"So I Think What We Mean When We Say A "gentle" Black Hole Is Probably That There's Not A Lot Of Hot

Oh, for the year to come in 2020, what I'm mostly looking forward to is new opportunities to explore.  That's been one of the most fascinating things in my seven years that I've been a research pilot at NASA is working with different engineering and science teams and learning more and more everyday.

 I feel like - it's just like going to graduate school over and over and learning great new things about the earth's atmosphere and flight research every day.  I just don't have to take written tests or write a thesis or anything like that.  So it's a great way to go to school and learn and explore.

What are you most excited for in 2020?

Working at NASA has been an extraordinary experience and I have a lot of memories I can tell you are my favorite.  But there's one in particular that stands out above the rest.  

I was a new flight director, only been in the office for two years, and we were executing the STS-120 mission, where we were taking these solar arrays that are in blankets, and you put them up on board the space station and you unfold them like an accordion.  

As we were unfolding one of them, we saw it rip.  And by the time that the power discipline expert could make the array stop, we had a huge tear inside the solar array.  After several meetings, it became clear that we were not going to be able to undock the shuttle in that configuration and we had to figure out a way to fix the solar array.

At that time I was working at what we called a team four.  So three teams used to support the shuttle mission, but we always had a fourth team waiting in the background for something to go wrong.  So at that point we called together a meeting and a young engineer showed up who was about 24/25 years old.  And [he] said "Flight!  I have a solution!"

So he walks into my meeting with this. [holds up object] And I said, "what is that?"  

And he says, "It's a cufflink, Flight, and I made it out of spare parts that are available to the astronauts on the space station. And if you take this and you weave it through some of the holes and you pull it tight, we'll be able to secure the solar array."

And so sure enough, we were able to take this cufflink and a couple more like it, and put one of our tallest crew members on board a stacked set of robotic arms and he installed a cufflink.  And that cufflink is there today and keeps the space station solar array structurally sound.  So best moment ever.  You never know what a 24/25 year old can accomplish.

What has been the best memory you have so far at NASA?

"We could definitely send a drone to a black hole, collect data, send it back, and study it.  But once it goes inside, once it crosses the event horizon, we're not going to get anything back.  So it would be impossible to know what's inside, but we could learn a lot about what's just outside of the black hole. 

Is it possible?  Sure.  I mean a hundred years ago did anyone think we would be landing rovers on Mars or Titan?  A hundred years from now?  Definitely."

Is it at all possible to send a drone into a black hole and collect the data of what it’s like inside? If not, how close do you we are to possibly achieving that?

"The answer is both.  You will disappear forever, but you will still exist inside of the black hole.  So how does that work?  

Well, you disappear forever from the point of view of everbody outside of the black hole.  As you get closer and closer to the event horizon you get what we call redshifted.  You get kind of faded away darker and darker and darker until you just disappear.  That's what it looks like from the outside.

From the inside--from your point of view--everything goes pretty well at least for the next five or six milliseconds, before you get crushed to death."

What would happen if I go into a black hole? Do you think I would disappear forever or would I still exist inside the black hole?

Joy is great motivator to do things to do.  And that's actually some advice that I have is whatever you're doing in life, make sure that it brings you some joy.  But there's a lot of reasons that people do things, and I think one of the really great things about being an astronaut is getting a chance to explore.  

We get to do things that are absolutely amazing.  And when we see the planet, we explore outer space, and we get to do all these things and we can come back and we can tell people about it.  So I think it's the thrill of science.  I think it's the lure of discovery.  And then the opportunity to share that with the world is really amazing.

Other than joy, why do you do the things you do?

Yeah, that's a wonderful thing.  And whether you're flying low level, over the earth's surface, or way up high in the earth's atmosphere like with the ER-2, there's different sights.  

One thing I like about flying low level is the vegetation, the hills, the mountains, the water - where you see details in the waves and the trees up close that are just absolutely beautiful.  Conversely, when you're way up high  you see everything.  And that's where you realize how many different pieces of the earth's surface come together, between the oceans, the big lakes, the mountains and everything, and the colors are so different that all they just paint an incredible picture from 13 miles above the earth.  

And when you look from the surface up through the beautiful atmosphere that we have from where the sky moves from a light blue color and then gradually gets dark blue and then purple and even starts to turn black way up high, that's just an incredible sight that I feel real privileged to see every time I go up there.  It's a privilege, it's just amazing.

What's the most beautiful natural scene uou've ever seen personally, as in Aurora Borealis, volcanic eruption, or something that made you seem like the Earth should be treasured?

Being a flight director was such an honor.  I was only able to do it for eight years, but I loved every minute of it.  My favorite part about that is being able to lead such talented teams.  

I had a different team with me every day, different teams on different missions I supported, but the one consistent thing is that they are all dedicated to flying these vehicles safely, to protecting the crew, to executing the mission.  

And it was just an honor to be able to lead them. I considered it a successful day if I didn't have to step in and I could just sit back and watch the team do their thing, and they are beautiful.

What was your favorite part of being a Flight Director?

"So, one of the really cool things about black holes that I've been working on recently is using black holes to study another aspect of astrophysics which we don't really understand called dark matter.  Dark matter pervades the entire universe. It's probably five, six times more populous than regular matter, and yet we still have no idea what this stuff is.

The only thing we know about dark matter is that it reacts to gravity.  And if you really want to push gravity to the extreme, of course the way to do it is with a black hole.  So we're trying to understand how dark matter and black holes interact together."

What is the most fascinating thing about black hole research for you, personally?

Yeah, we had to troubleshoot problems pretty much every day.  So, we have our tasks that we’re doing every day: a science experiment or some maintenance, but things don’t always go as planned.  So that’s one of the really interesting things about science experiments is that sometimes you observe things that are different and that’s how science gets done.

One of the experiments I worked on was actually doing a chemical reaction with some small little pockets of–they’re plastic kind of tubes that contain pockets of water.  And we heated the reaction and we noticed that there were bubbles being formed.  When we did this reaction on Earth we didn’t have the same thing, so we had no idea was to expect when we did this on board.  So we documented this and actually found it to be a really interesting phenomenon.  The scientists took that back and that ended up being part of our analysis of the experiment.  

Sometimes you’re just troubleshooting equipment because things aren’t working.  So I was working on one of the vacuum furnaces one day, and it has these quick disconnects that you can use to supply power or water to the vacuum furnace.  And I tried to do one of the quick disconnects and all of a sudden the connection–the valve–stayed full open and there was water spreading everywhere.  

So that was some really quick troubleshooting, I had water going in my face and I wasn’t really sure what to do so I closed the thing as quickly as possible, backed off, got the water out of my eyes, and then I called the ground and we did a lot of troubleshooting that day.

Have you ever had to troubleshoot a problem in space?

“So, if the sun were just an isolated black hole with nothing around it, we would see nothing.  If we knew exactly where to look–which we would, because we’re pretty good astronomers–and we could map out the solar system, we’d know there’s something in the middle of the solar system that’s causing all of the gravity and the orbits of the planets.  If we looked right at that, we’d actually see some really cool gravitational lensing effects, and you’d see these arcs of light around the invisible black hole called the Einstein ring.”

What do *you* think is inside a black hole? Or If they sun was a black hole what would we see in the sky? Thanks!