@OrganicMarble there's got to be a book in that. such hopeful days in so many respects, so much new collaboration. And an aging space station built under a completely different way of doing things from NASA. So you were one of the back-ups, or part of the training crew in some other way?

excellent, I finally learned how to use HORIZONS good enough to make that graph that Adler did

expect some mean voodoo in the future LOL

his still looks nicer but I'll master that too muahaha

I was a shuttle mission simulator instructor at the time science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/…

@OrganicMarble Wow that's fantastic! What do you do now?

(assuming it's not top secret and you can tell me without having to kill me then :)

@RussellBorogove we take it seriously, it's just not many people would have sniffed hydrazine and lived to tell the tale :)

I'm not sure how familiar Apollo astronauts would be with the smell of Aerozine-50/N2O4 combustion products. They were all trained on LLTVs but those used hydrogen peroxide.

I'd presume that someone at NASA would know and would have thought of that connection tho, if there was any.

@OrganicMarble that sounds like a pretty awesome job alright.

@TildalWave then again, why would moondust smell like gunpowder?

@briligg well I can imagine that it would smell like something burnt, perhaps like fried electronics, since it would be a lot of metal oxides constantly being fried and with possibly some trace volatiles embedded into it

hmmm...

also, who knows what all that even reacted with once they got to smell it inside LEM

yes, as occurred to Russell. it makes for an interesting mental picture, makes it easier to imagine being there.

it would be highly charged, electrostatic and likely quite some free oxygen oozing out of it once it comes in contact with the breathable atmosphere

ooh yes - it's never been in a reactive environment. right, of course!

interesting...

@TildalWave I'm retired now.

yes, I'd imagine quite a bit of lending of free electrons between different compounds

and note that they'd smell pretty bad on their own once they'd take those suits off

it was heavy work out there

(heh, O.M. seems to be having connection troubles. or he's doing drive-bys)

or I post too big gif files for no apparent reason? :))

well, but it's quite a fun one

how does human sweat smell like in contact with plasma?

plasma?

maybe lunar regolith is a really effective antiperspirant? :D

@briligg I was thinking what else would be somewhat accessible and would cause rapid redox of human sweat

gets in all the nooks and crannies :)

certainly i know little chemistry. but it's all metal oxides, as you say.

nothing very complex, at a blind guess i'd think it isn't very reactive at all.

you, fine powder filings essentially

@briligg yet you know that Al2O3 makes a fine rocket fuel

but once it's split, which seems to be rather a big deal : /

note that it could easily be missing some of the oxygen due to solar wind and thermal cycling

really? hm, but i imagine it wouldn't be easy to separate that part.

and talk about bulk processing...

well UV alone will split diatomic oxygen into monoatomic one in LEO, and that's below Van Allen belts

I can see it possible, and once it loses some oxygen it's not getting it back easily either

still, how do you separate it?

it'll be nice to see some sample return missions fly.

I'm not sure what powder would lose it the fastest, probably not aluminum oxide or silicon dioxide, but how about titanium oxide?

i thought that stuff was bound super-tight. that's why titanium isn't used for everything.

ah yes

they say there is some atomic iron

ah well that would make a pretty fine reduction agent then

i've toyed with the idea of going to the LEAG meeting in October. I can vaguely defend it because i've helped a little with a presentation that will be given. And i might be able to build on that enough before then to make a much better case it would be worthwhile.

motivation :P

if i can corner just about anyone there, i imagine i could get some good answers...

@briligg oh you gotta go, those are really interesting

especially in the recent years if you ask me

i bet.

but it's a couple of thousand bucks. so i really need to be able to sell the idea...

Huh? Why that expensive? It's in Maryland!!

the audio files i made of the last lectures didn't come out very well, i have to do something about that...

airfare alone will be over a thousand

three nights hotel, doubt it's a cheap place

@briligg really? that's steep

you always fly first class? :)

well, actually, it sort of translates into that because the peso has dropped like 20% in the last couple of months

but i believe i paid over 700 to go to toronto

and that was a red-eye

@briligg yeah but from MX to CA is more expensive because of thermal cycling :)))

:P

actually it was $600 US, not as bad as i remembered.

still...

asking hubby to pay over a grand so i can hang out with a bunch of loonies - it's a stretch, unless i have a specific goal that could reasonably be achieved.

well if you won't go you'll be stuck with me here yakking about it

oh here it is...

LOL cc @SarahBourt ^

heheh - not quite the same thing...

it's the warning you get before connecting to their meetings remotely

really? i sort of vaguely remembered wanting to do that once, and it was far more meek and polite. they ask you nicely.

go on ac.arc.nasa.gov

hm, it wasn't adobe connect before, i don't think

OK for LPI it'll probably be via SSERVI but they might use the same server, they did before

either that or webex, which is worse

yeah, but that was for a conference specifically for the public.

that's when you already connect, it's just the plash plugin thing

guests have that disabled on their end anyway

@TildalWave She came in the summer.

@geoffc :P

yeah, i was going to defend canada but i didn't get around to it...

I was going to say "That is a racist and hateful stereotype". I was watching the new Muppets TV Show trailer, and in it, Fozzy Bear is dating Alex (Sheldons assistant in Big Bang) and he is meeting the girls parents, who remark, if you have kids, where will they go to the washroom? The woods? Fozzy turns around and says That is a hateful stereotype. It was so funny.

then again, the day i met geoff it was like 7 C...

And rainy.

@briligg aha!

winter is coming....

:P

@geoffc hee hee that is pretty good

in the Goldilocks zone obviously

Weather here in Muskoka has been great. Little hot yesterday but today was great.

On the porch, breeze off the lake and I am fine.

um, not eaten alive by mosquitoes?

i had forgotten how incredibly dense they are there

@briligg in quantity or mentality :)

seriously, put a screen over the end of a vacuum cleaner hose and wave it around in the air, you could catch enough in a few minutes to make a little hamburger patty of them.

@TildalWave both. life is too easy for them. they've gotten soft.

how do you deal with it then?

when i got to my parent's place i realized i was the only person trying to kill them. they just ignore them.

maybe it's better where geoff is, right on the lake.

i thought, wow, i've been gone a long time.

i left for the city as soon as i could. muskoka is truly beautiful, of course. but i wouldn't sit on a porch there willingly in the summer to work on my laptop.

@briligg Screened in porch of course. What do you take me for, a philistine?

Bracebridge, city part (such that it is, maybe town, or hamlet is abetter word) is less buggy. Your parents may be far enough into the 'country' to get them bad.

mosquitoes are usually worse right on a lake.

oh, they sure are... nicely wooded lot, has a few damp sections...

or swamps

@duzzy i don't know, i think they are even a bit worse in the woods

Yes, they are really bad in the woods.

They like to stay in the shade, but water is where they breed.

ponds or swamps in the woods are the worst

I guess if it's an open lake with lots of sun it wouldn't be quite as bad

lake of bays is fairly big. Most of Muskoka is heavily wooded and has lots of little damp nooks for mosquitoes to breed in. they really get bad.

It doesn't sound pleasant.

In the woods where I grew up, we were always hiding from deer flies.

bats and dragonflies are good friends.

@duzzy Deer and horse flies are the problem around here. I go running and they chase me. Was out with the kids in the boat, and they were keeping up with us.

Stupid flies should not be able to fly that way.

Bats and dragonflies are good people. :)

Yeah, it's crazy.

Horse flies are terrible, but I was always more afraid of the deer flies because they always seemed to swarm more.

@briligg It is amazing how many swamps and little rivers and nooks of water there are.

I can't really tell the two apart, they both drive me nuts.

horse flies are usually bigger and black, and deer flies are usually a bit smaller, brown, and often have spots on their wings

My mom bought the greate mosiquoto netting jackets. We walk to synaguoge wearing them. Lovely idea.

If I remember correctly. :P

Ah yes, deer flies are the horrible little ones.

It's been a long time since I've been in the woods of Michigan.

There is a hill route I do on Friday mornings, and the deer flies show up, right as a I cross a street to the hill, and I kill 10-12 of them over 30 minutes of hill repeats and they keep coming.

They never stop!

"Never give up! Never surrender!" - Deer fly proverb

probably.

(i'm getting itchy...)

a hill route huh? there's plenty of places to do a brutal hill route in muskoka all right.

@duzzy no, I didn't prep that answer when I saw the conversation in chat (though I thought about it)

Your answer came quickly. The conversation caused me to think of a couple questions, but that's the one I managed to get into words... and it was what was actually being said, anyway.

I asked, got in the shower, got out of the shower, the answer was there. :P

I was surprised to find an actual interview that quoted an astronaut saying he watches TV shows on the ISS

Yeah, that's actually pretty cool.

And he's a Game of Thrones fan.

I started with articles going back to 2010 (when they first got a live internet connection) and was trying to piece together how much bandwidth they have from upgrades since then when I stumbled on that article

Oh nice. It's pretty cool when it works out like that.

I didn't realize they didn't have internet until so recently.

space.com/7813-nasa-launches-astronaut-internet-space.html

for security reasons they didn't want to just open up an ISS laptop to the internet

in 2010 they had a setup that sounded like they would use windows remote desktop to connect to a computer on the ground that had internet access

Yeah, that makes sense.

I used to work in a data center with a similar situation for a lot of servers.

I couldn't connect directly to them. I had to connect to a jump host, and then rdp through that to get to the server I needed to work on.

However, I obviously was not in space.

I imagine that job would have paid more if I had been.

well, at the very least it would have been more exciting

I wonder how well being an astronaut pays, government job, surely the pay bands are public record

Yeah, I would have gladly worked a lot of overtime.

I'm sure they are.

and I imagine being up there comes with some nice extra pay.

astronauts.nasa.gov/content/faq.htm - Currently a GS-11 starts at $64,724 per year and a GS-14 can earn up to $141,715 per year.

Is that just their base, though?

yeah, sounds like that's base salary

I imagine going to space would be treated similarly to a military deployment as far as pay, and things like that.

@TildalWave lol!

Is this the place to ask for a tag to be considered?

sure, it's easier if you ask a question that would need it tho

The Space Show w/ Dr. Julie A. Robinson, ISS Chief Scientist at NASA JSC is now podcast live. More info in the newsletter

starts in 5 minutes but I gotta run :P t/c

Oooof, ask a question and wind up having to edit wikipedia as penance for my curiosity.

My proposal is for a tag for "information-resources" or similar. This would include text books - not "coffee table" books; notable, general technical reports, from say space agencies, (accessible or otherwise) academic or professional journal articles.

@MyOtherHead We have reference-request but we try to avoid long list questions if at all possible. We'd mostly have those in our Space Exploration Meta, see resources. But I don't like the idea of mixing our main site tags that are topic oriented, with "meta" tags describing the nature of the question instead of what they're asking about. We're a Q&A and new tags won't change that. Tho there are a couple of exceptions, those are mostly from the early days, and converted into community wikis.

anyway, I really gotta run ... please discuss this, and it shall be decided however the community decides ... if it gets too complicated, please start a new Space Exploration Meta discussion about it ... have fun!

D'Oh! I didn't check the Space Ex Meta page. And i didn't search for "reference...". Mea culpa

still learning to fly this thing