This Week in Space (Audio)

TWiS 85: Top 10 Scary Space Frights - Halloween Special

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Space wants to kill you every moment you are there. From the harsh vacuum to extreme temperatures to killing radiation, there's no shortage of ways to make your stay in space brief. This Halloween, we discuss the Top Ten (and probably more) scariest moments and places in space. And a TWiS bonus--NASA Deputy Administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy drops in with her scariest space story! Hold on to your thrusters; it's going to be a wild ride.

Headlines:

  • Pre-Halloween Lunar Eclipse! Partial lunar eclipse on October 28, but you must be in the Eastern Hemisphere to see it. Peak viewing will be in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
  • China launched a new crew to its Tiangong space station on the Shenzhou 17 mission. The three taikonauts will spend 6 months on the station, replacing the outgoing Shenzhou 16 crew.
  • The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample capsule remains stuck shut after its return. NASA is still working on safely opening it to access the priceless cargo inside.


    • Main Topic - Top Space Frights

    • The harrowing Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, the first time humans landed on another world, almost ran out of fuel before touching down.
    • Black holes, with their incomprehensible gravity wells that spaghettify anything that gets too close.
    • Alexei Leonov's dicey first spacewalk in 1965 where his suit ballooned up and he nearly couldn't get back into the spacecraft.
    • Gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, that could strip a planet's atmosphere if pointed the wrong way.
    • The near-disaster of Gemini 8 in 1966, when Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had to fire retrorockets, forcing an emergency reentry, to stop the violent tumbling of his spacecraft.
    • Spooky exoplanet TrES-2b, with its coal-black atmosphere and lava-hot winds.
    • Surprise guest and NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy's Pick: Her own scary moment on STS-120 in 2007 when a snagged solar array threatened to electrocute spacewalker Scott Parazynski.

      • Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik

      Guest: Pam Melroy

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