>When the astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state (a process known as desublimation), and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen tinkle.
My question is, how much of a given volume ends up as frozen tinkle? Is it enough to damage spacecraft? More importantly, what happens when it comes into contact with an astronaut? Assuming it’s moving at a relatively fast speed, would it punch through a suit, or simply melt onto it?
What a way to go, too. Killed by urine. On the other hand, going on a spacewalk and coming back into the space station dripping with piss doesn’t seem like much of a way to make friends either.
It would seem to me that all of those manned flights from the beginning of the space age till now might make for quite the little pond…
St1d, it is helpful to provide a link to the column being discussed, so that others can track what’s being said. Although the column may be on the front page today, it will fade into the Archives in a few days. Hence, the need for a link.
Methinks that the crystals are truly tiny. Every spacesuit and human-containing spacecraft is protected from micrometeoroids. I bet that sattalites get hit by small pieces of debris constantly, eroding them.
Hmm… about that “cloud” - they’re sprayed out and the little pieces are going in all sorts of different direcions, with slightly different speeds from the nozzle. Give it a little time and that cloud of a day’s worth of piss (or whatever) is spread over a large volume.
If the cloud is from that vehicle, it stays at about the same speeds, so no danger of high velocity impacts from tinkle. Given that there’s no atmosphere to speak of, any possible contamination would just sublimate away again. Also, they avoid urine dumps during actual spacewalks.
No need to worry about 20 year old clouds of frozen tinkle. It would eventually (i.e. a couple months) fall back to earth, evaporating in the atmosphere.
I’m afraid the master might have introduced an erroneous concept here. I don’t think frozen tinkle in the manner described in space is possible. There is a process called direct freeze contact which suggests to me that what we might have here is a cloud of disassociated pure ice crystals and residue. I won’t bet the farm on that though.
The falling icicles are a slightly different story. From what I understand, this is the result of a slow leak and ice buildup on the skin of the plane, to the point where the block of ice is finally heavy enough to tear free and go hurtling into someone’s back yard.
I don’t remember where I read it, but I recall reading the reminiscences of an astronaut who actually described the process. His description seemed to indicate that the urine basically erupted into glittering yellow powder upon evacuating the airlock. Furthermore, a certain amount of the stuff would tend to hang around the spacecraft, due to mass, inertia, and other stuff I don’t completely understand, so depending on what window you looked out of, you would be seeing space and/or the Earth through a beautiful sparkling yellow haze.
The astronaut in question described it as being quite pretty, at least as long as you didn’t think too hard about what you were looking at.
Are you thinking of Apollo astronaut Russel Schweickert, who said “Urine dump at sunset” in response to a question about the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen?
I’ve only ever heard the blue airline icicle story as a joke, never represented as an actual event. The punch line is “Which proves that even if you live far from military targets and high population areas, you can still be killed by an ICBM”.
It's a common joke but there are occasional incidents. It's not an icile, though, just a mass. They usually come off as the plane decends to warmer altitudes, thus they tend to fall on or near cities.