An Astronaut ’s Dazzling View From Above

It’s a very good thing for the world that Terry Virts did not smell ammonia on the morning of January 14, 2015. He did hear a warning Klaxon go off — and a Klaxon aboard the International Space Station, where he was serving as part of a six-person crew at the time, sounds just as scary off of the Earth as it does on it. He also he saw a flurry of caution and warning lights blink on, one of which bore the letters ATM, indicating toxic atmosphere—in this case, toxified by leaking ammonia coolant, or so the on-board sensors indicated. So Virts turned to a much more precise sensor—his nose—and he knew the stakes were high. “As they would tell us in training,” he said in a recent conversation with TIME, “if you smell ammonia, don’t worry for long, because you’re going to die.” As it happened, Virts didn’t smell ammonia, but he and the other two astronauts in the American segment of the station nonetheless high-tailed it over to the Russian segment, where they use a different cooling system, slammed the hatch and camped out for 11 hours, until NASA and Roscosmos (the Russian space agency) traced the alarm to a faulty computer signal. Until the all-clear was given, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin wanted there to be no mistake about the fact that while things may be tense between Washington and the Kremlin, all such differences stop at the atmosphere’s edge. “He called up while w...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized international space station iss NASA onetime photogrpahy Roscosmos Terry virts Source Type: news