"Mount St Helens finally erupted, and devastation is abysmal. On May 18 at 8.32 in the morning an earthquake shook the mountain and the huge bulge on the northern flank detached into an immense landslide. Then the top of the mountain blew up, sending ashes as high as 80 000 ft into the air. We have GOES-3 and NOAA-6 and Landsat gathering data; computation, however, show that Liberty will overfly Mount St Helens on June 12, three weeks after the eruption, providing a unique opportunity to complete satellite observations. We obviously want you to turn on board science payloads to the volcano, but we recommend to snap as much photographic evidence as possible..."
***
Music: AC/DC,
Baby please don't go
As Liberty rushed over Northern Pacific, they prepared for the observation, which would last a mere tree minutes. Rendezvous happened at 7:50 p.m, and brought a surprise. An ash column topped the mountain, spreading in the direction of Portland. Steve Hawley caught many photographs, and soon Mount St Helens vanished on the horizon. "hmm, the view was sub-optimal, but wait another hour and half when we will overfly again..."
Ninety minutes later
Liberty rushed over Mount St Helens. Every useful instrument has been readied, a move further bolstered by the evident activity two hours before. Long focals have been adapted to the varied cameras.
And the angry mountain rewarded the crew hard work with a stunning fireworks of her.
"My goodness ! Look at this !" Steve Hawley shouted as he frantically caught pictures "the fucker just erupted again !" Shannon Lucid glanced through the porthole to see a huge mushroom cloud piercing the cloud layer, reaching high into Earth atmosphere, the brownish, rapidly expanding cloud topped by a white cap of condensed air. "Look at that ! This is created from the rapid rising and then cooling of the air directly above the ash column. When moist, warm air rises quickly it creates a cloud - we never seen that before, however, since aircrafts flies too low and satellites have different missions. How about that ?" She watched in awe.
Never, never in my life will I see something like this again.
The level of detail, even with the naked eye, was stunning. The clouds had been blown away into a surprisingly round hole - the eruption shock wave blasting everything away. "This is much bigger ! This cloud ash is 45 000 ft high at least !"
The show unravelled before their eyes, then the space station carried them away, undisturbed by the inferno that unfolded 200 miles below. But she couldn't chase the ash plume ad that perfectly round hole of her mind. She reminded that months before, in October 1979, the crew of the fly-alone
Enterprise had taken stunning pictures of typhoon
Tip, a monster storm with a whopping diameter of 1400 miles - so big it could have covered half of the United States !
She began to realize how Liberty was a unique observatory to monitor her home planet. The show was only beginning.
(
not Mount St Helens, but a Russian volcano seen from ISS a while back)
More volcanoes seen from space. Just because it's cool)
http://twistedsifter.com/2013/07/volcanoes-eruptions-as-seen-from-space/
...
Extract from a speech by Lee Scherer, NASA manager of the Agena tug program
"Today we begin a new era in the exploration of Earth upper atmosphere. We have varied NASA assets working together. First is Ames Convair CV-990 flying at 35 000 feet and Dryden WB-57F at 70 000 ft. Above are balloons, up to 160 000 ft. We are going to fire Black Brant XII souding rockets that goes even higher but only for a limited amount of time. And of course there's the space station which is well above 1 million feet.
So you can see there's a gap between balloons and Liberty. And indeed we don't know much about that peculiar atmospheric layer – and it's a crying shame, since it is the place where Earth atmosphere meets the vacuum of space.
The Agena space tug offers new opportunities complementing the souding rockets and balloons. Agena tugs have a lot of delta-V and propellant and so they can desorbit, dive into the upper atmosphere (as low as 50 miles) and then fire their rocket engine to climb back to space station Liberty. The diving technique as been aparently pioneered by Agena-based spy satellites: they lowered their orbit for sharper resolution."