Helen FieldsScience Writer

Hey, I just mentioned Ham the chimp the other day, and today is an important day in Ham history: It’s the 51st anniversary of the day he was launched into space. Here’s a picture. Ham was the last animal to try out this whole space thing before Alan Shepard became the first American (and the second human) in space. Ham survived the short, suborbital flight and lived another 22 years. The little guy was born in West Africa, went into space, and died in Florida. What an utterly unpredictable trajectory.

Here’s a set of NASA pictures of Ham and a brief history of animals in space.

New story! On meteorites! Read all about it!

When I was working on my story about the origins of life, I kept coming across meteorites. Scientists study them to understand the early chemistry of the solar system, including the chemistry that led to the basic building blocks of life.

I’m fascinated by these little emissaries from space. Other than moon rocks collected on Apollo and a few unmanned missions to comets and such, the only stuff we have from outside Earth is what’s fallen in the form of meteorites. They’re kind of tricky  - we don’t know much about their history or where they came from – but they’re just about all we’ve got.

The meteorites didn’t make it into that story, but my wonderful editor, Laura Helmuth, found a way for me to write about them anyway: an article in a Smithsonian Collector’s Edition. This special edition of the magazine is called Mysteries of the Universe and yes, the only way to read my article is to buy the special issue for $8.99 plus $1 shipping and handling. (Some of the articles are online, but mine isn’t one of them.) I know, that’s $9.99 you could otherwise spend on yarn or a movie, but it’s a really good article! Surely that’s worth 10 bucks. There are nice stories on lots of other topics, too, from Galileo to black holes to the search for Earth-like planets around other stars.

Scientists use meteorites to learn lots of things about space. My article includes this behind-the-scenes visit to the meteorite collection at the National Museum of Natural History. I also visited some astrobiologists at NASA who crush bits of meteorites and had a very funny phone conversation with the guy who runs ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites project.

The ANSMET FAQ includes these instructions on how to apply: “Here’s the first step- think about it for a minute. Do you really want to freeze your rear end off, living in a tent for 45 days, with no contact to the outside world, no warm bathrooms, no showers, no web surfing, no cable? If you fail that intelligence test, then the next step is simply a letter (on paper, please) stating your interest in the program.”

I don’t plan to apply. But anyway. Buy the special issue.

When I first started freelancing full time, a friend of mine was like, hey, I need some freelance work. You can write quizzes for me. And I was like, oh, I don’t know, quizzes? I’ve never written a quiz. And she was like, nah, it’s easy, go for it. And I was like, well, ok, if you say so. They turned out to be some of the most fun writing I’ve ever done. Here are the last three in my year-long series.

I referenced the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the intro to the Space quiz. Of course.

If you want to be a Fossil, where should you arrange to die? This is the quiz that tells you.

The art person got way sneaky on the quiz about Building Big – sometimes the picture gives you the right answer, and sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. Ooooohh!!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

For something I’m writing, I needed to double-check that you can buy meteorites (or pieces of meteorites) on eBay. Of course, I turned to Google. Look at the shopping results:

–> Note that they’re all used meteorites. What do you think the listing says? “Condition: Lightly melted on entry”?

Ok, I checked, and the actual eBay listings don’t seem to describe them as used. But still, it made me laugh.

A doctor in Lorton heard an explosion in his office on Monday. But it wasn’t an explosion, it was a meteorite. (Read the story in the Washington Post.)

It’s crazy, this business of living on a planet. We go around and around the sun, blundering into bits of asteroids that cross our path. We burn them with our atmosphere, melt the outsides til they’re black and shiny, and catch them with the floors of our doctors’ offices. Then they get to go around and around the sun with us, maybe even – if they’re lucky – with their own unique registration number.

Hi, rock! Welcome to Earth!

UPDATE, 1/22: An online discussion on the Post’s website about this story – hosted by two people I met on this day.

Nerdy excitement downtown: two instruments that used to be on the Hubble Space Telescope are at the National Air and Space Museum! And they’re not just any instruments, they’re instruments that made news. Remember when the Hubble first launched, and it was a giant national joke? These are the instruments that fixed it in 1993.

COSTAR, the space telescope equivalent of a pair of glasses, is a set of mirrors that were ground to reverse the error in the telescope’s big mirror. The astronauts on the first Hubble servicing mission also installed WFPC2, a new camera. NASA had planned to replace the original one anyway, because they knew digital camera technology would keep changing fast; the new one just had special adjustments for the messed-up mirror.

I went to the press conference this morning to check out these instruments for myself. COSTAR is shaped like a refrigerator, but much bigger, and with a set of little mirrors sticking out of one corner.

John Grunsfeld, an astronaut who’s been on three Hubble servicing missions, pulled the COSTAR out of the telescope six months ago. “It was easy,” he says. They thought it might stick, but it popped right out. He was much more excited about the glorified fuse box sitting next to COSTAR:

It’s the power control unit for the whole telescope. He pulled it out during a servicing mission in 2002. The people controlling the telescope at Goddard had to turn Hubble’s power off while he worked on it. That meant he had to work fast; otherwise, with the heaters off, the telescope might freeze. So he spent three years training on how to disconnect the unit.

You think I’m nerdily excited about these instruments, you should’ve seen him with the wrench he used to disconnect the wires. An engineer from the Goddard Space Flight Center brought it down this morning in a briefcase, and he was all happy to see it. (“This is my favorite Hubble tool!”) I don’t think the briefcase was handcuffed to the engineer’s wrist, but maybe it should’ve been. The curators were looking covetous, and there was some doubt about whether Grunsfeld would want to part with it.

I got into a little frenzy of quiz-writing right before I left for the Bering Sea, and here are the fruits of my labors.

Music – Knowing how bagpipes work will help you here.

Human Genome – I applaud the art person for finding pictures for this quiz.

Actually, I think I wrote some others, too…I’ll let you know when I figure out where they are.

You didn’t think I’d stop posting quizzes just because I’m in the Arctic, did you? Oh, you’re so silly.

Click here to take my quiz on the Apollo program!

Astronauts and polar bears? In one place?!?!? Well, no, two places: New quizzes!

Project Gemini. Did you know what NASA project came between Mercury and Apollo? Yeah, neither did I. I wasn’t born yet, you see. But now I want to take a field trip down to the Air & Space Museum to check out the capsule they’ve got on display.

Polar Science. Ah, this one was fun. I like the poles. You will do better on this quiz if you have seen Encounters at the End of the World, the Werner Herzog documentary about Antarctica. It’s a great movie, so you should see it even if you don’t organize your life around doing better on my quizzes.

For all my Science Channel quizzes click here.