Why astronauts have to wear gold sunglasses
To those of us who used to dream of becoming astronauts — possibly on the way to commanding the Uss enterprise — the current lack of interest in outer space is a little depressing.
Forty-six years ago we put men on the Moon, but has anyone been back for a second look? Is anyone even thinking about it? We should have moonbases by now, and I should be Writer-In-Residence at one of them.
For a few staunch space-maniacs, though, the dream has not faded. they live in hope that manned exploration of deep space will happen in their lifetimes, if not soon after.
But while they wait, Mark thompson’s virtual tour of the solar system in his fantasy spaceship shows that we’re not that far away from being able to do it properly.
starting, not unreasonably, from earth, he gives us a swift glance at the Moon before heading straight for the sun, 93 million miles away, or eight minutes if you’re travelling at light speed.
once round this giant, raging ball of unimaginable heat and we’re straight out again, passing the inner planets before negotiating the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter.
We see the rings of saturn, bear left for Uranus, marvel at the blueness of distant Neptune and then veer off beyond the edge of the solar system into deep space.
In 1,500 years, give or take a week, we’ll reach the oort cloud, before the ship’s final destination — Gliese 581, a star i n the constellation of Libra. that part of t he j ourney should take a mere 239,000 years.
And every step of t he way t here’s something new and bizarre and fascinating to discover.
have you ever wondered why there’s a gold tinge to astronauts’ visors? I had, and now I know why.
It’s dangerous enough to look at the sun from down here on earth, but it’s much more dangerous from space. If too much visible light hits our eyes, our eyelids instinctively protect them.
But this internal system doesn’t work for infra-red radiation. too much infra-red and our eyelids don’t work, the retinas get burned and we go blind. Gold leaf in the visor is the most effective protection against infra-red that we have.
on the Moon, it’s hard to judge distance. on the earth, there are dust particles in the air, and these have the quality of ‘softening’ things that are far away, taking them slightly out of focus.
on the Moon there’s no atmosphere to speak of, so no dust particles, so everything looks as clear as everything else. that mountain range might be half a mile away or 20 miles away: you simply can’t tell.
Not only is there water on the Moon, there’s quite a lot of it, hidden beneath the surface. this would make building moonbases a far more feasible prospect. Air we would have to take with us; water we could find for ourselves. the sun is brighter the further in you go. sunspots — those little spots that temporari l y appear on the sun’s surface — look black. But i f you could somehow take the sunspots away from the sun, they would shine brighter i n the sky than a full Moon. A solar flare — a sudden burst of extreme brightness on the sun — may last only a second or two, but it will unleash 30 million times more energy than all the nuclear missiles ever detonated.
on Mercury, because of its unusual rotation, you could see the sun rise, slow down, stop, and then head back in the direction it just came from before setting over the horizon from which it just rose.
this process actually takes several days but, let’s face it, there’s nothing else to do on Mercury, even if you could survive the brutal temperatures, which I’m afraid you can’t.
Ridges on Mercury are named after scientists who studied the planet, while surface depressions, for some reason, are named after high-achieving architects.
As FoR Mars, says thompson, ‘it’s a great place for a short excursion to the surface, but a bit more planning and preparation would be required before a human base could be properly established.’
the powder on the surface is iron oxide — or, rather, common rust. the sky is pink, too. If all the water ice on Mars thawed, there would be enough to cover the planet in a sea 10m deep.
the space shuttle had to have its windows replaced more than once after ‘impacts’ cracked the outer layers. When they looked more closely, they discovered that the damage had been caused by flecks of paint, travelling at more than 17,000 miles an hour.
When I was a boy, Jupiter had 12 moons, as far as we knew. Now it has 67. Callisto, a million miles or so from the planet, is considered the best bet as a base for the exploration of the outer planets, by generations as yet unborn.
We’ll never go there ourselves, sadly. But losing yourself in this lively, infectiously optimistic book is the next best thing.