【Native Speaker每日综合训练—44系列】【44-10】科技 Going to Space

伊蔓达

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去太空是人类的梦想，今天的话题就是讲这个哒！另外本期的Obstacle附件中有配套的音频提供，有兴趣的可以下载随意听~
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Part I: Speaker

Comet Reeks of Cat Crap and Rotten Eggs
November 3, 2014 |By Lee Billings

What smells like rotten eggs, a used litter box and an almond-munching mortician? The answer is one of those dirty snowballs in space, a comet. Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, to be exact, which is starting to thaw as it closes in on the sun.

Since August, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft has been monitoring the comet. Right now, Churyumov-Gerasimenko is between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, some 300 million miles from Earth. It’s so chilly out there that scientists expected Rosetta’s instruments to detect scarcely more than odorless carbon dioxide from the comet.

But instead Rosetta has also detected hydrogen sulphide—with its rotten egg odor—as well as ammonia, with a smell familiar to anyone who has changed a cat pan. Also in the mix: formaldehyde and methanol, found in embalming fluid, mixed with faint traces of poisonous hydrogen cyanide, which has an almond-like aroma.

Rosetta will deploy a probe to land on the comet this November, and will soon gather more pungent whiffs of the comet’s appalling perfume. But by studying this eau de comet, researchers hope to better understand the deep—and apparently smelly—chemical origins of our solar system.

Source: Scientific America
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/comet-reeks-of-cat-crap-and-rotten-eggs/

[Rephrase 1, 01:20]

伊蔓达

Part II: Speed

Can Space Tourism Companies Keep Their Customers Safe and Healthy?

Areovereager space tourists endangering their health?

Mar 1, 2014 |By Katherine Harmon Courage

[Time 2]
Keeping people healthy in space has been a major challenge since the first days of spaceflight. That is partly why NASA has always favored the crème de la healthy crème of human specimens for its missions. Now, however, the burgeoning business of commercial spaceflight is poised to open the galaxy's doors to a much larger—and unhealthier—pool of passengers. If private spaceflight companies keep their promise to allow people of average health to fly, space tourism could become a $1.3-billion industry with more than 25,000 customers by2021, according to consulting firm Futron Corporation. Virgin Galactic has already booked at least 680 reservations for a two-and-a-half-hour-long trip, with about four minutes spent in what is technically “space”—just more than 100kilometers above Earth's surface. And a Russian company called Orbital Technologies hopes to build a space hotel equipped for five-day stays at more than 320 kilometers above the highest suite on Earth.

Fewer than a dozen paying customers have made the journey into space so far. We can guess at the kinds of medical problems new waves of space tourists may encounter, however, by examining the experiences of professional astronauts between the 1960s and today. Major health issues for these explorers have included weakened bones and muscles, poor vision, nausea and insomnia. In addition to all these risks, untrained tourists will almost certainly face a wider array of “health problems that you haven't had to deal with in space before,” says Jeffrey Jones, a member of the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor College. Even a brief sojourn into space could present serious health concerns for the elderly and those with high blood pressure because of the enormous compression the body endures during takeoff and reentry. Longer voyages will likely aggravate many common medical disorders—including asthma, heart disease and cancer—that would usually disqualify someone from a NASA flight.

Currently there are no federal or state regulations that determine who is eligible for commercial spaceflight, so companies are free to set their own no-fly standards. A Virgin Galactic spokesperson says “most people” will be allowed to fly with them. Some doctors have begun drawing up screening guidelines for those who hope to vacation among the stars; others are considering how to modify a few Earth-bound medical procedures so that, if necessary, they can be applied in space.
[390 words]

[Time 3]
New Pressure
The issues to be tackled are formidable. In the past half a century, researchers have learned that space travel changes just about every system in the human body. Launch and reentry place people under strong gravitational forces (g-forces), a measure of the stress to which the body is subjected during acceleration. High g-forces make the heart work extra hard to circulate blood, especially to the brain (which is one reason high g-forces can cause people to lose consciousness). Some commercial spaceflight companies have offered to help customers prepare for the intense strain by whipping them around in a giant centrifuge machine, but the training is not mandatory.

Orbiting Earth in free-fall at, say, 28,000 kilometers per hour and about400 kilometers above the planet's surface—as is the case for the International Space Station—creates a state of weightlessness. On Earth, gravity keeps the bulk of our fluids in our lower half. When we are weightless, fluids spread out more evenly, draining from the legs and filling up the chest and head. In the process, fluid disperses through the inner ear tubes that help us keep our balance, resulting in nausea, which—even more than pain—is notoriously difficult to ignore and, if followed by vomiting, can lead to severe dehydration. Despite learning techniques to tolerate nausea, professional astronauts often feel queasy during the first days of a flight, so we can expect plenty of sick-to-their-stomach civilians.

Increased fluid in the head is also responsible for one of the most frequent complaints among astronauts after the all too common “space sickness”: poor eyesight. All of that excess cranial pressure can flatten the back of the eyeball and thus blur vision.
[282 words]

[Time 4]
In addition to shifting fluids, prolonged weightlessness weakens the skeleton. Because astronauts are no longer walking or performing other weight-bearing activities, bone loses between 1 and 2 percent of its mineral density each month in space, says Jeffery Sutton, director of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. As an added danger, calcium that leaches from bone can contribute to kidney stones—nuggets of minerals that can painfully obstruct the urinary tract.

Muscles also deteriorate in microgravity because they no longer have to work to support the body throughout the day. Although exercise in space can help slow such decay, fluid redistribution becomes a problem once again. Unusually high levels of lactic acid—which is responsible for cramps and aches during a workout—pool in the muscles of space exercisers, cutting their routines short.

Particularly concerning is how space alters the body's hardest-working muscle: the heart. Marlene Grenon of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues have discovered that after just 24 hours in a simulated microgravity environment, the cells that line blood vessels change shape, adhere in different ways and use a different mix of genes than usual.

Space travel takes its toll on the mind as well as the body. Getting a good night's rest in microgravity can be difficult because of persistent lights and sounds on a spacecraft and the eerie feeling of weightlessness. In several grounded simulations of long-term space travel, astronauts living in close quarters occasionally became depressed and foggy. Considering how aggravated airline passengers can get after a flight across the Atlantic, sending a group of space tourists on a seven-month trip to Mars, as the Mars One organization wants to do, might be asking for mutiny.
[284 words]

[Time 5]
Galaxy of Woes
Space tourists of average and poor health are bound to face a whole host of medical concerns on top of what even a NASA Adonis must worry about. Most commercial spaceflight customers are likely to be at least middle-aged, which means many will have high blood pressure and heart disease, common disorders for their age range.

Fluid redistribution is particularly dangerous for people with heart disease. As fluids move to the chest and head, rising pressure in the skull bumps up the risk of bursting blood vessels and damaging brain tissue. Similarly, increasing pressure inside the lungs from extra fluid can trigger an asthma attack—a sudden and acute constriction of the airways.

Even motion sickness could be extra dangerous to people with existing cardiovascular disorders. The dehydration, panting and racing blood pressure that come with excessive use of the barf bag, Jones points out, tire the cardiovascular system, which, if already weakened, could culminate in a heart attack. Some scientists have begun studying the heart in rats that are half-suspended (often by their tail), which somewhat mimics the fluid redistribution that happens in microgravity. So far they have learned that after a month—even in this experimental environment—the animals' heart muscle itself changes, becoming larger and less efficient; similar cardiac deconditioning has been reported in human astronauts.

Like microgravity, another one of the greatest dangers to space tourists is something they cannot see with their own eyes: radiation. Giant magnetic fields surrounding Earth deflect electromagnetic energy emanating from stars and black holes that would otherwise incinerate us. Once you leave Earth's magnetosphere behind, you are exposed to all that energy, which shreds DNA and can cause mutations that make a healthy cell start multiplying uncontrollably, leading to cancer.

Supremely healthy astronauts can spend hundreds of days in space without terribly increasing their rates of cancer. But if Mars One is serious about setting up colonies on the Red Planet, it will have to protect its passengers from radiation on the voyage—as well as at the atmosphere less destination. And skittering particles and electromagnetic waves could unfavorably tip the scales for anyone with a genetic predisposition to cancer.
[362 words]

[Time 6]
Final Frontier Medicine
Pinpointing who is vulnerable to illness in space is still not enough to guarantee the well-being of space travelers. We must also learn how to adapt medical procedures we have perfected on Earth.

Dorit Donoviel, deputy chief scientist at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, and her colleagues are exploring easy, noninvasive techniques as alternatives to standard medical practice in space. Traditionally doctors check for a change in brain pressure by sticking a needle into the spinal column or directly into the skull—a procedure that might not fly in space, especially without an attending physician. Instead Donoviel has been trying to gauge changes in internal pressure by recording how sound waves travel through the eye sockets and ear canals. And infrared light, which is absorbed and refracted differently by healthy and injured tissue, might be able to identify internal bleeding. Portable diagnostic devices based on infrared or ultrasound signals would be far more likely to make it to space than the bulky and heavy machines used for MRIs and CT scans.

In the meantime, a report published in 2012 in BMJ recommends that primary care clinicians start getting ready to evaluate patients who want to try commercial spaceflight. Conditions such as heart disease, uncontrolled asthma or high blood pressure should merit a warning and explanation of risks from a physician. Researchers are also devising simple ways to get hopeful tourists as healthy as possible before they ever set foot onboard a spacecraft. Low-tech solutions such as making sure people are well nourished and properly hydrated in the weeks before launch might go a fair way toward ensuring an emergency-free flight.

Virgin Galactic says it will offer customers three days of training that will include “physical tests” and “a medical screening” but is not disclosing the precise criteria used to approve tourists for flight, if any. For now the onus falls mainly on tourists and their doctors to take precautions. As a consolation to anyone who must stay grounded, just remember: there's so much to discover on our planet. I hear Iceland is out of this world.
[350 words]

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-space-tourism-companies-keep-customers-safe-healthy/

伊蔓达

Part III: Obstacle

Actually, it is rocket science

Two accidents, even though one was fatal, should not stop private enterprise from going into space

Nov 8th 2014 |From the Print edition

SPACE flight is difficult. It is also dangerous. Eighteen astronauts and cosmonauts have died in flights organised by the American and Soviet space programmes—and three others were killed in a fire during a rehearsal on the ground. Numerous unmanned rockets have gone wrong as well. Last week the lesson was hammered home again, on two separate occasions.

On October 28th an uncrewed Antares rocket operated by Orbital Sciences, acompany contracted by NASA to fly supplies to the International Space Station(ISS), blew itself up shortly after launching from a pad in Virginia. The explosion rattled windows in a town 11km (7 miles) away, but, fortunately, there were no casualties.

Three days later VSS Enterprise, a space plane owned by Virgin Galactic, a firm that hopes to provide wealthy thrill-seekers with flights to the edge of space, crashed during a test flight over the Mojave desert (see picture). This time, the toll was higher: one pilot was killed; the other survived but was badly hurt.

Crashes and explosions are not uncommon, especially with new rockets. The accidents were unrelated. That both happened in the same week is nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence. But it is, nevertheless, an unwelcome blow for enthusiasts of the “New Space” industry, which aims to use private companies and the discipline of fixed-price contracts to cut the cost of getting into space.

With investigators still sifting through the wreckage and analyzing flight logs, it is too early to say what caused either crash. But Orbital Sciences has indicated that the fault may lie with the engines on its Antares rockets. They are half a century old, having been built in the Soviet Union in the 1960s for use with the N1, an enormous rocket that itself suffered four failures, including one launch-pad explosion, before being abandoned. After the end of the cold war, a cache of the engines was discovered sitting in a warehouse. Two such engines, after refurbishment in America, are bolted to the bottom of every one of Orbital Science’s Antares rockets. The firm had been planning to fit more modern Russian engines to future versions. It is now likely to make the switch sooner.

Ad astra per aspera
As for Virgin Galactic, armchair crash investigators had, to the annoyance of Sir Richard Branson, the firm’s billionaire owner, also talked up the possibility of an engine failure, especially since the firm had recently altered the fuel mix burned by the space plane’s rocket. But officials from America’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating the crash, announced on November 2nd that they had found the fuel containers and the rocket intact.

The leading theory now is that the space plane broke apart under aerodynamic stress. Virgin’s craft can fly in two configurations: alow-drag arrangement when climbing into space, and a high-drag one used to lose speed while descending. According to the NTSB, the high-drag mode seems to have been engaged while the engine was still firing. If that is correct, then the resulting forces could have caused the craft to break up.

Orbital Sciences’s accident is embarrassing, but unlikely to harm it too much. The firm, which was founded in 1982, has only a toe in the New Space industry. Besides the Antares, it makes small satellites, launches a variety of other rockets, and has contracts with the American armed forces.

If anything, the accident is more embarrassing for NASA, which relies on the private sector for launches more heavily than it did in its glory days—often in the face of complaints in Congress. It has a $1.9 billion contract with Orbital to provide eight resupply trips to the ISS (the failed launch was to have been the third). But any congressional complaints are likely to be minimal. Partly, that is because, as a big, established firm, Orbital has friends on Capitol Hill. And partly it is because the accident will not seriously inconvenience the astronauts aboard the station.

Even if the investigation unearths a fundamental problem with Antares’s design, NASA has a similar contract with SpaceX, an upstart rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, an internet tycoon. SpaceX has already completed four missions out of a planned 12. The next is scheduled to launch in December. Ironically, Orbital’s accident may put extra pressure on SpaceX. If its flight should fail too, Congress may reasonably start complaining.

It is for Virgin Galactic that things look trickiest. The firm has no government contracts. It is entirely reliant on investors and ticket sales for cash. Those tickets cost $250,000 each and around 700 people have put down deposits. The firm cannot collect the balance of the money, though, until commercial flights begin. Its programme is already behind schedule. Such flights were once due to start in 2008. Following the change of rocket fuel, Virgin had hoped to begin flying paying passengers next year. That now looks impossible. And the crash must make many ticket holders wonder whether they really want to go. One who has made his views known publicly, Wilson da Silva, an Australian science journalist, still intends to fly. But around 20 others, the firm says, have asked for refunds.

Although Virgin is aiming only to take passengers to the edge of space (defined, somewhat arbitrarily, as beginning at 100km above the Earth’s surface), and not into full-blown orbit, its technology is, in many ways, trickier than the stuff operated by Orbital Sciences. Compared with spaceplanes,conventional rockets are reasonably well understood.

As George Whiteside’s, Virgin Galati’s chief executive, pointed out in an interview that took place before the crash, there have been around 100 space-launch vehicles in history, but only a handful of rocket planes, of which only two (the Space Shuttle and the X-15) have flown in space with anyone on board. New technology is always tricky to master; new rocket technology can be some of the trickiest of all.

[1008 words]

Source: The Economist

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21630960-two-accidents-even-though-one-was-fatal-should-not-stop-private-enterprise

conglomerator

Time 2: 2:30

Commercial space travel is a burgeoning business, if people of ordinary health can take the trip. The travelers may face health issues More than the known ones. No national health standard has been established yet. Each company is free to have its own standard. Doctors are working to generate the screening guidelines.

Time 3: 1:41

Space travel changes every organism of human body, because of strong gravitational forces caused by acceleration and weightlessness because of lose gravitation.

Time 4: 1:43

Other health concerns are named, including weakening skeleton, muscle deterioration, damage to heart and mind.

Time 5: 1:48

Ordinary people who wanted to do space travel are normally at mid age. High blood pressure and heart disease are common to their ages. Fluid redistribution is dangerous for people with the two kinds of disorders. Besides, there is a great risk of getting cancer because of radiation.

Time 6: 1:46

A new method of physical examination to adapt at space traveling has been devised. People with certain disease may be warned by their physicians with some details and methods of preparation have been developed. A space travel company provides a 3-day training before taking off, but no details are exposed. The author suggests that we’d better stay on our planet.

Obstacle: 5:27

Space travel is dangerous. Two incidents happened recently proves it. Investigation about the incidents is still underway, but possible causes are identified. One of the incidents is bad for the company which launched the craft and for NASA too, which has contracts with the company and another similar company. The other incident is different or probably worse for the company which launched the spaceplane. The company has no contracts with NASA but civilians and it can not get the cash, until it deliver civilian space travel as promised. More details are given about this company.

soun0218

T2: 2:48(390)

T3: 2:06(282)

T4: 2:19(284)

T5: 3:07(362)

T6: 2:30(350)

O1: 8:14(1008)

seraph797979

伊蔓达 发表于 2014-11-10 23:37
Part II: Speed

2,2'39
3,2'07
4,2'08
5,2'52
6,2‘53

古月小破烂

time 2 2’14
   if private spaceflight companies can promise people of health to fly, they will get a lot of customers. people try  to deal with health things.
time 3 1’10
time 4 1’15
time 5 2’01
time 6 2’11
obstacle 4’20
   some accident happen during space travel. The leading theory now is that the space plane broke apart under aerodynamic stress. Investigation unearths a fundamental problem, and need more improve. should point out pointed out in an interview that took place before the crash

玉溪山

2'48''
2'27''
2'13''
2'50''
2'30''

6''20''

gigizhulove

[Time 2]
The commercial space travel has been allowed, so that common people can take the aircrafts to the out space, but the most important things are with the current medical condition, a lot of health problems need to be considered.

[Time 3] - [Time 4]
New Pressure
1.        Space travel makes human blood circulation harder more difficult under strong gravitational forces.
2.        Lacking of the gravity in space, trained astronauts also feel sick. There are several kinds of symptoms caused by lacking gravity be discussed in this paragraph.
3.        Poor eyesight among astronauts is kind of “space sickness” caused by the increased fluid in head
4.        Losing mineral density of the skeleton is another serious problem that the astronauts meet in the weightless condition.
5.        To slow the deterioration of the muscles in weightlessness, astronauts always need to do the exercises, but new problem is accumulation of lactic acid in muscles.
6.        Getting a good night's rest in microgravity is difficult. Getting a space travel is a tough journey.

[Time 5]
Galaxy of Woes
4:02
Most of the customers of space travel tend to be at least middle-aged people having poor health condition. How to guarantee them have a good trip without potential harm is a problem needed to be solve urgently.
Fluid redistribution is dangerous for people with heart disease. Weightlessness raises the pressure in skull, therefore, raises the risk of heart disease.  
Beside the visible harm, some invisible energies around us such as radiation would incinerate us , leading to cancer.

[Time 6]
Final Frontier Medicine
4:10
Some scientists are researching on lowering blood pressure in head, and the results of this technology will be used in space travel in the future. Meanwhile, some medical services, including testing traveler’s health condition and training them adapt to the environment of OutSpace, are being provided by some clinics.
obstacle
9：00

越狱LV

Speaker
Rosetta has detected the sulphide as well as ammonia. It will deploy a probe to land on the comic to help the researchers better understand the chemical origins of our polar system.

2. 02:38.50
Some countries are developing their business in the space. But it will bring some healthy problems to those untrained customers. The companies have begun to draw up guidelines and healthy procedures.

3. 03:26.04
Launch and reentry into the people will bring people under strong g-forces, which could make the heart work hard to circulate blood. Increased fluid could bring severe dehydration and lead to poor eyesight.

4. 01:56.96
Besides, prolonged weightlessness weakens the skeleton. Muscles also deteriorate, including the heart. Space travel affects the mind and the body as well. Astronauts find not easy to fall asleep in the night.

5. 02:23.78
Customers with average and poor health should be especially taken care of because the main target customers are at their middle-age, who normally have high blood or heart diseases. It’s dangerous to travel in space. Another problem is radiation in the space, which could lead to cancer.

6. 02:30.88
The doctors are adapting the standard medical procedure to the space travel. People should have physical test and medical check before on-board. Several main diseases have been already evaluated for those who want a spaceflight.

Obstacle 06:40.23
Two spacecrafts crashed in a week, which is an unfortunate coincidence. One spacecraft has old sectors of parts and will be substituted for new technology and new parts. The other has no relation with the government and some people who have booked the tickets for space travel want to refund because of scary of the accidents. New vehicles and new rocket technology are being introduced but are tricky to master.