9
Partial answer because I learned a new word.
The lines / treads on the wheels are called "grousers" and they are indeed wavy.
Why:
Extensive testing in JPL's Mars Yard has shown these treads better1
withstand the pressure from sharp rocks but work just as well on sand.
(from the 1st link)
1In comparison to Mars Science Laboratory's wheel design
8
An interesting question!
Preface: I'm not nearly an expert on atmospheric heating. I'll try to analyze the problem from first principles - someone more experienced could do better.
There are not enough gas particles to come into contact with the spacecraft to heat it up.
This seems quite reasonable. Thin, diffuse gasses can be very hot without ...
6
You are misreading that NASA page. It does not say that the Sun does not heat spacecraft. What it does say is that the thermosphere does not heat spacecraft.
The thermosphere is much warmer than the Stefan-Boltzmann Law suggests. That law suggests a daytime temperature for a flat black plate face-on to the Sun on one side and face-on to empty space on the ...
5
The National Archives website has the stock footage for the NASA documentary "This is Mission Control". In the footage they show closeup shots of several screen in the MOCR and the staff support rooms. The footage is from October 1970, so it's probably safe to assume the screens show data for an Apollo 14 simulation run. Here are two examples from it.
Lunar ...
5
These are the best I've seen. They are from the recent restoration of the Apollo MOCR but are accurate AFAIK.
Source: https://wordpress.accuweather.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/mission-control-7.jpg
4
From captures at archive.org, the website redirected to the new page for a while, before it went completely offline.
New page: https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/lightning/
Comparing it to archived versions, it seems that it has roughly the same content as the original Lightning Research - GHRC site, although the file paths don't seem to be the same, breaking old ...
4
In fact the interesting question here is not why the spacecraft stays cool: it's why the thermosphere is so hot.
If you model the spacecraft as a perfect spherical black body heated only by the Sun (this is not a particularly accurate model but it will do to get a ballpack figure), then in the neighbourhood of Earth you'll get a temperature, in space, of ...
4
Of course solar radiation heats up a spacecraft just as solar radiation heats up your body when you stand in sunlight on a clear day. During the coast period to the moon, the Apollo spacecraft had to rotate to avoid overheating one side of the ship. The side in shadow would radiate heat away as the side in sunlight heated up.
2
There are at least not any others in the onboard and air-to-ground transcripts, as far as I can see
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/mission_trans/AS08_TEC.PDF
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/mission_trans/AS08_CM.PDF
Honeysuckle communications have been preserved and digitized, available for ...
2
After the fact, we now know that Curiosity is allowed to investigate the clay unit.
The first clay sample was taken in April 2019
Later samples have verified findings about water in the Gale crater, and brought data about the clay's mineral contents.
The same area has also been shown to contain salt deposits
The rover has followed the possible trajectory ...
2
While there may be some aerodynamic force in the radial direction pulling the chutes outboard, they probably do not dominate the lateral motion of the parachutes on a space capsule. This corresponds to this paper on the aerodynamic forces, which shows that the L/D values of the chute are quite small.
You can see on this presentation by NASA (slide 35) that ...
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