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Space Blog

Posted by michael on from the blogs...-in...-space dept.

LooseChanj writes "Ed Lu, a member of the Expedition 7 crew of the ISS has been sending back some extremely well written and interesting commentary about his mission, and some of the things one has to deal with in space. This is exactly the kind of stuff we need to see more of out of NASA!"

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. It's both by Raul654 · · Score: 4, Informative

    In this case (for a body enclosed by the space shuttle in free-fall) you can assume that momentum is conserved. So you you expel gas, the total momentum of you and the gas is 0.

    By the same token, the force exerted by you on the gas is the same force extered by the gas on you. That's newton's third law.

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
  2. Re:Is Ed Lu running lunix? by Rxke · · Score: 2, Informative

    Oh yeah, the Russian guys apparently run Sun and Windows.... making it a mixed systems, for they have separate computers to run their part of the station.

  3. Re:What happens to Farts in weightlessness ??????? by mikeophile · · Score: 3, Informative
    Lower atmospheric pressure won't change the amount of flautulance produced, will it?

    What would be a small toot at sea level would be a station shaker at partial pressure.

    Plus, the fart/air ratio would be higher, so it might disperse quicker but might be gaggingly worse till it does.

  4. Re:Is Ed Lu running lunix? by cyclone1996 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Only the laptops and the network that are used for housekeeping stuff like email, downlinking digital images, the crew's private phone (yes, they have one), procedures, and timelines are windows based.

    The laptops that plug directly into the core flight computers to allow the crew to do command and control of the station itself (critical things like maneuvering, opening valves, etc.) are running Solaris 2.5.

    These laptops are currently IBM 760 XDs but they are going to be upgraded next year, at which point the OS will be transitioned to Linux. Some of the payloads in the racks use various flavors of Unix depending on what the investigators put together but I'm not sure how many (if any) of those are Linux.

  5. Re:The things Ed didn't mentioned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Not 'Tatyana', but 'Tanya'. And that is just because all the manned launches are done from Baykonur. In Plesetsk they write 'Olya' on the rockets.