Category Archives: Space

Surveyor-3 — To the Moon and (Partly) Back Again

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Forty-five years ago today — April 17, 1967 — an Atlas-Centaur rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, sending Surveyor-3 on its way to the Moon.


(Apollo-12 mission commander Pete Conrad retrieves parts from Surveyor-3. The lunar module “Intrepid” is visible in the distance. NASA image taken by lunar module pilot Alan Bean. A higher-resolution version is available here)

Surveyor-3 landed on the Moon on April 19th, the second of the Surveyor series to make a soft landing. Its other objectives were to transmit television images of the lunar surface, use its sampler to probe the surface materials, and test the surface’s load-bearing strength and other properties in advance of the Apollo missions.

In what I think of as a fulfillment of Surveyor-3’s destiny, two and a half years later — on November 19, 1969 — Apollo-12 landed within about 600 feet (180 meters) of Surveyor-3. As shown in the image above, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean visited the spacecraft and examined it closely. They retrieved several parts, including the television camera, and returned them to Earth for analysis. Surveyor-3’s camera was put on display in the National Air and Space Museum.

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Apollo-16, and a Pioneer of Flight is Born

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Forty years ago today — April 16, 1972 — astronauts John W. Young, Jr., Thomas K. Mattingly, and Charles M. Duke, Jr., blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Saturn-V booster, on their way to the Moon.


(Lunar Module “Orion” and the Lunar Roving Vehicle, with astronaut John Young in the background. NASA image.)

Apollo-16 was the fifth mission to land on the Moon, and the second in which astronauts drove the Lunar Rover to explore a wide area around their landing site. Young and Duke spent almost three days on the lunar surface, and made three separate excursions from the Lunar Module out onto the Descartes Highlands.

And for bonus “aerospace” history, on this date 145 years ago Wilbur Wright was born in Millville, Indiana. I find it interesting how quickly we went from Wilbur and Orville’s first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on the Moon — and I wonder when it will become important to us to push outward from there.

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First Indian National Satellite

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Thirty years ago today — April 10, 1982 — Indian National Satellite 1A (INSAT-1A) was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket.


(Depiction of INSAT-1A from the ISRO website.)

INSAT-1A combined communications, meteorology, and optical imaging payloads that were intended to provide disaster warnings to remote civilian populations. However, the spacecraft’s attitude control system ran out of propellant less than a year and a half into its 7-year mission. According to the Indian Space Research Organization’s INSAT-1A page, ISRO abandoned the spacecraft in September 1983.

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Space Station Spinal Surgery

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Ten years ago today — April 8, 2002 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on its way to the International Space Station.


(Astronauts Steven L. Smith [R] and Rex J. Walheim during the third of STS-110’s four EVAs. NASA image.)

STS-110, also known as ISS Assembly Flight 8A, featured astronauts Michael J. Bloomfield, Stephen N. Frick, Jerry L. Ross, Steven L. Smith, Ellen Ochoa, Lee M.E. Morin, and Rex J. Walheim. The team completed four spacewalks during their 10 days in space, and delivered and installed the “Starboard-Zero” Center Integrated Truss Assembly.

The new truss was a key part of the ISS’s skeleton — its “center backbone,” according to this STS-100 information page — with attachment points for additional station modules and solar panels. In addition to mechanical attachments, the truss included power and thermal control systems, a Mobile Transporter to extend the reach of the station’s robotic arm, as well as other equipment needed to keep the station operational.

In addition,

The launch marked a milestone as Mission Specialist Jerry Ross became the first human to fly in space seven times, breaking his own and other astronauts’ records of six space flights.

You know, some of us would be satisfied with getting to fly in space just once.

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A Two-Time Space Tourist's First Flight

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Five years ago today — April 7, 2007 — Hungarian-American software executive Charles Simonyi blasted off on the first of his two tourist trips to the International Space Station.


(Soyuz 14 [TMA-10] approaches the International Space Station. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Soyuz TMA-10 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying Simonyi and cosmonauts Oleg V. Kotov and Fyodor N. Yurchikhin. Simonyi, who made his fortune as one of the primary developers of the Microsoft Office products Word and Excel, spent about 2 weeks in space before returning to earth aboard TMA-9.

That would not be Simonyi’s only trip to space, however: In March 2009 he returned to the ISS aboard TMA-14.

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Microgravity Fire

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Sounds as if it should be a band name instead of a blog post title.

Anyway, 15 years ago today in space history — April 4, 1997 — the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on the first mission for the Microgravity Science Laboratory, which included experiments in, yes, microgravity fire.


(STS-83 on Pad 39-A with Comet Hale-Bopp in the background. NASA image.)

During mission STS-83, astronauts James D. Halsell, Susan L. Still, Janice E. Voss, Donald A. Thomas, Michael L. Gernhardt, Roger K. Crouch, and Gregory T. Linteris carried out a number of experiments, including the “fire-related experiments” alluded to earlier. The fire studies were carried out in specially-built combustion chambers in the Spacelab module. Unfortunately, a fault in one of the shuttle’s fuel cells caused mission managers to cut the mission short and bring the shuttle home after only 3 days.

In other space history, 40 years ago today the USSR launched a Molniya rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying the Molniya 1/20 communications satellite into a highly-elliptical, high-inclination orbit known as a “Molniya” orbit. The French experimental satellite SRET-1 launched on the same rocket; it tested solar cell materials and studied the effects of radiation from the Van Allen belts.

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Kvant: From Salyut to Mir

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Twenty-five years ago today — March 31, 1987 — the Soviet Union launched the Kvant-1 space station module from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Proton K booster.


(Kvant-1 diagram. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Kvant-1 was “a specialized module left over from the Salyut-7 program.” Once installed on the Mir space station, the module not only expanded the station’s experimental apparatus but its six “gyrodynes” — i.e., control moment gyroscopes, as opposed to the rotorcraft of the same name — also improved Mir’s attitude control.

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Another Pathfinder for Chinese Manned Spaceflight

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A decade ago today — March 25, 2002 — China launched Shenzhou-3 (“Divine Vessel 3”) from Jiquan Space Launch Center.


(Shenzhou-3 on the launch pad. Image linked from http://www.spacedaily.com/images/china-shenzhuo-rollout-2002-bg.jpg.)

The unmanned Shenzhou-3 was launched by a Long March 2F rocket, and carried everything necessary for a manned spaceflight. Following its mission, the capsule landed successfully on April 1st in the desert in Inner Mongolia.

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ATLAS Launch — No, Not the Rocket

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Well, a rocket, and ATLAS, but not an Atlas rocket. Confused yet?

Thirty years ago today — March 24, 1992– the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to study atmospheric science and how space phenomena affect Earth’s environment.


(ATLAS-1 pallets in the shuttle’s payload bay. NASA image.)

The STS-45 crew included U.S. astronauts Charles F. Bolden — the future NASA administrator — Brian Duffy, Kathryn D. Sullivan, David C. Leestma, C. Michael Foale, and Byron K. Lichtenberg, as well as Belgian astronaut Dirk D. Frimout. Their 8-day mission was the first launch of the Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science (ATLAS-1).

ATLAS-1 consisted of a dozen instruments from seven different countries — the U.S., France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan — to study “atmospheric chemistry, solar radiation, space plasma physics and ultraviolet astronomy.” ATLAS-1 was not a free-flying platform, so it stayed on the SpaceLab platform in the shuttle’s cargo bay while it performed its observations.

The ATLAS platform flew on subsequent shuttle missions to continue the atmospheric research.

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Space History: Third Space Shuttle Qualification Flight

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Thirty years ago today — March 22, 1982 — the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on the third “shakedown” flight of the shuttle program.


(STS-3 landing at White Sands, New Mexico. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton crewed Columbia during the STS-3 mission. They checked out the shuttle’s systems and documented problems ranging from lost communication links to toilet malfunctions, from space sickness to sleep cycles interrupted by unexplained static.

The shuttle was scheduled to land at Edwards AFB, but the dry lake bed was actually too wet to accomodate a landing. High winds at the back-up landing site at White Sands, New Mexico, forced a one-day mission extension. Columbia landed there on March 30th — the only time a shuttle ever landed at White Sands.

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