Category Archives: Space

Space History Double Shot: Gemini-11 and STS-48

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Forty-five years ago today — September 12, 1966 — astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr. and Richard F.Gordon, Jr., launched from Cape Canaveral on the Gemini-11 mission.

Gemini-11 mission objecttives were “to achieve a first orbit rendezvous and docking with the Agena target vehicle, to accomplish two ExtraVehicular Activity (EVA) tests, to perform docking practice, docked configuration maneuvers, tethered operations, parking of the Agena target vehicle and demonstrate an automatic reentry.” The 3-day mission also carried several experiments.

Gemini-11 marked the first time two tethered spacecraft were rotated to impart a gravity-like acceleration.

The hatch was closed at 9:57 a.m. [on September 14] and shortly afterwards the spacecraft were undocked and Gemini 11 moved to the end of the 30 meter tether attaching the two spacecraft. At 11:55 a.m. Conrad initiated a slow rotation of the Gemini capsule about the GATV which kept the tether taut and the spacecraft a constant distance apart at the ends of the tether. Oscillations occurred initially, but damped out after about 20 minutes. The rotation rate was then increased, oscillations again occurred but damped out and the combination stabilized. The circular motion at the end of the tether imparted a slight artificial “gravitational acceleration” within Gemini 11, the first time such artificial gravity was demonstrated in space. After about three hours the tether was released and the spacecraft moved apart.

Twenty-five years later, on this date in 1991, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from the Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-48. Astronauts John O. Creighton, Kenneth S. Reightler, Jr., Mark N. Brown, Charles D. Gemar, and James F. Buchli deployed the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).


(Artist’s conception of UARS. NASA image.)

UARS was designed to operate for three years, to “make the most extensive study ever conducted of the Earth’s troposphere, the upper level of the planet’s envelope of life sustaining gases which also include the protective ozone layer.” The spacecraft was decommissioned in December 2005.

Unfortunately, UARS has been in the news recently: the 14,500-pound observatory is expected to fall back to earth later this month in an uncontrolled reentry.

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A Brief Photo Gallery: International Space Station's P3/P4 Truss

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Five years ago today — September 9, 2006 — the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the International Space Station.


(Joseph R. Tanner waves at Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper during their spacewalk. NASA image.)

Mission STS-115 was the latest ISS construction mission. U.S. astronauts Brent W. Jett, Jr., Christopher J. Ferguson, Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper, Joseph R. (Joe) Tanner, and Daniel C. Burbank, along with Canadian astronaut Steven G. MacLean, installed the P3/P4 truss, a major structural element that included additional solar panel arrays.

Here’s the station before the P3/P4 truss was installed:


(ISS, taken by STS-115 prior to docking. NASA image.)

And here’s the station after:


(ISS, taken by STS-115 after undocking, showing the new P3/P4 truss and solar arrays. NASA image.)

And here’s a nice shot of one of the new solar panels being extended:


(Detail image of new ISS solar array. NASA image.)

For more photos, check out the STS-115 Shuttle Mission Imagery page.

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Suborbital Apollo-Saturn Test Flight, and Bill Dana Goes Supersonic

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Forty-five years ago today — August 25, 1966 — NASA launched another suborbital Apollo-Saturn vehicle to test Command & Service Module systems in advance of manned Apollo launches.


(AS-202 launch. NASA image.)

AS-202‘s flight objectives were to verify the Saturn 1B launch vehicle’s integrity, loads, and performance, and to evaluate the separation system, emergency detection, and heatshield of the Apollo spacecraft.

Mission controllers fired the CSM’s engines multiple times to test their rapid restart capabilities, accelerating the capsule for reentry to test the heatshield. It performed very well: “Maximum temperature of the spacecraft exterior was calculated at about 1500 deg. C, temperature inside the cabin was 21 deg. C (70 F).”

Jump ahead five years in time …

On this date in 1971, NASA pilot William “Bill” Dana made the first supersonic flight in the M2-F3 lifting body.


(NASA lifting body pilots with M2-F3 in the background. NASA image.)

Last November, I blogged about Dana making the first flight in the M2-F3. I likely will continue posting occasional references to Dana’s flights, because he’s one of the most interesting people I ever met (during my first USAF assignment, we were both on the Flight Readiness Review Committee for the very first launch of the Pegasus system). If you want to know more about him, check out his Wikipedia page.

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Ranger-1

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Fifty years ago today — August 23, 1961 — Ranger-1 launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas-Agena rocket.


(Ranger-1 spacecraft. NASA image.)

Ranger-1 was designed as a pathfinder mission to test components for future lunar and planetary missions. It also carried scientific instruments such as telescopes, particle detectors, a magnetometer, etc., to “study the nature of particles and fields in interplanetary space.”

The Atlas rocket put Ranger-1 in a “parking orbit,” but the Agena upper stage did not restart. Ranger-1 separated from the Agena and ended up tumbling in a low Earth orbit, re-entering the atmosphere a week after it was launched. Thus the mission was counted a partial success: “much of the primary objective of flight testing the equipment was accomplished but little scientific data was returned.”

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ADEOS (Midori) and the First Frenchwoman in Space

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Fifteen years ago today — August 17, 1996 — the Japanese launched the first of a series of environmental remote sensing satellites, and the Russians launched a mission to Mir that included the first female French astronaut.


(Artist’s conception of ADEOS spacecraft. JAXA image.)

ADEOS, which was later renamed “Midori,” was the ADvanced Earth Observation Satellite and was launched from Tanegashima Space Center on an H-2 rocket. The spacecraft operated until mid-1997, measuring winds, ocean surfaces temperature, atmospheric aerosols, ozone, and greenhouse gases. You can read more about the first ADEOS/Midori spacecraft on this JAXA page.

And Soyuz TM-24 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Soyuz-U launch vehicle, bound for the Mir space station. Russian cosmonauts Valery G. Korzun and Alexander Y. Kaleri flew on this mission with Claudie Andre-Deshays, the first French woman in space.

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Explorer-12 and Meteor/TOMS

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Two bits of space history today.

First, 50 years ago, Explorer-12 was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Thor-Delta rocket. Part of the extensive Explorer series, Explorer-12 was the first of a sub-series of four satellites orbited to “measure cosmic-ray particles, trapped particles, solar wind protons, and magnetospheric and interplanetary magnetic fields.”


(Model of the Explorer-12 satellite, on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum. NASM image.)

And then 20 years ago a U.S. meteorological instrument — a Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) — was for the first time launched as part of a Soviet satellite. The Meteor/TOMS launched from Plesetsk on a Tsiklon-3 (read, “Cyclone-3”) rocket.

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Last Mission of the Luna Program

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Thirty-five years ago today — August 9, 1976 — Luna-24 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton-K rocket.


(Graphic of the lunar sample return portion of the Luna-24 mission. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)

Luna-24 was the third Soviet mission to retrieve and return lunar ground samples, and the last mission for their Luna spacecraft series.

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Genesis Launched

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Ten years ago today — August 8, 2001– a Delta-II rocket launched from Cape Canaveral carrying the Genesis probe.*


(Genesis spacecraft. NASA image.)

Genesis operated for the next three years, collecting samples of the solar wind to discover clues about the origin and development of the solar system. It orbited the semi-stable L-1 point between Earth and the Sun.

In 2004 Genesis returned to earth with its samples, but its parachute did not deploy during re-entry. It crashed instead of soft-landing, though useful samples were still recovered from it.

You can learn more about the Genesis mission on this page.

___
*Not the one from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

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Dual-Satellite Mission: Dynamics Explorer

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Thirty years ago today — August 3, 1981 — a Delta rocket out of Vandenberg AFB placed two satellites in orbit for a unique interactive mission.


(DE-1 image of an aurora over North America, taken with the University of Iowa’s Spin-Scan Auroral Imager. NASA image.)

Dynamics Explorer 1 and Dynamics Explorer 2 were high- and low-altitude spacecraft, respectively, intended to

investigate the strong interactive processes coupling the hot, tenuous, convecting plasmas of the magnetosphere and the cooler, denser plasmas and gases corotating in the earth’s ionosphere, upper atmosphere, and plasmasphere.

The spacecrafts’ orbits were such that one made high-altitude observations while the other made low-altitude observations, which could be compared to better understand atmospheric dynamics and the interaction of our atmosphere with charged particles from the Sun. Mission operations ended in 1991.

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A New Target for Asteroid Exploration?

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NASA reported yesterday that Canadian astronomer Martin Connors of Athabasca University identified a 1000-foot-wide asteroid orbiting in a very convoluted path around the Earth’s leading LaGrange point.

Connors made the discovery using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft.


(Image from the WISE spacecraft, with the newly discovered asteroid 2010 TK7 circled in green. NASA image.)

Surprisingly, the New Scientist article in which I first learned about the find pitches it inaccurately as an asteroid stalking the Earth. It is more accurate to say the asteroid is leading the Earth in its orbit around the sun.

The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth’s orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid’s orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers).

NASA has an interesting video of the asteroid’s orbit: Earth’s First Trojan Asteroid (NASA video)

Alas, 2010 TK7’s odd orbital path probably excludes it from being explored and exploited any time soon. But there are plenty of other possibilities still waiting to be found for future explorers … and even for fictional ones like the “Asteroid Consortium” in my novel.

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