Questions tagged [flight-profile]
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Why do people experience weightlessness on the way up in parabolic flight?
To experience "weightlessness" without actually traveling into space, and orbiting the earth, a parabolic flight is used. See the flight path of Mercury, as shown in this link: https://en....
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When will Lucy deploy its solar panels?
The Lucy spacecraft has wide solar arrays that are folded up for launch. It will then deploy them once in space.
At what moment of the Lucy mission (2021) will its solar arrays be deployed? As soon as ...
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What is the cause of the horizontal drift in the ascend path of the Starship and other rockets?
As can be seen in the available videos on-line and in the following picture, as the rocket ascends, a horizontal drift in its path can be seen. I have forgotten the calculation of the Coriolis effect ...
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Falcon 9 plot of pitch angle vs time during launch?
I found this super helpful plot of the Saturn V pitch angle vs time during launch:
Is there an equivalent plot for a typical (or atypical if must be) Falcon 9 launch?
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Methods to obtain trajectories to reach a specific orbit?
Knowing the performance parameters of a given rocket, is there a methodology to figure out what flightpath the rocket must follow to reach a particular orbit? In other words, is there a direct way to ...
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Why is the delay between main engine cutoff and second stage ignition so long? [duplicate]
I was reading over the recent Antares launch profile and was surprised to see that the main engine cutoff is at T+230s, but the second stage does not ignite until almost 100 seconds later. Why is ...
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Are 'classical' gravity turns still used and recognizable as such?
If I understand correctly, the term 'gravity turn' refers to a specific way to turn from the initial near-vertical launch direction to a final tangential orbit direction in an efficient manner. It's ...
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Why is there a hole in solid rocket engines?
I would like to find out why there is a straight hole down the middle in all solid rocket engine motors.
I thought it only makes sense in hybrid engines where pure oxygen needs to be blown down the ...
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How is rocket engine cutoff controlled?
In a typical, modern satellite launch, what triggers the cutoff of the orbital insertion stage's rocket engines?
I can think of three basic possibilities:
Compute how much fuel you need for the ...
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Can a launch-provider determine from the flight-profile whether the payload will be in the wrong orbit?
The British Broadcasting Corporation writes to say
The European Space Agency (Esa) says the latest two satellites for Europe's version of the American GPS satellite navigation system have not gone ...