AccuWeather's Bernie Rayno talks with astronauts Michael Barratt and Tracy Caldwell Dyson aboard the International Space Station who answer all your burning questions while floating in zero gravity.
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00:00AccuWeather, this is Mission Control, Houston. Please call station for a voice check.
00:05Station, this is Bernie Randall with AccuWeather. How do you hear me?
00:10We hear you loud and clear. How us?
00:12Alright, loud and clear. You look and sound fantastic.
00:17And welcome to a very special edition of AccuWeather's Ask the Experts. I'm Bernie
00:33Randall. We go beyond the forecast to give you the how and the why on all of the cool
00:37and interesting stuff you've wondered about and wanted to ask in weather, space and science.
00:43Today's guests are literally out of this world. We're taking a trip to the International
00:48Space Station, about 250 miles above us, to talk to NASA astronauts Mike Barrett and Tracy
00:54C. Dyson. According to NASA, the ISS launched in 1998 and it orbits the Earth at speeds
01:01of up to 17,000 miles per hour. Thank you for taking your time, Mike and Tracy. Mike,
01:07can you describe this mission and your role as pilot?
01:12Well, it's a good question. My role as pilot was on the Dragon, the little spaceship that
01:17brought us up here with the Crew 8. And my role was really to back up the commander and
01:23to be ready to take control of the vehicle if need be, which unfortunately from my standpoint
01:29did not arise. We had a great ride up here. It's a great little spaceship. But that was
01:33our commute to work. And really the focus of our mission is here on the ISS. And over
01:39a period of about six months to conduct the research, the tasks before us, to maintain
01:43the station, upgrade it, and to do a few spacewalks. So it's a very multimedia-packed mission,
01:50if you will, from the rocket ride up here and descend at the end to the six months of
01:55hard work and just amazing science in the middle.
01:59And Tracy, what is your role in the mission?
02:02Well, like the rest, I'm what is called a flight engineer. And my job is to help maintain
02:07the space station and to help set up and run experiments, to talk to the public, to
02:14do some of the more critical dynamic operations like capture vehicles that come up, cargo
02:20ships with the robotic arm, as well as do spacewalks, just a whole host of things.
02:27And Mike, how many other people are on the ISS? How would you each describe daily life
02:35on the International Space Station?
02:38Well, right now we're sort of in our normal crewing mode. So there's seven souls up here.
02:44There are three Russian cosmonauts and four American astronauts. And there are sort of
02:51territories, if you will. There's Russian modules and U.S. modules, Japanese, European,
02:56Italian. And it really is an international station with an integrated crew, which we
03:01really enjoy quite well. All of us are here really for the same reason. And life on board
03:07is kind of a mix. There's a bit of a routine. And about when we go to bed, we get up.
03:12We try to do our exercise for a couple hours plus every day to maintain our bones and
03:17muscles. But the science and the jobs change every day.
03:20So today I started my day with about two and a half hours of doing human body science,
03:26doing scans, ultrasound scans with investigators on the ground, both in Europe and in Canada.
03:33Both of these are folks I knew in the space medical community.
03:36So it was really quite a delight for me. Characterizing how the body changes in space
03:40with this imagery is one of the great experiments that we get to do up here.
03:44And I just finished testing an emergency breathing mask and oxygen tank.
03:49So you never know quite what you're going to do.
03:51And Tracy, you've been in space on three missions now for more than 200 days.
03:57Have you developed a daily routine?
04:00Well, like Mike said, our days are pretty set for us during the work week where we we get up.
04:08We have a meeting with the control centers around the world that start our day.
04:12And then we have a whole series of activities. And then in the middle there, like Mike said,
04:18to maintain our bone mass, our muscle mass, our flexibility, those kinds of things.
04:23And then we finish off the afternoon with a whole host of different tasks,
04:28ranging from maintenance of the station to science on board to other operations,
04:33proficiencies and things like that.
04:36And then we end with another conference with our teams on the ground.
04:40And then we get ready for the evening, having dinner together, getting ready for sleep
04:46and any kind of relaxing that we can do.
04:49And Mike, we have to ask, what led you to become an astronaut?
04:53Well, I think my story is similar to many hundreds who have come before me
04:57and certainly my office mates. I think like everyone, I'm fueled by curiosity
05:01and I had a lot of varying interests. I really loved astronomy. I loved flying.
05:07I loved oceanography. I love photography. I got a degree in marine zoology.
05:12I went to medical school. And if you were to look for a place that puts all of those together,
05:17it's NASA, it's human spaceflight.
05:20And I think that's a common story with all of our folks in the office.
05:23It's an amazing slice of humanity that's just fueled by curiosity
05:28and just loving to learn new things at the same time
05:32and bringing a lot of diverse interests to the table.
05:35They all intersect with human spaceflight.
05:37So I have followed a path of basic science, medicine eventually, private flight,
05:45and then eventually went into space medicine.
05:47And you can only do that in a very few places in the world.
05:50One of them is the NASA Johnson Space Center,
05:52and I was able to make the leap to the astronaut corps from there.
05:55And Tracy, same question. What events led to you working in space?
06:00Well, my inspiration came when I was in high school,
06:04and the world was excited about something NASA was doing,
06:07and that was putting a teacher in space.
06:09And before then, I really hadn't thought much about what astronauts were,
06:12what they were doing, mainly because I wasn't around test pilots much in the military.
06:19But when a teacher was selected to go into space, it got my attention
06:23because most of my days and my life was spent with teachers.
06:27Teachers were the people who ushered me through school,
06:31as well as coached me in sports and counseled me.
06:35And so when a teacher became an astronaut,
06:38it really inspired me to look into NASA and what they were doing.
06:42And it happened to be that they were working on building the space station.
06:46At the time, it was called Space Station Freedom.
06:48It was just the United States, but then it changed
06:50and became the International Space Station,
06:53where you had to have multiple countries working together,
06:57different cultures coming together, building a space station in space,
07:02and doing all the things that at the time in my life I enjoyed doing,
07:09working with tools, working with people, and just being physically fit
07:16and having that be a part of your job.
07:19So things like that made me pursue the Astronaut Corps.
07:23And then when I was eligible, I submitted an application,
07:26and the rest then is just history.
07:29Well, it certainly sounds like you have a lot of work to do up there,
07:33but we have to ask, what do you both do for some fun?
07:37Well, we're chuckling about the things we're not going to tell you about.
07:41Well, one of which is playing with our food, which she was mentioning.
07:45You can't not play with your food up here,
07:47and we've learned that we can actually kind of hurl something along a trajectory
07:52and then go fetch it ourselves.
07:54That is just indicative of zero gravity.
07:57It's still so novel.
07:59I think I've now spent about 250-something days in space,
08:03and every day I learn something new and wonderful about zero gravity.
08:06It's magical.
08:08And frankly, any time you get to look out the window
08:11at this incredibly beautiful planet, that is just amazing.
08:16That's one of our favorite pastimes, and always will be,
08:19and to capture the photographs we can.
08:21Otherwise, we listen to music.
08:23We make things that we can't make anywhere else.
08:27We enjoy sometimes calling people unexpectedly
08:30and try to convince them that, yes, we really are up on the space station.
08:34But really, the magic is here.
08:36It's just something to savor.
08:38I'm throwing in a little wrinkle.
08:41Do you sleep better in the space station, or do you sleep better at home?
08:46We'll each answer that.
08:48It is a perception of myself and many that you keep a same level of alertness
08:54for a little bit less sleep up here,
08:56and that was certainly true on my first long flight.
08:59And once you kind of get back used to it again,
09:02you just start not going to feel the weight of your body on a bed
09:05or the weight of your head on a pillow.
09:07You're floating.
09:08After a little while, that just gets to be incredibly pleasant.
09:12And the funny thing is you don't really nod off
09:15because nodding off is kind of dependent on gravity pulling your head down
09:19and kind of catching yourself.
09:20That doesn't happen.
09:21You just kind of drift to sleep.
09:24It's really quite wonderful, and I personally really enjoy my rack time.
09:29I'm going to let Tracy answer as well.
09:31Yes.
09:32What I notice is that, like Mike was saying,
09:35I think you can sleep less with the same alertness up here.
09:38I sleep less, but I sleep deeper, I notice.
09:42I go into a very deep sleep.
09:45I'm very comfortable.
09:46And as Jeanette, one of our other crewmates had said,
09:49I heard her say that her dreams were more vivid,
09:51and I have to agree that it just seems like dreams become more vivid.
09:55At least that's been my experience.
09:57Our conversation from space is just getting started.
10:00Up next, we're asking about the impact of space travel on the human body.
10:06That's a really big question with a really big answer.
10:10Coming up, Mike Barrett explains the toll space travel takes on the body
10:14and how to adopt to an out-of-this-world lifestyle.
10:18Plus, what is it like to walk in space?
10:23On a professional level, it's one of the most rewarding
10:26and very challenging parts of our job.
10:28Any astronaut will tell you that we spend a lot of effort in our training
10:33throughout our career learning how to do a spacewalk.
10:37Hear what they experience as soon as they step out into the atmosphere.
10:41You'll also hear how a total solar eclipse looks from the perspective of an astronaut.
10:47All of that and more when Ask the Experts continues.
10:59And welcome back to AccuWeather Ask the Experts.
11:03I'm Bernie Raynaud.
11:04Let's get back to our conversation with NASA astronauts Mike Barrett
11:08and Tracy C. Dyson aboard the International Space Station.
11:13Mike, you're a physician as well as an astronaut.
11:16Now, we have a viewer question.
11:17Tom from New York City has this question.
11:20What is the impact of space travel on the human body?
11:24Well, I don't know if you can see my fingers,
11:26but this is the thickness of a textbook that I'm the senior author or editor on
11:32about space medicine.
11:34And let me just tell you that that's a really big question with a really big answer.
11:39Every system in the body changes.
11:41And it's really quite amazing how adaptable we are.
11:45You know, we start losing bone and muscle mass,
11:48which we try to counter with exercise.
11:51But we also lose some blood volume.
11:53We lose blood mass.
11:54We lose plasma volume.
11:56Our lungs change shape.
11:57Our heart changes shape.
11:59The diaphragm moves up.
12:00The organs move a little bit.
12:01The immune system changes.
12:03Your sense of balance changes like crazy.
12:06So cardiovascular regulation, I mean, basically everything.
12:09And really, that's kind of my passion is how we adapt to zero gravity.
12:14Most of them are very adaptive.
12:16Some of them are probably less.
12:19Friendly to the human body, but it shows the resilience,
12:22the plasticity of our bodies and how amazing we really are to challenge it
12:28and put it in an environment like this.
12:30And we still become really good workers,
12:32but we're now three-dimensional workers who can function in a very novel
12:37gravitational environment and bring the human capacity for creative thought
12:42and observation into bear.
12:43I mean, it's really an amazing thing.
12:46So that's a really short answer to a really big question,
12:50but I encourage people to go out and learn more about it.
12:53And, Tracy, you are also a chemist.
12:56What is your research focus and what kind of experiments are you doing?
13:01Well, I'm not doing any chemistry per se up here,
13:04but what I have been involved in are various studies that were developed
13:10on the ground, spent a lot of time with biofabrication facility
13:14where they're printing actual tissues, samples of organs.
13:22And so my job is really just to help set up the experiments
13:26and to exchange samples and help basically take care of the facility.
13:34Various other experiments, like Mike was mentioning,
13:37we're human subjects for.
13:38And so we either attach electrodes and send signals down to the ground
13:45so they can see what kind of changes there are in our body,
13:49but also donating samples for later analysis,
13:55which also, by the way, utilizes some really interesting other facilities,
14:01like our minus-80-degree freezer.
14:04We've got some pretty hardy freezers up here on the space station
14:08to preserve all this science so that it could make it home for further analysis,
14:12which I think is just a testament to what a fantastic laboratory the space station is.
14:20It's fully equipped with not just novel science, but novel support for the science.
14:25Not to mention these gigantic solar arrays,
14:27which are generating a ton of power for running all of these facilities.
14:31Mike and Tracy, we feature astronomy stories here at AccuWeather.
14:35Can you describe how the total solar eclipse on April 8th looked?
14:40Sure, yeah, it was spectacular.
14:42I'll just start up front with that.
14:44Our focus was really on the shadow across the ground rather than looking up at the sun.
14:49Our big windows of observation are really pointing downwards at Earth,
14:53so that wasn't a view that was that good for us necessarily,
14:57but the shadow moving so quickly across the surface of the Earth
15:02just really reminds you that there's planetary neighbors out there
15:06and that the solar system is so much bigger than the Earth.
15:09It was really amazing to see this black, what I almost consider like a menacing shadow,
15:16creeping over this beautiful blue and green and brown Earth surface at pretty high speed.
15:22We were actually faster than it.
15:24It was moving, depending on where it was on the Earth, a few hundred to over 1,000 miles an hour.
15:29We're going 17,000 miles an hour, so we overtook it.
15:32And we saw it best at Eastern Canada.
15:35We were all crowded up in the cupola to watch it, all four of us,
15:39taking pictures, just kind of giving our verbal impressions to it as well.
15:44It was just really awe-inspiring to see.
15:46Speaking of awe-inspiring, Tracy, I understand that you've been on three spacewalks,
15:51totaling more than 22 hours.
15:54How would you describe those experiences?
15:58In some regards, it's very surreal when you think about it,
16:02that you yourself become your own satellite,
16:05and you are outside the space station in the harshest environment almost imaginable.
16:11And you're not only alive and functioning,
16:14but you're actually productive and doing something important for the space station.
16:20But on a professional level, it's one of the most rewarding and very challenging parts of our job.
16:25Any astronaut will tell you that we spend a lot of effort in our training throughout our career,
16:31learning how to do a spacewalk.
16:34And when you actually get to go outside and do one,
16:36it's one of the most rewarding experiences in our field.
16:41And so when you're out there, you almost can't believe what you're doing.
16:45But also a testament to our training, the facility, the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory,
16:49where we do our training, or the majority of it, has a replica of the space station underwater.
16:56And when we come out the hatch, it's definitely a different environment outside the space station.
17:02But the space station itself is very familiar to us.
17:05As we translate around on handrails, we're seeing very familiar surroundings,
17:11and that also is a great comfort.
17:13But then when you get a very quiescent moment, which is also brief, out in a spacewalk,
17:19when you get to look at the beautiful planet and the stars, if the lights are down low,
17:28it can take your breath away, and it can also take your focus away.
17:32So we try to limit those moments so that we stay focused and on the timeline,
17:37but it can be some of the most memorable moments of your life.
17:41We'll have more on our conversation from space with Michael and Tracy just ahead.
17:47Ask the Experts returns after a quick break.
17:58And welcome back to AccuWeather Ask the Experts.
18:01I'm Bernie Raynaud.
18:03Let's get back to our conversation with NASA astronauts Mike Barrett and Tracy C. Dyson
18:08aboard the International Space Station.
18:11And Mike, here at AccuWeather, we're interested in space weather.
18:15In your ISS environment without atmosphere, are there impacts from the changes in space weather
18:22In your ISS environment without atmosphere, are there impacts from the changes in the sun's radiation?
18:29When we're above the Earth's atmosphere,
18:32we lose a lot of protection from the atmosphere that shields us from radiation.
18:37So I'm showing you a little radiation dosimeter that we all have to carry around continually.
18:43We're basically like radiation workers at a nuclear power plant or a hospital.
18:50So anytime you're using radiation at a higher dose than normal, you carry one of these.
18:55And we actually get quite a bit higher than those industries that I mentioned.
18:59But another big thing is just the effect on our equipment.
19:02A lot of our electronics are very sensitive to radiation.
19:05And that includes our cameras.
19:07Anything that has densely packed chips basically is going to be vulnerable to radiation and single event upsets
19:15where you might actually bit flip a switch or a signal input.
19:19So it's something we deal with every day.
19:21And it's just something really interesting to us.
19:23Station, this is Houston ACR. That concludes the event. Thank you.
19:27NASA astronauts Michael Barrett and Tracy C. Dyson,
19:30thank you so much for joining us and sharing your experiences aboard the International Space Station.
19:37Thank you for joining us on AccuWeather's Ask the Experts.
19:40I'm Bernie Raynaud.
19:41Don't forget, when you have a question about weather, space or science,
19:45you can write us or send us a video question at AskTheExperts at AccuWeather.com.
19:50You can also call us at 888-566-6606.
20:15NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
20:46Thank you to all participants.
20:48Station, we are now resuming operational audio communications.
20:51Station, this is Houston ACR. That concludes the event. Thank you.