Dan Barry *80 on why astronauts can’t whistle in space
ABC News and io9 have some interesting coverage on how astronaut Dan Barry discovered that it is impossible to whistle while out on a moon walk.
Barry, who has seven hours of spacewalking under his belt, tried whistling during his spacewalk in May 1999. “I thought of it on the fly,” ABC News quotes Barry as saying. “It turned out that it didn’t work.” Why not? “You can’t whistle because the air pressure in the suit is only 4.3 [pounds per square inch], and normal atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi, so there are not enough air molecules blowing by your lips to make a sound,” Barry said.
For the record: the tune he would have whistled could he have whistled was “Whistle While You Work.”
Barry, who earned his doctorate from Princeton in 1980, is just one several Princeton Engineering astronauts. Others include Pete Conrad *64, the third man to walk on the moon, Greg Linteris ’79 *90, James C. Adamson *77, and Gerald Carr *62.
By the way, the Trenton Times recently featured Robert Stengel‘s contributions to NASA’s space shuttle program. Stengel, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at
Princeton University, designed a control system for the Apollo Project Lunar Module.
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About this blog
EQN is a blog from Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science that highlights faculty, students and alumni who, through innovation and leadership, are changing the world.
Recent Entries
- Starshade deploys for first time
- Hale ’11 and Ohlendorf ’05 shine in the major leagues
- Flood risk study receives $2.3 million Rockefeller Foundation grant
- Ice cream social August 9 to feature vintage technology
- Jennifer Rexford ’91 one of top 10 ‘cloud trailblazers’
- Dan Boneh *96 wins prize for advances in cryptography
- Computer science researchers untangle a hairy problem
- Technology Review: mining cellphone data without violating privacy
- Dean H. Vincent Poor elected fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh
- Bob Kahn wins Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
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