Slashdot Mirror
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 external tank doesn't make it into space. It separates from the shuttle before that. Unless the bat managed to switch horses in the middle of the stream.
Fluid dynamics basically says that at very close distances to a surface, it doesn't matter how fast the fluid is flowing, the wind speed at the surface is very low, and approaches zero. So maybe he made it!
I wonder how long he held on? Unless he was sheltered from the airflow I find it hard to believe that he could have held on once the shuttle reached any real speed. It's hard enough to hang on in a wind tunnel at subsonic speeds
Probably frozen in place. They try not to have ice on the tank because it keeps breaking off and smashing tiles... that was the end of Columbia. Still some builds up.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/44545
Is a technical article "A millimeter wave technique for measuring ice thickness on the Space Shuttle's external tank" from 1991 where they basically built a radio telescope to measure the temperature of the ice/insulation etc. They don't directly discuss ice thickness, but all their calibration curves ran from 0 to 15 mm thickness. So unless they totally screwed up, they don't expect more than 15 mm of ice.
Most bats are somewhat thicker than 15 mm (err, are they? thats about half an inch). That is probably enough to freeze it onto the tank though.
Since the ice likes to shake loose and crash into the shuttle as it falls, likely the bat didn't make it to space. I don't think the ice would sublimate fast enough in space that if it made it, it would "stage separate" from the tank. So, if it made it up there, it rode the tank back down.
Personally, I'd worry alot more about bats nesting in the engine turbopumps than "chilling out" on the cryogenic fuel tank.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger