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5.1 Viewing Earth from the Shuttle-Insights by the Astronauts

James Wetherbee, Commander, STS-86

Commander Wetherbee discusses his past experiences viewing the Earth during the crew familiarization briefing by the KidSat students to the STS-86 crew.

You may have heard a lot of stories about astronauts who come back and talk about the lack of borders. You get up into space and don't see borders and that gives you a sense that we are all in this together-we are all really one people and need to take care of the planet. I heard that so many times but I find it more interesting to go up and look for places where you do see borders. There are some places where you can see that, but it doesn't happen very often.

Some obvious areas are where the land meets the water, of course. I find it interesting, for example, to look at the peninsula of Florida and find out that the cartographers did a very good job when they drew the maps. That's an easy example, but there are others: where you see the straight lines-in some of the states in Africa, for example. I can imagine there is a long fence or road that goes for hundreds of miles where the folks many years ago said, "Okay, you take the mountains and we'll take the plains"-and that's the border of the state. You can see it on maps-these long straight lines that are borders.

Others occur because of land formations-a similar situation where people said, "All right, we got the mountains, you take the plains, and you take the forests." You can see those long divisions between states. I find that more interesting than coming back and saying you can't see borders in space. You can see a lot of human structures. You can see all the big cities, of course, which look gray in color in contrast to the browns or the greens of the Earth. You can see runways, all over the world, big ones, even little ones. You can see long interstates. You can't see any cars or trucks-they are a little bit too small-but you can see long roads in between cities. So I find it very interesting to look at the Earth from the point of view of what it would look like to someone who suddenly zipped down here and took some video. How would they tell whether or not there were people on the planet or anything living? I have not seen the Great Wall of China-mostly because I haven't looked for it. I'll try to look for it in this next flight. You can see an awful lot of campfires when you are flying over at night in some areas of the world. It's a pretty spectacular sight to see all the fires.

I'll talk briefly about weather patterns. You have done a very good job of analyzing the photographs of weather patterns that you already have. Those are interesting to see; especially some of the large thunderstorms. Mesoscale lightning-the kind where, all of a sudden, lightning is triggered on one side and then you see a whole bunch of lightning strikes very quickly on a very large mesoscale of two, three, four hundred miles across. All of a sudden lightning is bursting, then there is a period of quiet for several seconds, and then you see more lightning. It looks like it's all connected. Obviously, hurricanes are very easy to see and very spectacular. If you see hurricanes that have a very well-defined eye, that's pretty spectacular from space.

Some of the things that are very difficult to take pictures of are really pretty spectacular. i'm sort of jumping ahead to your last question, "Which pictures would you choose to take from space?" Some of the things that are pretty spectacular are very difficult to take pictures of. The one that comes to mind is the atmospheric glow that you see on the nighttime side of Earth-thousands of miles away from any human light-and the atmosphere glows. It exists because of a phenomenon where it gets heated during the day by the sun. The molecules and atoms of oxygen in the upper atmosphere get heated and jump up to a higher energy state. Then, on the night-side of the orbit, they cool, drop down to a lower