(photo by NASA)
… διαβάστε αυτό το άρθρο από τους New York Times, που μιλάει ο John Grunsfeld για την εμπειρία του στο διάστημα, επισκευάζοντας το Hubble Telescope!
Ένα απόσπασμα από την συνέντευξη…
Dr. Grunsfeld said he could get so involved in his task that he would forget he was in a space suit wearing gloves, a feeling he calls the Zen of space. “And once you’re outside working, you know, all the rest of the world disappears.”
“Once in a while the universe lets you be free alone and in peace,” he said.
On his second mission to the telescope, in 2002, the cooling system in Dr. Grunsfeld’s spacesuit sprang a leak as he was about to leave the airlock, necessitating a quick change before mission control could cancel the spacewalk.
Outside the airlock, the Zen of space took over. He thought of nothing except his task of replacing 34 tightly packed connectors in a power control unit that had not been designed to be repaired in space. “And the Zen part,” he explained, “is that I had trained myself in the challenge of connecting all these connectors to only think about one connector.” It would simply be too overwhelming to think about them all at once. “So I only ever had one connector to do.”
An ideal job, Dr. Grunsfeld said, would be to spend six months on the International Space Station. “I would like to live in space,” he said.
One of the attractions of that lifestyle is unique to physicists. When the shuttle passes through a zone in its orbit called the South Atlantic Anomaly, astronauts are exposed to large doses of cosmic rays, high-energy particles from the Sun or distant galaxies, which leave a wake of visible light as they pass through a dark-adapted human eyeball.
“In space you can get in touch with your quantum self,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “I was a human cosmic ray detector.” He said he could identify the different kinds of particles zooming through his eyeball by how bright the flashes were.