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South Pole Diary

3/13/06

Penn State physicist Doug Cowen was at the South Pole this past Christmas to help construct the "Ice Cube" telescope. This is a device for detecting neutrinos (high energy particles from outer space).

While he was at the Amundsen-Scott Station, which is located at the geographic South Pole, Cowen kept an audio diary that documents what it's like to live and work in this extreme environment.

Beyond Earth

5/1/03

An astronaut in low earth orbit 150 miles up—on the space shuttle, say, or in the International Space Station—will intercept the occasional cosmic ray: “You'll see flashes of light, of color, even with your eyes closed,” said James Pawelczyk. An assistant professor of physiology and kinesiology at Penn State, Pawelczyk is a former NASA astronaut who flew as payload specialist aboard the shuttle Columbia in 1998, logging 16 days and 6.4 million miles in space.

Beyond Earth

5/1/03

In a meteorite crater blasted into arctic Canada 23 million years ago, scientists and engineers are spending the long, light-filled northern summers practicing being on Mars. “While much research has been directed to solving the problem of getting humans to Mars and back,” writes Pascal Lee in the May/June 2002 issue of The Planetary Report, “little attention and almost no dedicated field studies have addressed what humans will do once they reach the Red Planet.

“How will human explorers live and work on Mars?”

Beyond Earth

5/1/03

"The space shuttle is 20 years old,” said Pat Dasch, a consultant on space policy and the former executive director of the National Space Society, a citizens' group “committed to bringing about a spacefaring civilization,” according to the group's literature.