Colorado schools lose friends, associates

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Feb 2, 2003 | by ANSLEE WILLETT

David Petrick spent much of the past two weeks listening to the space shuttle Columbia astronauts talk with Mission Control.

"They were just awestruck with what they were seeing - a world without borders and with peace," he said.

They were running a fire-suppression experiment that Petrick and other Colorado School of Mines students spent five years helping develop. The students and faculty got to know many astronauts, including those who died Saturday.

The school in Golden and the University of Colorado at Boulder were the only Colorado schools that had experiments on the mission, NASA said.

Petrick graduated in 2001 but kept working on the experiment with a few other students and professors. Many of them and their families went to Florida to watch the Jan. 16 launch of Columbia.

Student Angel Abbud-Madrid gave the astronauts a written test to make sure they understood the experiment.

"The astronauts loved him so much, but not more than he loved them," Petrick said. "They called down from space to make sure Angel was OK, to tell him he could breathe now."

Abbud-Madrid was at the Johnson Space Center on Saturday in Houston, but Petrick had not been able to reach him.

The school's project used a super-fine mist, creating fog to remove heat to extinguish fire instead of using harmful chemicals or sprinklers that spray a lot of water and destroy equipment and property.

The project was successful, said Frank Schowengerdt, director of the school's center for commercial applications of combustion in space. The results were sent using video.

There was a snag last week, however.

"We had a slight problem Monday with a water leak in the combustion chamber," he said. "(Payload specialist) Kalpana Chawla spent five hours working on it and got it fixed. She was really determined because this was our first experiment in space."

Professor Stein Sture of the University of Colorado didn't want to talk much about his school's experiment aboard the shuttle.

"I knew all the astronauts quite well and some of them very well," he said. "This is indeed very, very sad, a very hard loss."

More than half the results of the university's project had been sent back. It used weightlessness to understand soil behavior and aimed to improve techniques for evaluating building sites on Earth and eventually on Mars and the moon.

Sture turned on the TV early Saturday and watched reports on the shuttle with his family.

"They're all exceptional people, always," he said of the astronauts. "Kind human beings, great senses of humor, very accomplished."

Petrick said he and others at the School of Mines are trying to cope with the tragedy.

"They were working so hard for us. We are eternally grateful to them," he said. "We're just all sending prayers out to their families."

ON-BOARD EXPERIMENTS

Space shuttle Columbia's 16-day mission featured more than 80 experiments ranging from the effects of space travel on astronauts to the possibility of creating a perfume.

Spiders, flowers, cancer cells, ants, carpenter bees, fish embryos, silkworms and rats were all on the space shuttle for a variety of experiments.

Protein research was conducted on diseases such as HIV-AIDS, Huntington's and Alzheimer's.

Crew members collected samples of their blood, urine and saliva to detect possible bone loss, kidney stones, muscle loss or weakening of immune systems.

The Israel Space Agency and Tel Aviv University sponsored a $2 million experiment that involved aiming cameras at the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean in search of dust plumes from the Sahara Desert that might affect Earth's climate.

Perhaps the most commercially viable experiment on board was sponsored by International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., which sent a miniature red rose plant with six buds and an Asian rice flower with a jasmine scent. Astronauts extracted and preserved essential oils from the flowers so fragrance experts back home could recreate the smell. A 1998 space shuttle experiment yielded a scent incorporated in the perfume Zen and a body spray called Impulse.

A project two Arizona State University researchers conducted was aimed at turning crew member urine and wastewater into clean water for drinking, cooking and bathing.