CHALLENGER - 3 reference results
Challenger expedition, British oceanographic expedition under the direction of the Scottish professor Charles Wyville Thompson and the British naturalist Sir John Murray. Taking place from 1872 to 1876, it opened the era of descriptive oceanography. The team sailed in the converted 18-gun corvette Challenger, the first vessel specifically equipped for general oceanographic research. The expedition cruised almost 69,000 nautical mi (130,000 km) in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic oceans, gathering data on temperature, currents, water chemistry, marine organisms, and bottom deposits at 362 oceanographic stations scattered over 14 million sq mi (36 million sq km) of ocean floor. Its major contributions, covered in a 50-volume, 29,500-page report that took 23 years to compile, included the first systematic plot of currents and temperatures in the ocean; a map of bottom deposits that has not been changed much by more recent studies; an outline of the main contours of the ocean basins, incorporating the discovery of the mid-Atlantic Ridge and the then record 26,900-ft (8,200-m) Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench; the discovery of 715 new genera and 4,717 new species of ocean life forms; and the discovery of prodigious life forms even at great depths in the ocean.
See H. N. Mosely, A Naturalist on the "Challenger" (1879); Sir C. Wyville Thompson, Voyage of the "Challenger" (2 vol., 1877); E. Linklater, The Voyage of the Challenger (1972).
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Licensed from Columbia University Press
Licensed from Columbia University Press
Challenger, U.S. space shuttle. It exploded (Jan. 28, 1986) 73 seconds into its tenth flight, killing all seven crew members, including the first civilian in space, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. The disaster was caused by the faulty design of a gasket (the O-ring seal). As dramatically demonstrated by Richard Feynman, a member of the presidential commission appointed to investigate the accident, the elastic O-ring did not respond as expected because of the cold temperature (30°F;/-1°C;) at launch time. (At a news conference, Feynman illustrated the loss of elasticity by dropping an O-ring into a glass of cold water.) As a result of the explosion, the United States did not send astronauts into space for almost three years as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration redesigned a number of features of the space shuttle.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright © 2004.
Licensed from Columbia University Press
Licensed from Columbia University Press
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