 500 degree swing in the course of 45 minutes and doing that over and over again for the course of a year...
FRAZIER: And also being battered by...
O'BRIEN: Oh, we've got some live pictures. Take, look at that.
FRAZIER: Oh, all right.
O'BRIEN: Let's check out these live pictures. Now, let me just show you where we are. I'll try to orient you a little bit. Right now this is a camera on the shuttle's robot arm. You're looking at Dan Barry there. Now, you may wonder how I know that's Dan Barry. Do you want to know?
FRAZIER: Well, he's got a patch on his arm and he's using some -- oh, there's a number, I see.
O'BRIEN: No, they've all got patches.
FRAZIER: I see a number, too.
O'BRIEN: No, the number is not it. There are red stripes at the top of his backpack. Do you see those red stripes? And do you see the red stripes on his thighs?
FRAZIER: Right.
O'BRIEN: That is the dead giveaway. He is extravehicular mobility -- you know, this is NASA talk -- he's number, he's crewman number one on the spacewalker with red stripes and there at the other, on the top of your screen there is his spacewalking comrade Pat Forrester. Now, Pat Forrester is on his first spacewalker ever for real. They spend about 10 hours in that giant swimming pool in Houston for every hour they spacewalker. So everything he's doing is very familiar to him.
Dan Barry, actually, two years ago did a space walk at the space station. This is his second real foray into space. He, of course, has as much training, kind of a difficult image that you saw there to make out. But nevertheless back to...
FRAZIER: Well, they're moving into shadow there.
O'BRIEN: Mission control -- and there's all the people that wish they were up there spacewalking, the flight controllers in Houston.
FRAZIER: Hang on a minute now. We're going to stay in space but change from the International Space Station to some other very exciting news and that is that astronomers at the University of California at Berkeley are excited today over a new discovery they've made, a solar system with planets that have an orbit like that of earth.
Most of the 70 known planets that have been discovered outside earth's solar system have wild eccentric looping orbits or very small orbits. These two follow a nearly perfect circular path around their sun, which is a star in the Big Dipper.
So, if these planets were in our solar system, they would be between Mars and Jupiter and scientists feel that they are most likely gaseous giants like Jupiter, not hospitable to life forms, at least as we know them now.
We're going to talk next with Ann Kinney, who's in Washington, to talk more about the issue. She is director of astronomy for NASA.
Ms. Kinney, thank you very much for joining us. How is it, first of all, that you were able to find these?
ANN KINNEY, NASA DIRECTOR OF ASTRONOMY: They look for velocities caused by the planet on the star. I brought a planet with me here. Let's see if I can orient it correctly.
FRAZIER: Looks like ours.
KINNEY: It does. The planet, as it goes around the star, it pulls the star and that pull can be detected as a velocity. It's very difficult to do and, of course, currently we cannot detect things as small as earths. Currently we're detecting things more the size of Jupiter, not the size of earth.
FRAZIER: And finding planets is nothing new. That's been happening almost half a decade now, right?
KINNEY: Yes, you could call that nothing new. I'd say it's pretty new, actually. It's only five years that we've known there were any planets at all and as we discover planets, it really changes the way we think about our own world. Of course, our ultimate goal is to be able to not only find earth like planets, but to eventually take an image of one and to be able to have an image of a blue dot surrounding another sun close to us.
O'BRIEN: And -- it's Miles.
KINNEY: Hi, Miles.
O'BRIEN: And, you know, there are quite a few inferences you have to make. First of all, they don't actually see the planet. They see the wobble of the star. And by the way, this star is in the Big Dipper. It's the constellation known as the Big Bear, for those of you who are amateur astronomers. And then by inference if you know that there's something, a gas giant like Jupiter, you could actually come to the conclusion that it might actually be out there protecting an earth size planet and perhaps a planet that might be the right distance, the so-called Goldilocks planet just right for life, right? KINNEY: That's right, not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold.
O'BRIEN: But the importance of having a Jupiter like planet, I mean it might help folks to understand here that Jupiter protects us in a lot of ways. And if you find a solar system with a Jupiter that might lead you to believe there's another planet there, right?
KINNEY: Yes. The thinking is that the Jupiter is the planet that sucks up all the dangerous asteroids so that you're not, so that life is not constantly destroyed by asteroids. It's, I think Paul Butler calls it the garbage can. It sucks up all the, all those things that would otherwise be very destructive to our environment.
FRAZIER: And what's the significance of the near circular orbit? Why does that matter more than those eccentric sort of parabolic orbits you've seen in the past?
KINNEY: It's stability. We see how hot it is in the summer here. Of course, that's because of the tilt of the earth's orbit. As the earth's orbit goes around the sound it is tilted and you get a closer direct view in summer than in winter. If you had a highly elliptical orbit, it would be hotter at one time of year and colder in another time of year and it would simply be you would not have the stability for life that you need.
FRAZIER: And how did they find this out at Berkeley? Were they using the Hubble, for example, or a land based radio waves? What were they doing to discover it?
KINNEY: They were using the Lick Observatory, a very sensitive observatory. These guys work really hard at getting their velocities down. They're working on going down to a detection of three meters a second. It's extremely difficult. This is work, of course, supported by NASA and it's also been supported by NSF.
So they observe this star for a very long period of time, over a period of 10 years, and they watch as the star wobbles towards us and away from us as it's being pulled by its planet. It's very, it takes very careful work. The work is very difficult.
FRAZIER: And very exciting results. And I thank you, Ann Kinney, for explaining them to us this morning.
KINNEY: Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you.
FRAZIER: Well, it was a big day.
Miles, thank you for joining us, too.
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