Window on the world
The International Space Station is about to get what NASA is calling "a room with a view" -- an observation dome that will give astronauts a window on the world unlike any other ever flown in space.
Earlier this week, space shuttle Endeavour blasted off on a mission to the space station to deliver the Tranquility node, which is essentially a new room for the outpost.
Attached to this room is a special structure called the cupola. It has seven large windows -- the central, circular window is about 31 inches across -- so astronauts can float inside and be surrounded by a panorama.
That will be a welcome change for astronauts on the station, who currently can only peer out through small portholes that are scattered around the orbiting outpost.
Right now, the biggest, best window is currently in the U.S. Destiny lab -- it's a porthole 20 inches across.
The window's all very nice but it does look rather familiar.
Weird Science Factoid: If you chew a cabbage/lettuce leaf properly, you'll lose more energy than you'll gain from actually eating it. Now that's a way to lose weight...
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
