South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
In new spacewalk, astronauts tiptoe around toxic ammonia
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Spacewalking astronauts had to take extra safety precautions Saturday after possibly getting toxic ammonia on their suits from the International Space Station’s external cooling system.
Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins had no trouble removing and venting a couple of old jumper cables to remove any ammonia still lingering in the lines. But so much ammonia spewed out of the first hose that Mission Control worried some of the frozen white flakes might have gotten on their suits.
Hopkins was surprised at the amount of ammonia unleashed into the vacuum of space.
“Oh yeah, look at that go. Did you see that?” he asked flight controllers. “There’s more than I thought.”
Even though the stream of ammonia was directed away from the astronauts and the space station, Hopkins said some icy crystals may have contacted his helmet. As a result, Mission Control said it was going to “be conservative” and require inspections.
The astronauts’ first suit check found nothing amiss.
“Looks clean,” Hopkins called down.
NASA did not want any ammonia getting inside the space station and contaminating the cabin atmosphere. The astronauts used long tools to vent the hoses and stayed clear of the nozzles, to reduce the risk of ammonia contact.
Once the ammonia hoses were emptied, the astronauts moved one of them to a more central location near the NASA hatch, in case it’s needed on the opposite end of the station. The ammonia jumper cables were added years ago following a cooling system leak.
As the nearly sevenhour spacewalk drew to a close, Mission Control said the astronauts had already spent enough time in the sunlight to bake off any ammonia residue from their suits.
Indeed, once Glover and Hopkins were back inside, their crewmates said they could smell no ammonia but still wore gloves while handling the suits.
The hose work should have been completed during a spacewalk a week ago, but was put off along with other odd jobs when power upgrades took longer than expected.
Saturday’s other chores included: replacing an antenna for helmet cameras, rerouting ethernet cables, tightening connections on a European experiment platform, and installing a metal ring on the hatch thermal cover.
Eager to get these station improvements done before the astronauts head home this spring, Mission Control ordered up the bonus spacewalk for Glover and Hopkins, who launched last
November on SpaceX. They teamed up for back-to-back spacewalks 1 ½ months ago and were happy to chalk up another.
“It was a good day,” Glover said once back inside.
Although most of their efforts paid off, there were a few snags.
The spacewalk got started nearly an hour late, so the men could replace the communication caps beneath their helmets in order to hear properly. A few hours later, Glover’s right eye started watering. The irritation soon passed, but later affected his left eye.
Then as Glover wrapped up his work, a bolt came apart and floated away along with the washers, becoming the latest pieces of space junk.
“Sorry about that,” Glover said. “No, no, it’s not your fault,” Mission Control assured him.
It was the sixth spacewalk — and, barring an emergency, the last — for this U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew of seven. All but one was led by NASA.
“We’re building the foundation for somebody else to continue the work so we can retire and be with each other, and Barack can golf too much, and I can tease him about golfing too much because he’s got nothing else to do.”
Michelle Obama
WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama is knitting and thinking about retiring from public life.
The former first lady says in a new People magazine interview that she picked up knitting needles to pass time during the coronavirus pandemic. And now she’s hooked.
“Knitting is a forever proposition,” she said. “You don’t master knitting, because once you make a scarf, there’s the blanket. And once you do the blanket, you’ve got to do the hat, the socks.”
She’s working on her first sweater for her husband, former President Barack Obama.
“I’m figuring out how to make sleeves and a collar,” she said. “I could go on about knitting!”
The former first lady also talks about how the pandemic helped her and her husband reclaim “stolen moments” with Malia, 22, and Sasha, 19, who both returned home from college to quarantine with their parents at the family homes in Washington and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
She also discusses what she says is the “low-grade depression” she experienced during the pandemic lockdowns and after George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police May 25, along with her shift away from high-impact exercise and what she wants out of retirement.
Mrs. Obama, whose exercise workouts went viral during her time as first lady, said she taught herself to be a better lap swimmer during quarantine “because I’m finding in my old age that the high-impact stuff I used to do doesn’t work.”
Now that Malia and Sasha are independent, young adults, Mrs. Obama, 57, said she enjoys that their conversations have become more “peer-oriented.”
“I’ve been telling my daughters I’m moving toward retirement right now,” she said, adding that she’s choosing her projects and chasing summer.
Her new Netflix children’s food show, “Waffles +
Mochi,” premieres Tuesday, and tentative plans call for groundbreaking to begin in August on the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
“Barack and I never want to experience winter again,” Mrs. Obama said. “We’re building the foundation for somebody else to continue the work so we can retire and be with each other, and Barack can golf too much, and I can tease him about golfing too much because he’s got nothing else to do.”
The Cherokee Nation, for the first time, has asked Jeep to change the name of its Grand Cherokee vehicle, a move that the carmaker, preparing to release the next generation of the line, has resisted.
Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said last week that the name belonged to the Cherokee people and that Jeep’s use of it without permission was troubling.
“The use of Cherokee names and imagery for peddling products doesn’t deepen the country’s understanding of what it means to be Cherokee, and I think it diminishes it somewhat,” Hoskin said.
His opposition to Jeep’s use of the tribe’s name was reported by Car and Driver magazine.
Stellantis, the carmaker that owns Jeep, defended its use of the name.
“Our vehicle names have been carefully chosen and nurtured over the years to honor and celebrate Native American people for their nobility, prowess and pride,” the company said. “We are, more than ever, committed to a respectful and open dialogue with Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr.”
Jeep introduced its Cherokee SUV in 1974. After the car was retired in the early
2000s, Jeep revived it in
2014. Since that time, the Grand Cherokee has become one of Jeep’s most popular models, with more than
200,000 sold last year. Stellantis formed this year from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, which included Jeep in their portfolio of brands.
Companies have long used Native American names and images as marketing tools, and for many years, the Cherokee Nation did not express an opinion on Jeep’s
use of its name. But the tribe’s request comes as U.S. cities, companies and sports teams are — in response to the nationwide protests after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last year — removing or reconsidering statues, flags, symbols, names and mascots that depict Confederate leaders or other historical figures, or that use Native American imagery and names.
In one of the most high-profile cases, under pressure from corporate sponsors, the owner of Washington’s NFL team, Daniel Snyder, in July agreed to drop its name and logo after many years of protests by Native American groups and others who called it racist.
Suzan Shown Harjo, a scholar who has been at the center of efforts to persuade teams, schools and colleges to drop Native American names and mascots, said Jeep’s explanation for its use of the Cherokee name — that it was honoring the tribe — was just an excuse.
“Of course it’s not an honor,” said Harjo, director of the Morning Star Institute,
a group that promotes Native American causes. She said the use of Native American names has been particularly painful when companies and sports teams use them without permission.
“That’s the assumption that was made by so many people about our land, water, gold, silver, copper — name a mineral. Now it’s about our imagery, our names and our cultural icons,” she said. “When does this thievery stop?”
Hoskin said he told Jeep during a Zoom meeting in late January that he did not condone its use of the Cherokee name. He said that the meeting was cordial and that he was encouraged that the company had initiated the conversation.
“A generation ago, I don’t think it would’ve occurred to them,” he said. “We’re living in a time where people are thinking a bit more about the impact of imagery and names.”
The Cherokee Nation, mostly in Oklahoma, has more than 385,000 members, making it the largest federally recognized Native American tribe.
BASRA, Iraq — It’s nearly dawn and Zainab Amjad has been up all night working on an oil rig in southern Iraq. She lowers a sensor into the black depths of a well until sonar waves detect the presence of the crude that fuels her country’s economy.
Elsewhere in the oil-rich province of Basra, Ayat Rawthan is supervising the assembly of large drill pipes. These will bore into the Earth and send crucial data on rock formations to screens sitting a few feet away that she will decipher.
The women, both 24, are among just a handful who have eschewed the dreary office jobs typically handed to female petroleum engineers in Iraq. Instead, they don hard hats to take up the grueling work at rig sites.
They are part of a new generation of talented Iraqi women who are testing the limits imposed by their conservative communities. Their determination to find jobs in a historically male-dominated industry is an example of the way a burgeoning youth population finds itself increasingly at odds with deeply entrenched and conservative tribal traditions prevalent in Iraq’s southern oil heartland.
“They tell me the field environment only men can withstand,” said Amjad, who spends six weeks at a time living at the rig site. “If I gave up, I’d prove them right.”
Iraq’s fortunes, both economic and political, tend to ebb and flow with oil markets. Oil sales make up 90% of state revenues — and the vast majority of the crude comes from the south. Following low oil prices dragged down by the coronavirus pandemic and international disputes, Iraq is showing signs of recovery, with January exports reaching 2.868 million barrels per day at $53 per barrel, according
to Oil Ministry statistics.
Given the industry’s outsized importance to the economy, petrochemical programs in the country’s engineering schools are reserved for students with the highest marks. Both women were in the top 5% of their graduating class at Basra University in 2018.
Every work day plunges them deep into the mysterious affairs below the Earth’s crust, where they use tools to look at formations of minerals and mud, until oil is found.
“Like throwing a rock into water and studying the ripples,” explained Rawthan.
To work in the field, Amjad, the daughter of two doctors, knew she had to land a job with an international oil company — and to do that, she would have to stand out. State-run enterprises were a dead end; there, she would be relegated to office work.
“In my free time, on my vacations, days off I was booking trainings, signing up for any program I could,” Amjad said.
When China’s CPECC came to look for new hires,
she was the obvious choice. Later, when Texas-based Schlumberger sought wireline engineers she jumped at the chance. The job requires her to determine how much oil is recoverable from a given well. She passed one difficult exam after another to get to the final interview.
Asked if she was certain she could do the job, she said: “Hire me, watch.”
In two months she traded her green hard hat for a shiny white one, signifying her status as supervisor.
Rawthan, too, knew she would have to work extra hard to succeed. Once, when her team had to perform a rare “sidetrack” — drilling another bore next to the original — she stayed awake all night.
“I didn’t sleep for 24 hours, I wanted to understand the whole process, all the tools, from beginning to end,” she said.
Rawthan also now works for Schlumberger, where she collects data from wells used to determine the drilling path later on. She wants to master drilling, and the company is a global leader in the service.