Jeff Williams, NASA astronaut and U.S. record holder for total days spent in space
"On Earth, not all water tastes the same. Some water is delicious, but some can leave a funny taste in your mouth—the result of a particular mineral or metal. This doesnʼt happen on board the International Space Station, even though youʼre drinking recycled sweat and urine. You donʼt sense any unusual flavors. The water—and the beverages we make from it—consistently tastes pretty good.
The process of treating wastewater up there isnʼt all __that different from the natural water cycle on Earth—the runoff, the evaporation, clouds, and rain. The planetʼs water cycle turns water we might consider nasty into water we consider drinkable; so do the ISSʼs systems. And we test it almost every single day, so weʼre confident __that our drinking water is clean. NASA has very strict standards for it. We joke about it a lot, but we really donʼt think much about what our drinking water used to be. Iʼve been on board with 55 or so different people, and Iʼve never seen anyone hesitate to drink it. We drink the Russian water, and they drink ours."
As told to Sarah Fecht
Rick Gelting, U.S. Public Health Service Officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
"When you’re in a water emergency, it’s really not the time to try something new. In 2010, when the cholera outbreak hit Haiti, the local government invited us to help implement a water-cleaning system. We had to work quickly to get clean water to small communities fighting against the waterborne disease. But we also couldn’t introduce any new technologies or products that local workers and residents might not be familiar with.
Chlorine was our go-to: It’s available, inexpensive, and incredibly effective. Problem is, there are different types of chlorination, so we had to trace where people got every drop of their water—whether they piped it in, hauled it from wells, or got it elsewhere. This is where local knowledge comes in handy.
For large community water systems, we used locally available materials to drip a liquid chlorine solution directly into storage tanks, a method that Haiti’s national water and sanitation agency (DINEPA) developed. But some people were bringing in small batches of water from other places. In those cases, special chlorine tablets and solutions let individual households treat their own water.
Working with DINEPA was key because they knew the local conditions and communities better than we did. Local knowledge ensures that what you build will sustain itself and make a difference in the long term—because you will eventually leave."
As told to Claire Maldarelli
Robert Rogers, meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization
"When we fly Hurricane Hunter aircraft into cyclones, a lot of the data we gather is to monitor for “rapid intensification.” That’s when a storm increases in strength by 35 miles per hour or more within a 24-hour period, and it’s a big concern for the forecast community. The nightmare scenario is for this to happen to a Category 1 hurricane just before landfall on the U.S. coast: It goes from a Category 1 to a catastrophic Category 4, and no one has any warning.
Back in 2007, during Hurricane Felix, we flew into a Category 2. But at 10,000 feet, I saw flashes—at first I thought someone took a photo, but then I realized it was lightning. When you see lightning in the core of a storm, it’s a sign that it’s really intensifying. We wound up hitting such a strong updraft, maybe 60 miles per hour, that we hit zero g for a couple of seconds. My notebook started to float, and drops of water from the cup next to me were hovering in the air. At that point, the mission switched from collecting data to just getting home safely."
As told to Rachel Feltman
Nick Holschuh, Geophysicist at the University of Washington
"If you were to melt Antarctica, the global sea level would go up by around 60 meters, which would obviously be pretty bad. But to understand how and when the ice sheet might melt, we need to measure its physical properties—the material of the rocks beneath, the temperature of the ice, defects gliding through the system. For something one and a half times the size of the United States, thatʼs a crazy-difficult task.
So how do we do that? Well, if you use a thermometer to measure temperature, youʼre actually measuring the behavior of alcohol or metal within the thermometer itself. I used a similar principle to measure temperature through the ice. We sent sound waves down into the subsurface to get information on physical properties—like temperature—that affected them on the way.
Explosives happen to be a great source of sound. First, we bored a 20-meter hole down into the ice with a hot-water drill. Then we stuffed in a pound of Pentex H boosters and packed them in with snow. We covered the surface in an array of microphones. Then—boom!
After the explosion, we listened for echoes. Logistically speaking, itʼs not the simplest method of measuring the properties of ice, but having a variety of data-collection techniques at our disposal helps us understand how human behavior affects this massive system.
On quieter days, I use radio waves to peek through the ice sheets—to look at the configuration of the ice and the properties of the material itʼs sitting on top of—and I use satellite data to see how the surface is changing over time."
As told to Sophie Bushwick
Emily Sutton, meteorologist and storm chaser at KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City
"When you're chasing a storm, hydro-planing and hail are usually scarier than the tornado itself. It’s like driving on black ice in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception."
As told to Rachel Feltman
Andrea Dietrich, water consultant for utility companies
"About 25 years ago, some people would turn on their faucets and smell cat urine. It was one apartment in a building, or one house in a neighborhood. Residents would say, 'We don’t have a cat.' We were stumped for more than a year until a utility employee said, 'It’s not our water; it’s residents’ new carpets.'
He was half right, anyway. At the time, maybe 0.1 percent of utilities in the United States disinfected their water with chlorine dioxide. But chlorine dioxide isn’t water soluble, so when people opened their faucets, it would quickly fill the surrounding air. There, it reacted with chemicals in new carpets to create the signature stench. My colleague and I went to his church, which had a new carpet, to test the theory. We sprayed chlorine dioxide into the air, and sure enough: cat urine."
As told to Sarah Chodosh
These articles were originally published in the March/April 2017 issue of Popular Science, in the “Tales From The Field” section.