TileFile

A Bit OF Fun
I have been playing around with this site a bit. I think it's quite innovative and different to the chaos of MySpace or the narrow focuses of specialist sites. It's still new, but it looks like it could be real fun.

Dark Matter

Strongest Evidence Yet


Long disputed, the evidence for Dark Matter has been gatherin steadily.

"This is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter," astronomer Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told reporters.

Astronomers believe dark matter - as opposed to ordinary matter making up the stars, planets and the like - comprises about 85 per cent of the universe's material, but evidence of it has been difficult to come by.

Dark matter cannot be directly seen. It does not shine or reflect light, but astronomers infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity
bends the light given off by even more faraway galaxies. They do not know what
it is made of, but think it could be a kind of particle.

Astronomer Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology, not involved in the research, said the findings are facing scepticism within the astronomical community.

"It's really exciting if it's right. But to be sort of convinced of the ring, astronomers would really want to see some independent observations verifying it," Massey said.

Here's the article.

Space As A Lifestyle Choice...

Don't Wanna Go Home


Here's an interesting article on what Cosmonauts say about working in Space.

The best, the most beautiful part, is after the start when you look at Earth
straight away," Cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov said.
"Earth is like a big, blue balloon and this beautiful balloon is flying, all around it is solid blackness."

Dezhurov has lived in Star City – a formerly top-secret training base for cosmonauts near Moscow – for 21 years and has done two four-month stints aboard the International Space Station, 350 km above Earth. He can think of no other profession he'd like better, despite the fact that after the launch, and that glimpse of his home planet, "it's all work, work, work up there, night and day".

But his main gripe is not the long hours, or missing his family and friends. "The hardest thing is coming back to Earth," he said. The problem is not so much the mundanity of earthly existence – bills to pay, food to buy, chores to complete.

"The muscle fabric degrades very much. It's hard to walk. You have to learn how to walk again, like a small child."

Astronauts train daily aboard the orbiting space station to prevent the atrophy of their legs and feet which are under-used in weightlessness. It takes several weeks under medical supervision to recover from a long stay in space.

The things we learn, every day. :)

More on Schirra

Pretty Cool
If you thought the Right Stuff was a bit too macho, you should check this out here from Time Magazine:

Wally Schirra once told Chris Kraft to go to hell. Remember the astronaut, who died this week at 84, for a lot of things, but put that particular bit of courage near the top of your list. Nobody, up until that moment, had ever told Kraft to go to hell, and the fact is, Schirra didn't tell him directly either. What he did do was tell Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut corps, and he knew Slayton would tell Kraft, the director of all of the manned missions. Even when you're calling down your imprecation from the safe remove of the Apollo 7 command module high in Earth orbit, that took brass.

Apollo 7 was Schirra's third and last mission. Having joined the space agency as one of the original seven astronauts in 1959, the former Korean war combat pilot became the fifth American in space, orbiting the Earth in his tiny Mercury spacecraft in 1962. In 1965, he returned to space aboard Gemini 6 with co-pilot Tom Stafford, rendezvousing with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, already waiting in orbit in Gemini 7. After those two trips, there wasn't much that rattled Schirra, but agreeing to fly Apollo 7 at all still took some spine.

On January 27, 1967, just 21 months before Schirra's mission took off, the Apollo command module had killed three of his colleagues, when a spark ignited its pure oxygen atmosphere, immolating Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a lockdown rehearsal on the pad. Everyone at NASA already knew that the so-far unflown Apollo was a lemon. Not long before the three men died, they sat for a photo session with a model of the command module resting on a table in front of them it. In one of the outtakes never released to the press, they dropped the grins, bowed their heads and brought their hands together prayerfully. They inscribed the picture to Harrison Storms, the head of North American Aviation, the spacecraft's lead contractor: "Stormy," the inscription read, "this time we are not calling Houston!"

After the fire, it was left to Schirra, the commander of the three-man back-up crew that included space rookies Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele, to help oversee the gutting and redesign of the ship. Schirra was a bear about the job, stalking the factory floor, poking his nose into whatever the engineers were doing and making it clear when he did not like what he saw. If he wasn't satisfied with the answers he got, he'd go up to the executive suites and buttonhole Storms himself. "You guys want to fix this ship or not?" he'd challenge. "If so let me see you down on the factory floor with the rest of us."

After all this, it was no surprise that when the spacecraft finally took off for its 11-day trip, Schirra would be just as much of a pit bull about how the ship would be flown. NASA scientists had stuffed the flight plan with experiments and astronomical observations, but Schirra didn't want any part of them. This was an engineering mission, as the test pilots liked to call it, meaning that it was a shakedown flight for the ship itself, not a working trip for the men in lab coats.
Whenever an experiment crowded an engineering exercise, he'd jettison the experiment. When a prime-time broadcast was scheduled for shortly before the crew was to execute a tricky rendezvous, he scrubbed the TV show. "No TV until after the rendezvous," he pronounced. The ground objected but Schirra held firm. "TV will be delayed without any further discussion."

Things got more contentious still when all three men developed head colds, something that can be uncomfortable enough on Earth and is exponentially worse in the unfamiliar pressure of a sealed spacecraft. Reporters noticed the sparring between mission control and the ship and began writing about the "snappishness" of the astronauts. The Russian press weighed in too, pointing out the crew's "increased irritation due to the monotony of the spaceflight and the imperfect design of the systems for controlling the vital functions of the spacemen."
Finally, Kraft broke all protocol and proposed to speak to Schirra directly. Slayton offered to do it himself, figuring that as one astronaut to another he could communicate more candidly. Slayton did just that and later reported back to Kraft.
"I told him that the whole world was following this flight and that he and his crew were not coming across well," Slayton said. "I told him he was trained to do a job and that he'd better get busy doing it."
"And?" Kraft asked.
"And he told me to go to hell."

As Slayton must have known, however, doing his job was precisely what Schirra was engaged in for the entire 11 days aloft. Astronauts were pilots first and showmen second. And while the silver flight suits and the smiling press events and the ticker-tape parades belied that, they were hired for their unique understanding of the machines they flew and their hardheaded ability to coax the most from them. That was Schirra's gift. And if flipping off his boss was necessary to get his work done, well, he was happy to do that too. Kraft, 83, wound up respecting Schirra for that act of defiance. Schirra was happy to get that nod. But the fact was, the pilot in him really didn't need it.

An interestng read and a peep in to the world of '60s-'70s NASA.

The Passing Of Wally Schirra

All Hail The Mercury Seven


Wally Schirra, he of the Mercury Seven with 'the Right Stuff' passed away.

Schirra was one of the seven young men selected in 1959 to lead the Cold War
space race against the Soviet Union. Only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter remain
from the project. He was born in March 1923 into an aviation family, Schirra
was one of the seven Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959. He then
piloted the Sigma 7 Mercury flight in late 1962, which orbited Earth six
times.

That flight lasted 9 hours, 15 minutes and attained a speed of 28,091km/h at an altitude of 280 km. It travelled almost 230,400 km before re-entry.
Schirra was the command pilot on the historic 1965 Gemini 6 flight. The highlight was a successful rendezvous of Gemini 6 with the already orbiting Gemini 7 spacecraft. This was the first rendezvous of two manned manoeuvrable spacecraft and established another space first for the United States.

In 1968 he was the command pilot on Apollo VII. Schirra had logged a total of 295 hours and 15 minutes in space. He was the only astronaut to have flown Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions.

In 1969 Schirra retired from the US Navy and NASA. According to his family, Schirra died of natural causes.

Farewell, and godspeed, Wally.