astronaut-pee
A trail of light sparkled through the sky on Wednesday night, observed by some skygazers who marveled at its beauty. Was it a shooting star, or some other romantic celestial occurrence? No. It was astronaut piss.
Astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery were merely dumping water and urine out into space in preparation for a landing attempt on Thursday. Poor weather forced them to postpone, but the Discovery safely landed in California on Friday.
From Space.com:
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.
So, why would dumping water cause a shimmering light trail in the sky? When astronauts dump waste water, it usually freezes into a cloud of tiny ice droplets. When the sun hits them, the ice turns into water vapor and disperses in space.
It’s probably safe to say that piss has never been so pretty.
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