New answers tagged history
-2
The shallow depth of moon dust has forced NASA to rethink their dust settling formulas when based upon their multi billion year age of the moon and solar system. As a Creationist and engineer myself, this was the answer a NASA scientist gave when I had the opportunity to ask one upon the Mars Rover program opened up for questions about their programs. Look ...
3
Here is an image of the Apollo 9 multispectral camera mounted to the hatch window. It was used in Earth orbit:
Image from this pdf.
A color image of the array from this NASA page: Note the different color labels in green, red, brown and black.
An front side image of the Apollo 12 camera array was provided by Organic Marble, so I concentrate on the filter ...
4
There's a picture in the Apollo Experience Report - Photographic Equipment..., page 21.
This is a guess really - it's out of my wheelhouse - but a note on Page 11 in the document linked above gives the experiment number SO-246 associated with this instrument, and on Page 5 in the Apollo 12 Lunar Photography document linked in the question, SO-246 is stated ...
3
Is it true Von Braun added the fins solely because "he liked the look"?: clearly not.
Did he use them more often than his peers: it's just stats thing at this point but p<0.05 is looking pretty good.
This might be expected as the pros and cons of fins are not a direct/universal trade-off:
Pros: they add stability (and control if they can be actuated).
...
8
As @Uhoh answered in comments: *
The Wikipedia article about Laika says: "Over five months later, after 2,570 orbits, Sputnik 2—including Laika's remains—disintegrated during re-entry on 14 April 1958."
For basic historical questions like this, it's always worth looking at Wikipedia first, and then coming here if you cannot find the info you need.
32
The early prototypes of the A4/V2 were painted in the familiar
black-and-white roll pattern scheme. This scheme was designed to aid
in tracking the rocket after launch. This pattern made it easy to
observe any variation or roll of the rocket. The exact pattern was
changed many times, and as with the rest of the rocket, the pattern
was examined and ...
12
Nothing about Apollo/Saturn was an aesthetic choice. To service aesthetics, the outer surface would be nice and smooth, but there were all sorts of protrusions for things like retro rockets, ullage thrusters, cable conduits, etc., not to mention the corrugated/ribbed fairings between tanks/stages. Note that while the tanks themselves were pressurized, giving ...
3
You don't want an exhaust pointing sideways on a gimbaled engine, because that exhaust will exert considerable force on the gimbaling mechanism, making it much easier to move the engine in one direction than the other.
You also don't want the exhaust pointing sideways when you can point it downwards and take advantage of its thrust. So the more interesting ...
3
The design objective for the gas generator exhaust system on both types of H-1 engines was to preclude the fuel-rich gas generator exhaust from recirculating under the base of the booster in flight. The non-gimbaling engines had fixed plumbing to dump the exhaust out the side of the booster. The gimbaling engines couldn't have this fixed plumbing, instead ...
5
Wernher Von Braun was in charge of building the following rockets:
V-2- Fins
Redstone- Fins
Jupiter - Fins
Juno- Small Fins
Saturn I- Most orbital version had fins
Saturn V- small fins
The evidence would suggest that von Braun likes rockets with fins. Just to give you an idea, here are a few rockets not build by von Braun in the same time period.
RTV-A-2 ...
1
I've found something like this in famous book "Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by J.D.Clark, 1972.
" And when you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 rpm, and the clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to undergo what the British, ...
1
A lot of information on the site www.svengrahn.pp.se
Notes on the space tracking activities and sensational claims made by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Torre/TorreB.html
Analysis of the information provided at the "Lost Cosmonauts" web site
Conclusions
In general the Judica-Cordiglias never seemed to understand ...
4
People think that rockets push on the air, and that without air there is nothing to push on.
This is a very common misconception I think: people with physics or other science backgrounds (like me) have spent a long time more-or-less unconsciously training ourselves not to think like this intuitively, to the extent where we may end up thinking that people ...
3
Here is a list of the flown uncrewed capsules:
Mercury Capsules
MR-1/MR-1A | NASA Ames Exploration Center, Mountain View, California
MR-2 | California Museum of Science and Industry, Los Angeles, California
MA-2 | Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston, Texas
MA-5 | North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, Durham, North Carolina
BJ-1 | Steven F. ...
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The rest of the current American crewed capsules.
Mercury Capsules
MR-3 Freedom 7 | JFK Library, Boston, MA
MR-4 Liberty Bell 7 | Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center Hutchinson,
Kansas
MA-6 Friendship 7 | National Air and Space Museum Washington D.C.
MA-7 Aurora 7 | Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, Illinois
MA-8 Sigma 7 | Kennedy Space Center ...
0
I have managed to scrounge up (around the internet) SRB Case Use Histories for the following flights and tests:
STS-092
STS-093
STS-096
STS-097
STS-098
STS-099
STS-100
STS-102
STS-103
STS-105
STS-107
STS-108
STS-109
STS-111
STS-113
STS-132
STS-133
STS-134
STS-135
Ares 1-X
SLS QM-1
For a goodly part of last year I was communicating with the collator of the ...
3
Foot-pound or pound-foot are synonymous, and represent the arithmetic product of pound (force) and foot (length).
The pound (force) is the weight of one pound (mass) at the Earth's surface (somewhat imprecise because Earth's gravity field varies depending on your location, and the effective weight of an object will be influenced by the centrifugal force due ...
7
Is it... the gravitational potential energy of one pound hoisted one foot in a constant gravitational field...?
Yes indeed it is!
To be energy, the pound has to be parallel to the foot.
$$E = \int \mathbf{F} \cdot d \mathbf{s}$$
To be torque, the pound has to be perpendicular to the foot
$$\tau = \mathbf{r} \times \mathbf{F}$$
1 foot-pound (or pound ...
2
According to Wikipedia foot-pound and foot-pound-force are synonymous:
The foot pound-force (symbol: ft⋅lbf or ft⋅lb) is a unit of work or energy in the Engineering and Gravitational Systems in United States customary and imperial units of measure. It is the energy transferred upon applying a force of one pound-force (lbf) through a linear displacement of ...
20
There are good diagrams of the Kontakt docking system in the Mir Hardware Heritage document by Portree.
As stated in comments, this was an unpowered, misalignment-tolerant docking system that did not incorporate a transfer tunnel.
... a spring-loaded probe docking system, called Aktiv (“active”),
which was designed to penetrate and grip a “honeycomb” ...
5
This answer is based on the text @organic-marble cited in his now deleted answer and general knowledge about angular resolvers and electronics.
source: Don Eyles at www.klabs.org
The radar antenna of Apollo 11 was steerable to point it at the target no matter how the orientation of the LM was (within some 10° range at least). Steering happened ...
8
Without any time markings, it's impossible to tell if the ground track indicates a "hard left" or very gentle maneuvers over a long period of time.
The annotated transcript gives us some hints, though:
[Pete is descending very slowly as he flies along the north rim of Surveyor Crater, looking for a good spot to land.]
[Conrad, from the 1969 ...
2
In theory, the footprints on the moon can last as long as the moon itself. However the moon is always being bombarded by micro-meteorites and charged particles from the Sun, putting the life-span of these footprints at around 10 - 100 million years. According to this article, lunar rocks erode at a rate of about 0.04 inches/1 million years.
From past ...
5
These are the first words of the 12 astronauts when they physically step on the moon. Not when they are descending on the ladder or on the footpad.
Apollo 11
Neil Armstrong, CDR: "That's one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind."
Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, LMP: " Looks like the secondary strut had a little thermal effects on it right here, Neil."
...
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Before launch, NASA (or whatever space agency a particular astronaut is affiliated with) keep their passports and visa, and bring it back to them when they land. Since the astronauts land in Kazakhstan, they need their official documents so they can leave the country and go back home.
This is Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's reply to the question ...
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