Search Results for: NASA

A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark

Longreads Pick

At Aeon, Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s HI-SEAS IV space exploration analogue, reflects on six months in a Mars simulator. When the six-person crew emerges on August 28th, 2016 — after a year and a day “off-planet” — they’ll have completed the longest NASA-funded Mars simulation in history.

Published: Feb 24, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,400 words)

A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark

Mars' Silver Island. Photo courtesy of the European Space Agency. CCBY

At Aeon, Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s HI-SEAS IV space exploration analogue, reflects on six months in a Mars simulator. When the six-person crew emerges on August 28th, 2016 — after a year and a day “off-planet” — they’ll have completed the longest NASA-funded Mars simulation in history.

Life on sMars, like on Mars itself, is elemental. Our chief concerns revolve around sun, air, water and rock — specifically, what we can and can’t do with those four basics in the right combinations. The Sun creates our energy. We, in turn, transform that energy into artificial light, in colours of the spectrum that most please our plants. The plants take up water, and set their roots in rocks that we’ve gathered from the surface. Their stems reach up towards the light, and our hopes grow with them: exhaled by the green leaves, born in the flowers that will bloom into fruit.

We brought along seeds, soil, and a special kind of bacteria. Cyanobacteria, as the name suggests, are green. In the bottle, they look thin and luminescent, like jello before it congeals. These versatile little creatures can convert carbon dioxide into breathable air. They can purify water. They can feed off the sparse Martian menu, using nitrogen from the air and minerals from the ground, or they can consume urine and break down our waste. Purely by living, breathing, eating and excreting, these little bacteria turn soil that’s been dried and fried under the pink Martian sky into a useful growing medium, and in the process make everything from biofuel to proteins — proteins by the ton, potentially — for future Martian colonists.

Collaboration is one of the key motivations behind the sMars project: to find out what people need to live, work and survive together on other planets, and how to give it to them. The idea sounds simple in principle, but is difficult in practice. To work together effectively, people need more than just food, water and energy. Shared mission goals help, but they still aren’t enough to keep people happy for months on end. So what is enough? The belief — the hope — is that there’s a recipe for making it work: that the right people, given the right tools, can live together in a small space under stressful circumstances for years and continue to perform at near-peak levels, the way that astronauts do when in low-Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station. Our jobs as simulated astronauts is to test out potential ingredients for that recipe.

In the future we’re trying to build, we will have to learn how not to fear the various deprivations. We’ll have to learn to embrace them instead, beginning with our own, very real, human limitations.

Read the story

More stories about Mars from the Longreads Archive

Volkswagen and ‘the Normalization of Deviance’

Volkswagen recently admitted to intentionally skirting U.S. emissions controls by installing “defeat devices” in nearly 500,000 vehicles. This scandal has undermined their credibility and profitability. In The Atlantic, Jerry Useem looks at historic precedents in other large organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Ford and NASA to explore Volkswagen’s expensive mistake and the corporate climate that led to it:

The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.

If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”

Read the story

Kay Redfield Jamison, William Styron and the True Stories of Mental Illness

Kay Redfield Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison. Photo by hocolobrary, Flickr

Journalist Mary Pilon is a former reporter for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the author of 2015’s The Monopolists, the best-selling book about the origins of the board game Monopoly . She’s just announced her next book, The Kevin Show (Bloomsbury, publish date TBD), about a manic depressive Olympic sailor who believes he is the star of ‘The Kevin Show’—hearing and speaking to the voice of the Director, who tells him what to do in the ongoing TV movie of his life. Given her latest project, we’ve asked her to share some of her early book research and recommendations on mental health. Read more…

How We Discovered Pluto

Photo: NASA HQ

At National Geographic, Nadia Drake has been writing about NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reaching Pluto this week, and she’s also written about our history with the former planet, which was discovered by 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh on February 18, 1930:

Tombaugh spent about a year searching for the missing world, using an instrument called a blink comparator. The noisy machine let viewers flip back and forth between long exposures of the sky, often containing hundreds of thousands of stars, taken several days apart. Anything that traveled a significant distance during that time—a planet or an asteroid, for example—would appear to move as the images flipped.

On that late afternoon—it was February 18—Tombaugh was manning the comparator and squinting at thousands of stars, evaluating each one by eye. Suddenly, in photos taken six days apart in January, he spied a small speck of light that didn’t stay put. In one image, it was to the left of two bright stars. In the next, it had jumped a few millimeters to the right of those stars. Tombaugh flipped back and forth between the images and watched the spot leaping in and out of its original position. He grabbed a ruler and measured the precise difference in the spot’s position. Then he found another photo of the sky, taken earlier in January, and searched for the same spot. Finally, he used a hand-magnifier to confirm the potential planet’s presence in one more set of photos, taken by a different camera. After 45 minutes, Tombaugh was convinced.

Read the story

Well-Aimed and Powerful

John C. Houbolt at blackboard, showing his space rendezvous concept for lunar landings. // NASA // Wikimedia Commons

Margaret Lazarus Dean | Leaving Orbit | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 21 minutes (5,246 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Leaving Orbit by Margaret Dean Lazarus, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, appearing courtesy of Graywolf Press.

* * *

The astronauts walked with the easy saunter of athletes. . . . Once they sat down, however, the mood shifted. Now they were there to answer questions about a phenomenon which even ten years ago would have been considered material unfit for serious discussion. Grown men, perfectly normal-looking, were now going to talk about their trip to the moon. It made everyone uncomfortable.
—Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon

Southern Festival of Books: Nashville, Tennessee, October 10, 2009

Maybe you’ve seen it. Many people have—at least 800,000 have clicked on various YouTube iterations of the same moment. It looks like nothing at first. The video is fuzzy, amateur, handheld. We hear the muffled verité sound of wind against the microphone, of the excited breath of the camera operator. People are standing around, their postures reflecting boredom, their faces and movements obscured by the shaky camera work and low resolution.

On YouTube, of course, this poor video quality, combined with a high hit count, contains an inverse promise: something is about to happen.

We can make out a white-haired man in a blue blazer, partially obscured by a sign. He seems to be talking to another man, in a black jacket, whose back is to the camera. Out of any context, the white-haired man would be unrecognizable because of the bad video quality, but if you know to look for him—and you do, because of the title on the YouTube page—the man is recognizable as astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot of Apollo 11, one of the first two men to walk on the moon.

The muffled audio obscures the voice of the black-jacketed man, who is speaking now. Passion or nervousness makes his voice waver.

“You’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t,” the man says. He is holding an object out to Buzz. A subsequent Google search reveals that it’s a Bible—he is trying to make Buzz swear upon it.

Overlapping him, Buzz Aldrin’s voice says, clearly and unwaveringly,
“Get away from me.”

“—calling the kettle black. You’re a coward and a liar and a thief—”

At that moment Buzz’s arm comes up and cracks the black-jacketed
man in the jaw. Even with the poor video, we can see that it’s an impressive punch, well-aimed and powerful. We can’t see the punched man’s face, but we see his head recoil backward. The camera recoils too, as if in sympathy. Something has changed in the scene, you can sense it. One public figure’s image has been complicated, another person now has a story to tell, a video to put on YouTube. Read more…

The Astronauts and the ‘Nutella Incident’

Concept for NASA human Mars mission. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Their persistently cheery e-mail updates [from the crew in the Hawaii-based simulation] raise a question: Does a happy crew tell NASA anything useful? Binsted argues that upbeat blog posts don’t always tell the whole story. Small gripes often emerge in the post-study interviews, when subjects know that their replies will be kept anonymous. It was only at the end of one of the four-month food studies in the dome, for instance, that Binsted heard from everyone about the “Nutella incident,” in which a crew member arrogantly finished off the group’s monthly ration, reasoning that the team was scheduled to open a new bin the next day. Stuster’s work with isolated crews found many examples of trivial annoyances growing unbearable, such as complaints from one of Byrd’s Antarctic crewmen about another man’s “way of breathing, his belief in dreams, and his frequent use of the phrase ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Stuster’s latest study for NASA, on private journals kept by astronauts, fairly hisses in places with steam let off by astronauts irritated by overscheduling, by patronizing requests, and by pointless-seeming tasks coming from ground control, such as recording serial numbers on items of trash. In the Mauna Loa dome, crew members simply roll their eyes when Binsted’s far-flung volunteer assistants do something lame, like expecting an immediate response to an e-mail sent when everyone is still asleep, because the sender forgot that sMars, like Hawaii, is not on daylight-saving time. Binsted calls it “crew-ground disconnect,” and deals with the problem in ways that are summarized by her use of the term “mission support,” rather than “mission control.”

Tom Kizzia, writing in The New Yorker about how NASA is preparing its astronauts for the long-haul isolation and travel that a possible Mars expedition would require.

Read the story

Moving to Mars

Longreads Pick

How NASA is preparing its astronauts for for the longest, loneliest voyage ever.

Author: Tom Kizzia
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 20, 2015
Length: 28 minutes (7,000 words)

The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

 ***

The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Frances Leech | Vintage | March 2013 | 14 minutes (3378 words)

The Longreads Exclusive below is based on Frances Leech’s ebook of the same name, published in 2013 by Vintage UK.

***

To make chocolate mousse, enough for 150 people, say, first whip the cream — liters and liters of it. Then, separately, whisk the egg yolks. Boil sugar and water and add to the yolks, still whisking, in a thin drizzle. Melt the chocolate, then stir, fold, and whisk everything together with some gelatin.

What is missing from this description, the bare-bones sketch in the red address book that alphabetizes all of my work recipes, is the physical sensations. When I started my apprenticeship in Paris a year ago, I learned that baking can be at once precise and vague. Measure everything to the last gram, simple enough. Harder to describe what the meringue mixture should look like when it is just right, hard to put the steady pressure of a hand piping cream into words. I looked and looked and was frustrated over and over.

Read more…