# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged reference-request

64

There is a very nice Myth Busters video about bouncing a laser off the Moon linked below. To answer your question, current work is done with an array of corner cube reflectors on the Moon roughly 50 x 50 cm in size. Pulsed lasers on Earth have traditionally been green frequency-doubled infrared Nd:YAG lasers, similar to the "classic" DPSS green laser ...

35

The University of Texas's McDonald Observatory performs laser measurements of the distance to the Moon using retroreflectors left by the Apollo astronauts. You can read all about it in the McDonald Laser Ranging page. Lots of technical details in this paper.

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Schachterle, Lance, and P. K. Aravind. "The three equations in Gravity's Rainbow." Pynchon Notes 46-49 (2000): 157-170. Journal Link. "In our view, Pynchon inscribes these equations into Gravity's Rainbow to challenge readers with yet another form of authority within the text." Sorry—hit a pay wall... Later: Got through the pay wall:   &...

15

Here is the Apollo 11 (Columbia and Eagle) graph of center of gravity during the AS-506 flight, taken from the APOLLO/SATURN V POSTFLIGHT TRAJECTORY - AS-506 (rather large scanned PDF):        I selected Apollo 11 flight for historical significance, but you could find many other postflight telemetry and flight analysis ...

11

Truax was advocating "design for minimum cost". As this paper here (starting on page 140) explains, this philosophy of design would probably include a number of changes to how spacecraft were designed. I think this sentence is the key: The fundamental premise that the DFMC concept rests upon is that, by using a clean-sheet design approach, a space ...

11

For integration into software, I would recommend the SPICE toolkit, available with interfaces for C, Fortran, IDL, and MATLAB, and the many SPK kernels that can be loaded into SPICE containing the most accurate ephemerides available for the planets and their satellites. For specific small bodies you can use the HORIZONS system to generate SPK kernels, or you ...

9

Launching a CubeSat is by their nature a difficult process. They are designed as a secondary payload, which means that the primary payload dictates the entire launch. There are some programs such as NASA's CubeSat initiative, which provide free rides to educational projects. For commercial launches, data is spotty. One CubeSat reportedly launched for 100k (...

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The most famous Christmas-related event was on the Apollo 8 mission. Apollo 8 orbited the Moon on Christmas Eve and into the morning of December 25th. On Christmas Eve, the crew read the first 10 verses from Genesis 1 on TV for what was then the largest TV audience ever. They closed their broadcast with: And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good ...

8

The main difference between the two is that halo orbits tend to be much larger and are constricted to one plane. There's a NASA tech doc from 1993 comparing the station keeping costs between the two and finding none. The authors were quite clear that they did not know if this applied to all station keeping algorithms, but it was clear in the one they ...

8

This NASA technical report seems to correspond to your focus: Project management in the Apollo program: An interdisciplinary study Drucker, Pooler, Wilemon, Wood. Publication Date: Jan 01, 1972 Document ID: 19720025304 Findings concerning project management in the NASA Apollo program are presented. The Apollo program in the context of the total NASA ...

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There's a good reference to more specifics of the design in "Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight" Basically, it's a huge 2 stage rocket constructed out of 8mm steel that wasn't expected to be as reliable as most rockets, but because of the simplicity in design and higher tolerances while being able to deliver much greater lift capacity ...

8

What you want is the Satellite Catalog or "SATCAT" file. The original public source for this is the Satellite Situation Report (SSR) published daily on Space-Track (http://www.space-track.org - free registration required). This file contains a record for every catalogued object which includes the launch date, launch site, object name, etc. Here's a ...

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There are two sources: MOLA laser altimetry (http://tharsis.gsfc.nasa.gov/mapping_data.html) with the actual data available from MEGDR (Mission Experiment Gridded Data Records) at http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mgs/megdr.html (the closest analog to SRTM you can get, but at a higher fidelity level). and DTM (digital terrain models from stereo ...

8

Exact radiation patterns and gain (you're probably not asking about signal strength since that depends on distance which isn't constant) will vary across all the different GNSS contellations, even individual generations / blocks of same systems, but for a fairly detailed analysis of GPS blocks, you can refer to e.g. GPS Space Service Volume: Ensuring ...

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Simply traveling the URL "upwards" you get this: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/aam/cami/library/online_libraries/aerospace_medicine/tutorial/ It's an "online book", Advanced Aerospace Medicine On-line: This on-line aerospace medicine reference was designed to provide a comprehensive information source for use by ...

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I don't know how commonly rocket CGs are published. You can estimate it reasonably well from published weights and dimensions by modeling engines, fuel tank, and oxidizer tank as cylinders of uniform density, and computing weighted averages of the centers of those cylinders. If you don't know what order the fuel and oxidizer tanks are stacked in, assume ...

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To my knowledge, Mercury Project used keyed CWI (Continuous Wave Interrupted) FM (frequency modulated) system, or FMCWI, capable of receiving Morse code over the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and voice over HF (High Frequency) channels. This would be a completely analogue system, so we can't really speak of cryptographic algorithms. That doesn't mean comms were ...

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Among others, the Wikipedia page cites this CNET article, which in turn links to a copy of the original KCNA statement; this is also linked from the WP page. It's now offline, but here is an archived copy. No image (possibly didn't archive) but the text confirms a) the name and b) the logo. The National Aerospace Development Administration (NADA) is the ...

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The good old Space Shuttle News Reference Manual should get you started. There is also good information in the Crew Operations Manual (section 2.22). I know just linking is frowned on, but your question is so general that I'd just have to copy the entire sections and paste them in, which seems absurd.

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From Wikipedia on New Horizons: New Horizons is intended to pass within 10,000 km (6,200 mi) of Pluto, with this closest approach date estimated to occur on July 14, 2015 at 11:50 UTC. New Horizons will have a relative velocity of 13.78 km/s (49,600 km/h; 30,800 mph) at its closest approach, and will come as close as 27,000 km (17,000 mi) to ...

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Source: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php Sea Dragon Payload mass delivered to LEO 550 metric tons Cost per payload kilogram $59/kg to$600/kg Details here, here, and here. Sea Dragon was designed by Robert Truax in 1962 to be a low-cost heavy lift launch vehicle. To reduce costs for launch pads and gantries, ...

6

I asked Jim Carpenter, lead scientist for ESA on the Luna 27 lander project, about this. He said that although the plans and protocols for Aurora are still in place, it is currently on hold, outside of the Exomars program. ESA announced the Heracles program a few weeks ago. The winners of that competition will present their plans at the Moon 2020-2030 ...

5

Wikipedia page on List of artificial objects escaping from the Solar System is a direct answer to your question. Please see further links therein for trajectory, speed and other historical info of each of these objects: Space probes Pioneer 10 – Launched in 1972, flew past Jupiter in 1973. Contact lost in January 2003 and is heading in the ...

5

The Mars 2022 orbiter is expected to have this capacity. From the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter wiki page, one can see the entire history, including the latest plans. See also SpaceFlightNow. This mission will be similar to MRO, in that it has a science mission, but doubles as a high speed data relay, although it will be a higher speed relay than MRO, as ...

5

The Ariane 5 user manual has the following data: Using a storable propellant upper stage, through a delayed ignition of this upper stage, Ariane 5, in the A5G version, has demonstrated its ability to carry a satellite weighing 3065 kg, leading to a total required performance of 3190 kg, towards the following earth escape orbit: - infinite velocity V∞ =...

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NASA provides a good Brief History of Rockets which summarizes in concise form many of the historical advances in rocketry and space exploration, including Wan-Hu's unfortunate attempt at a rocket-powered chair. The simple rocket in the form kids light on the Fourth of July, invented by the Chinese, has been generally around by the end of the 13th century, ...

5

NASA provides open source software for just this purpose. It's called DAS (Debris Assessment Software) and you can find it here: http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/mitigate/das.html There are a lot of options and knobs, but you could start off by opening the program, clicking "Requirements Assessment", clicking "Casualty Risk from Reentry Debris", and ...

5

@AnthonyX has found a paper that fits your description, published in JBIS. The paper's citation is: Kennedy, Andrew. (2006). Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. 59. 239-246. and it can be read now at Researchgate. The Abstract says: This paper describes an ...

4

From Gerald R. Hintz, Orbital Mechanics and Astrodynamics: Techniques and Tools for Space Missions, 2015: Michielsen devised a graphical display for all lunar transfer information, including passage effects, on a single plot. This chart is presented in Fig. 7.9 [missing from preview, see below] with an application to the Apollo 11 Mission. The $v_r$ ...

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Edit: This answer was written before the question was clarified to specifically address launch costs, and as such does not fully answer the question. There's a good price breakdown/analysis on SatMagazine for some generic numbers. However, it was written in 2009 so may be a little out of date. You might also take a look at Clyde-Space, they have a lot of ...

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