We were talking yesterday, I think, about this observation that was made on the Caenorhabditis elegans that was aboard the… the Columbia, the shuttle that crashed several years ago, tragically crashed, with the loss of all the people on board. That, by the way, was a science mission, you know, most of the missions recently have been to build the space station but the… but the Columbia was sort of dedicated to this mission, to a science mission. Okay, so they had C elegans on board and when the… when the shuttle crashed, it was coming in for a landing in Texas, and it crashed, I think over, probably over eastern California, but most of the debris field was in Texas, and they enlisted a large number of people, NASA did, you know, they had forestry service and others, I think maybe some of the military and they collected all the debris and very carefully mapped everything with GPS… read so they could find everything, I mean they could locate everything, and they brought it back to… to Kennedy. They had a big hangar there, a big shed, and they reassembled it, reassembled the space shuttle.
Well, among the debris they found five of the six anodized aluminum containers, things about that big, that looked like a big coffee can... long coffee can, and… and they looked kind of used but not… but I mean you could use them again, and they were pitted, they had this strange collection of… some of them. Well, that’s the thing, so they survived the crash. Well, they survived the, you know, the break up of the aircraft and intense fire, the deceleration when they hit the ground, and then some of them were on the ground in Texas for… for up to a week, I think, or more, and they were close to or below freezing; they survived all that and some of them even were reproducing in there. Okay, well, what happened was they were able to estimate, they had temperature loggers but they went way off-scale, but probably the temperature inside, you know, was tolerable, obviously, and they… they could estimate it by… there was some adhesive, you know, plastic tape, and they know the melting point of that so they can, you know, figure the…
[Q] And that was intact?
I'm sorry?
[Q] The adhesive was intact… ?
The… the adhesive was inside the container and they could make estimates of probable temperatures, so that was… that's a fascinating finding, you know, for, good for good old C elegans and, secondly, there were some practical hints that came from them. One of the issues we have on the space station is how you, you know, they have a visit there every few months, what you do is you experiment, and you want to do some measurements on it and so forth, on the ground, you want to be able to get them ashore, get them down to earth. So, it would be great if you could sort of throw them out the door, deorbit them and they could… and they could get down. As a matter of fact, there are devices…
[Q] Put little rockets on them?
Well, well there are devices that have been recommended. I think some built, that you could, you know, launch from the space station, put it under a space lock, you know, or launch it… you'd have to push it out, you could… you'd push it out with a spring so that it separated, and then you'd have to have power on board with the rockets of some sort, you'd have to deorbit and you'd probably have to have some navigation capability in order to direct it to some extent. But all those are quite doable, you know, on a very small… you know, NASA has plenty of experience with directing small satellites and then parachuting down to, you know, land in Utah or somewhere, which is where these things often land, or in the middle of Siberia, or in the middle of… it's actually Tajikistan I think — no, Kazakhstan, that's where they land. So, and then you could… that… in fact, I'm going to a meeting on Monday in California at NASA - Ames Research Centre - where, once again, we're going to be talking about research on the space station.
