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Did Bat Hitch a Ride To Space On Discovery?
suraj.sun writes "A bat was seen clinging to the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its launch on Sunday, apparently clung for dear life to the side of the tank as the spaceship lifted off.
The shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 milers per hour, which is 25 times faster than the speed of sound, in just over eight minutes. That's zero to 100 mph in 10 seconds.
Did it make it into space? No one knows yet. But photos of Discovery as it cleared the launch tower showed a tiny speck on the side of the tank. When those photos were blown up, it became apparent that the speck was a bat."
The bat has been named Brian.
- "Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing." Sir Betrand Russell
The bat was on the far side of the external tank from the orbiter, about a third of the way up from the bottom. There wasn't really any way that it could strike the orbiter during launch, or that any foam that it might pull off would fall and strike the orbiter. The weight of the bat compared to the weight of the shuttle loaded with fuel is negligible, you'd need a pretty big envelope for your back-of-the-envelope calculations to have enough decimal places to show any effect from it. It was not an unsafe call to essentially ignore the bat. It didn't pose any risk.
As for the idea of contaminating something like Mars and having it end up overrun with earth bacteria, I guess it's impossible to prove that it couldn't happen, but I don't it's very likely. Mars is more like the earth than anywhere else in the solar system, but it's still very different. You might be able to find a few organisms here that could potentially survive on Mars, but it's doubtful that any would thrive, particularly to the point of overrunning the planet.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
MECO is around 185,000 feet (35 miles). The start of 'space' is commonly defined as 50 miles. But yes, that's damn high.
Except the article stated that IR cameras showed that part of the tank never dropped below 60 and the bat never dropped below 70.
And they're not accelerating upwards (I hope)
some of those crazy cars go at 9.8ft/s^2 (+ or - a little for air resistance)
I think you mean 9.8ms^-2 ;-).
Metric: get it right, first time.
Boundary layer (at least at subsonic speeds) where laminar flow slows is barely a tenth of an inch thick. Brian would have been a fair bit thicker than that, so would have certainly been exposed to significant aerodynamic forces as the Shuttle accelerated.