The beautiful trail in the sky looked like a mysterious
celestial event. In reality, it was urine.
Some skygazers were treated to the unexpected view of a
bright sparkling glow Wednesday night, created when astronauts aboard the space
shuttle Discovery dumped the waste
out into space.
The water dump was a scheduled task for STS-128 pilot Kevin
Ford, who poured out urine
and waste water stored aboard the shuttle in preparation for a landing
attempt Thursday. Weather thwarted that try, but astronauts plan another
landing attempt Friday at 5:48 p.m. EDT (2148 GMT) in Florida, though rain and
high winds are expected again.
The light show Wednesday was aided by an unusually
large amount of water being dumped all at once - about 150 pounds (68 kg),
said NASA spokeswoman Kylie Clem. Discovery had just undocked from the
International Space Station the day before, and had not been able to unload
waste water during the 10-day visit.
"It would have been a large quantity because we don't
do water dumps while docked to the station now," Clem told SPACE.com in an
e-mail. "That is a fairly new restriction over the last couple of flights
in order to prevent potential contamination of the Kibo
module."
The Kibo module is a new Japanese-built research lab on the
space station that includes an external platform to expose science experiments
to the space environment. Water dumps from a docked shuttle could potentially
pollute the experiments.
In general, though, spotting space water dumps from Earth is
common, Clem said.
Waste water usually freezes upon jettison into a cloud of
tiny ice droplets. Then when the sun hits, the ice sublimates directly into
water vapor and disperses in space.
A number of people in North America apparently spotted
Wednesday's dump, and some sent pictures to the Web site SpaceWeather.com.
One of them, Abe Megahed, photographed the tail at 9:40 p.m.
EDT (0140 GMT) Wednesday from Madison, Wisconsin.
"I just watched the
shuttle and station flyover (8:40 PM CST 9/9/09) and was surprised to see that
the shuttle was sporting a massive curved plume," he wrote. "What
could it be? Something venting? An OMS burn? RCS thrusters? A massive, record
breaking urine dump?"
It turns out he wasn't wrong
about that last one.
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Original Story: Mystery Explained: Glow in Night Sky Was Astronaut UrineSPACE.com offers rich and compelling content about space science, travel and exploration as well as astronomy, technology, business news and more. The site boasts a variety of popular features including our space image of the day and other space pictures,space videos, Top 10s, Trivia, podcasts and Amazing Images submitted by our users. Join our community, sign up for our free newsletters and register for our RSS Feeds today!
