This Month's Story

Because of a serious accident several years ago, I was forced to stop writing. This included my “This Month’s Story” that was a regular part of my web site. At my doctor’s insistence, I am forcing myself to again write a story each month as a part of my therapy. I hope this will be the start of a long line of stories. I hope you will enjoy this effort and will make it a habit of reading each month’s story.

If you have any questions or comments on this or any of my stories, please contact me at paul@annabellebooks.com.

This picture shows the Internal waves entering the Med from the Strait Of Gibraltar. The Atlantic is on the left of the photo, the Mediterranean is on the right. The waves are the arced features in the picture. On the Atlantic side of the Strait, the deep sill (900 feet) that generates these waves is manifested on the surface as a very faint rather complex line.
My plane is too small to be seen but it is there just off the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.
The original of this picture is in color and far prettier. However for various reasons I can not show that color picture here and present this B&W picture instead.

I was at the Lyndon B. Johnson Manned Space Flight Center just south of Houston. The shuttle had landed the previous week and I with two other oceanographic friends from the same laboratory where I worked were there to view photographs the astronauts had taken at my behest of several ocean phenomenon.

I had made the trip from my lab to the Space Center many times before; mostly to lecture the astronauts on what it was they were seeing on the surface of the ocean when they viewed it from several hundred miles in space. They were all extremely smart people, it’s just they were not trained in oceanography. I was. So what I lectured them about was a subject they knew very little about except for the occasional Jacques Cousteau movie they had seen on television.

Those had been enjoyable trips and I was finding out more about their interesting space flight journeys than I was learning from my television set. I made many friends among the astronauts and my trips to Houston were rewarded by being made part of a select group of scientific investigators that received the photographs they took from space (I believe there about thirty such scientists in the group). These third master photograph quality sets of all the pictures taken during each shuttle mission was a sort of reward for both my lectures and the scientific space information I wrote about in my many peer review oceanographic papers.

Actually, the astronauts were happy because picture taking was really a secondary purpose on their being on the shuttle. It was something that was really viewed as a sort of amusement or time out from their regular work.

Let me explain briefly about the photographs themselves, by these I mean the photographs our group of special photographs were given. To begin with, they were of a vastly higher quality than the pictures the public saw. Let me explain.

First the original photograph or what is called the first master was copied and then placed in sealed storage never to be touched again except for some dire emergency. The second master copy was then used to make a third set of masters for the select scientific group of earth investigators that received these pictures of which I was one.

Finally one of the second master copies was made into a fourth set which was then distributed to the public. The problem here was that each time the master was copied there was a slight degradation to the original master. This degradation was very small, but to us third master investigators, the degradation was extremely important. The closer we got to the original photograph, the better it was for us to see extremely tiny earth features.

Getting back to the trip the three of us were taking to the manned Space Center. Our going was for a different purpose that of past missions. I was there under orders from the Oceanographer of The Navy to look at shuttle pictures that were specifically taken for me.

A few weeks earlier I had been taken away from a the particular ocean study I was involved in at the time to receive a call from the Oceanographer’s Office to make up specific operation plans for an oceanographer that was to be aboard the next shuttle flight.

I was startled. “Who,” I asked, “was the oceanographer they were sending up on the Shuttle?” There was a pause at the other end and then I heard “Scully Powers, an Australian.” I thought for a moment, and then said, “I’ve never heard of him! Why didn’t Powers know what ocean experiment he wanted to do on the shuttle? Why was I being asked at this late date to make up work for someone I never heard of to do?”

There was a long pause on the other end of line. I realized I was talking to the Oceanographer’s senior scientific director who I knew personally for various personal reasons and that my questions were embarrassing him. I also realized by the pause that he did not want to answer them. Finally he said that I was to stop whatever I was doing and to send him the operation plans he was requesting by the following morning.

I said yes (what else could I say). I would do what he requested immediately and would have it sent to him the next day

I worked late that night and sent the plan off early the next morning. The plan I sent would actually have three sites to photograph. I did this so that if weather covered one area, one of the other areas might be clear. These sites would cover oceanographic events in three completely different areas: upwelling along the coast of Baja California, Atlantic and Gulf water current interaction far offshore the west coast of Florida, and finally internal waves in the Strait of Gibraltar. I would have two friends conducting teams to study the first two events; one would do the Baja California and the other would do the west Florida area.

I would go to Spain to observe internal waves exiting the Strait of Gibraltar.

My proposal was approved immediately! By that afternoon the money I had requested was forwarded for my use. I was flabbergasted! The amount that I needed to do the work was pulled out of thin air and, in truth, was far more than I needed.

I immediately flew to Rota Spain to prepare to cover the internal waves in the Strait of Gibraltar. I intended to study the waves as they were being generated by the turning of the tide as it tripped over a 1000 foot deep subsurface sill in the Strait. Although each wave was generated far below the surface, the apex of the waves appeared as only a foot or two high disturbances on the ocean’s surface. They would resemble the ripples caused by throwing a pebble in a pond. The sun’s reflection off these surface waves would make it possible to see them from the shuttle’s altitude (at least so I believed).

I borrowed a Navy P-3 and flew over the area at extremely high altitudes twice during my wait for the shuttle’s launch. To my satisfaction (although not surprise) the internal waves were visible on both flights. The only problem would that be that at low tide, no internal waves were generated. According to my calculations, the shuttle would be over the area at high tide with the full moon producing the strongest internal waves. I crossed my fingers that the shuttle’s launch would go as scheduled.

To my great happiness, it was launched as scheduled. As soon as it was launched, I checked the weather conditions in the other two areas. They were cloud covered and promised to be so for the remaining period of the mission; it would be up to me and the internal waves being generated in the Strait.

I made an exhaustive check of the regional weather. This showed that the Strait area would have good weather for at least a week. And so with my borrowed Navy P-3, I flew over the Strait concurrent to the shuttle’s over flight. That night I received word from Huston that no pictures were taken and that I should wait and repeat my P-3 flight the following day. On the evening of the following day, I received the same message. (It was not permitted for me to talk directly to the astronauts on the Shuttle; I had to go through an intermediate operator in Huston’s Mission Control so I could not know if the problem in taking the pictures was due to a problem aboard the shuttle or that they could not see the internal waves.)

Since I flew the P-3 on each of these days and could see the waves quite clearly, I was puzzled by the extremely brief response to my queries.

On the third day, I again saw the waves. It was the full moon and as I watched them, I was impressed. They were tremendous in size and scope! Even the P-3 pilots were amazed at their clarity. That evening I waited expectedly for the call from Huston. It came and when it did the caller was excited. He yelled that the waves were clearly seen and that they said that they were tremendous. They even appeared to extend beyond the Alboran Sea, the first of several seas that make up the Mediterranean.

I relaxed as he went on and on. Our operation was not only a success, it had exceeded even our greatest expectations!!

Now, to return to my colleagues and my visit to Huston to see the Shuttle pictures. When we arrived the crew was all smiles and prints of their pictures were laid out on a long table for us to see. As we looked at them, the mission commander spoke quietly in my ear, “Sorry about your friend Powers.”

I stopped amazed and asked him what he meant.

It turned the ports for taking pictures were in the leading part of the Shuttle. A spotter would look ahead of the shuttle (remember they were circling the earth at a tremendous speed) and when he/she spotted the earth feature they were looking for, he/she would shout out a warning to the person with the camera that the target was coming up and the camera person would take the picture.

Only this person was not Scully Powers, it was an old friend of mine from many other prior missions and the pictures she took that day were as all the pictures she took for me, “picture perfect.”

But where was Scully Powers? It turned out Powers had made a nuisance of himself several times in the forward picture taking area by kicking several of the landing controls. This had happened several times and was extremely serious. The mission commander became so vexed by Power’s clumsiness that he had ordered him to stay out of the shuttle control area and had asked my experienced person to take the pictures instead.

Hers is a name I do remember, Kathy Sullivan. We were old friends.

The five of us, the shuttle commander, Kathy and me and my two navy lab persons spent the afternoon looking over these and several other pictures. We were highly pleased. Finally we quit for supper. I asked Kathy to join us as our guest for pizza at a popular astronaut pizza bar.

Once there, Kathy gave us a more intimate story of the mission including the part where Scully Powers was banned from the picture taking area. Then she said something that I had never been told before. For the first few days of all shuttle missions, almost everyone suffered from what can be best described as a type of motion sickness. On the third or fourth day almost everyone returned to their normal equilibrium, but until then the astronauts were too sick to do anything but the basic needs to keep the shuttle functioning.

“So that is why you didn’t get pictures of the internal waves the first two days.”

She nodded, “We actually saw the waves but they went by so quickly that we were in no condition to take their pictures. We said as much to mission control. Didn’t they tell you?”

I nodded my head no. “Things were a little confused at the time and we were never told.”

There was more going on at the time, part of which involved navy politics, but I quickly decided not to say anything about it. As far we were concerned, we got our pictures; they were unbelievably beautiful and to me that was all that mattered.

I wrote several peer-review papers on what the pictures showed including a special issue of EOS, the American Geophysical Unions official journal. I was invited to several all expense trips to European Laboratories where I stayed on two for quite a while as a visiting professor. I (and my wife, Stella) was even invited to the Russian Laboratory on the Black Sea as guests of what was then the soviet government. (That trip rates a monthly story in itself.)

All told we were happy and have memories that have lasted us a very long time. These were good people. Altogether, Kathy made three missions and took pictures for me in each of them.