naive-bayesian

The Saturn V Stage One Rocket Boosters

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.”

NASA’s Iconic Red Vortex Photo: ‘The Rest of the Story’

The physics of producing lift with a wing creates an aircraft wake which has a large vortex (tornado) generated at each wingtip. The strength of this vortex increases as aircraft weight increases. The flow from a wingtip of a crop duster picks up the seeds or chemicals and sends them far from the area directly below the aircraft. The strong spinning flow in the vortex can also cause a problem for other aircraft under some conditions. NASA and the FAA had done extensive research beginning in the 1970s and continuing today to understand and predict flow behind transport aircraft to determine safe separation distances (spacing of aircraft). We believed that this research could help the “Aerial Applications Research” program, perhaps, if the physics of the flow behind crop dusters could be understood, predicted, and tamed.

Because we see computer images on TV of airplanes the size of counties flying over a map of the U.S., we come to think of the airspace as crowded. In reality, the airspace is not crowded. Instead, the runways and the arrival queue of airplanes lined up to land are crowded. The airplanes are spaced in the queue that keeps each safely following an airplane away from the spinning wake vortex of the previous airplane.

Get ready, the teeny robots are coming…

Modeled after hyper-mobile insects like ants and cockroaches, these robots can run, jump and scamper. The possibilities are endless as to what tiny bots could accomplish: look for survivors in disaster wreckage, inspect bridges for flaws, even swim through our veins and perform surgery. And, of course, take over the world.

Speck of Interstellar Dust Obscures Glimpse of Big Bang

(Via NYT)

It seems many people and media are pessimist about the primordial gravitational waves detected by BICEP2 passed year… But not every one…

One of the many large caves found on Mars

A Proton-M rocket was rolled to Baikonur launch complex 200 earlier today (January 29) ahead of its Sunday morning launch.

The rocket, operated by International Launch Services, will launch the Inmarsat 5-F2 communications satellite. It will be the 116th launch of the Proton-M, which uses a Briz-M upper stage.

     I recently had the opportunity to visit the Apollo/Saturn V Center at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and photograph their enormous Saturn V rocket. Each stage of the rocket is displayed separately, allowing the viewer to glance the machine’s inner workings. Although, they work together as a system, it’s important to think of the different stages as completely separate rockets. These stages used different propellants, and were manufactured by different companies, in different facilities.

     Kennedy’s complete Saturn V rocket is actually a hodgepodge of different Saturn V stages, put together from various rockets that had completely different purposes, from different points in the program.  I’ll outline where each stage came from, and it’s intended purpose. 

     The first stage of a Saturn V rocket is called the “S-IC” Stage. This particular S-IC on display, shown in photos one thru five, is called S-IC-T. The “T” stands for Static Test Article. S-IC-T was manufactured at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, along with the first few stages. Later, manufacturing would be moved to NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans.

     This article was tested at Marshall on the S-IC Test Stand, which I covered in a previous post (click here to view). Every time they test-fired this stage, the acoustic shockwave emanating from the five F-1 engines would shatter the majority of the windows in nearby Downtown Huntsville. If NASA kept that up, the would soon lose the support of the locals. Thus, the “Mississippi Test Facility” was created in Hancock County, Mississippi. NASA created an easement around the new facility large enough to work as an acoustical barrier, so no more buildings could be damaged. S-IC-T was successfully tested there on the enormous B2 Test Stand. Later, the Mississippi Test Facility would be renamed “NASA Stennis Space Center”, as it is called today.

     Everything forward of the first stage is from a rocket called SA-514, which was meant to land Apollo 18 in Schröter’s Valley, and explored the Copernicus Crater on the Moon. Due to loss of public interest and budget cuts, Apollo 18 and several subsequent Apollo Moon missions were cancelled.

Huygens Lands on Titan