the complete book of spaceflight

[...]... 2003 (See table, The Angara Family.”) angle of attack In the theory of airplane wings, the acute angle between the wing profile (roughly, measured along its bottom) and the wing’s motion relative to the surrounding air In the case of a rocket rising through the atmosphere, it is the angle between the long axis of the rocket and the direction of the air flowing past it angular momentum The momentum an... resulted in the loss of all fuel-cell-generated electricity and led to many other complications, including a complete loss of oxygen and water supply from the CSM The mission was immediately aborted and all efforts shifted to the safe return of the crew The CSM was powered down, and the crew moved to the LM for the bulk of the return flight Not wishing to risk complicated maneuvers to turn the spacecraft... motors, mounted on top of the CM at takeoff and later jettisoned In the event of a booster failure or some other imminent danger, the LES could be fired to lift the CM clear of the Saturn V The LES engines, with a thrust of 654,000 N, were more powerful than the entire Redstone launcher that put the first American into suborbital space, and could provide an acceleration of about 6.5g As the maximum acceleration... cylinder at the end of which was the main engine used to place Apollo into lunar orbit and begin the return to Earth The SM carried the hypergolic (self-igniting) propellants for the main engine, the systems (including fuel cells) used to generate electrical power, and some of the lifesupport equipment At four locations on the SM’s The combined CM and SM The CSM orbited the Moon, while the LM conveyed... when the primary flight plan has been abandoned for any reason other than abort altimeter A device that measures the altitude above the surface of a planet or moon Spacecraft altimeters work by timing the round trip of radio signals bounced off the surface Alouette A model of Alouette 1 at a celebration after the launch of the real satellite Canadian Space Agency altitude The vertical distance of an... linking the CM and the LM Crewmen spent much of the time on their couches but could leave them and move around With the seat portion of the center couch folded, two astronauts could stand at the same time The astronauts took turns sleeping in two sleeping bags mounted behind the left and right couches Food, water, clothing, waste management, and other equipment were packed into bays that lined the walls of. .. small group of journalists Unfortunately, only 77 seconds into the flight, the Thor’s turbopump seized and the missile blew up Telemetry from the probe was received for a further 123 seconds until the 39-kg spacecraft ended its brief journey by falling into the Atlantic Although not given an official name, the probe is referred to as Pioneer 0 or Able 1 Before the launch of the second probe, the whole... notable for its discovery of X-ray bursts and of the first X-rays from the corona of a star beyond the Sun (Capella); it was the first satellite for the Netherlands The universities of Groningen and Utrecht provided the ultraviolet and soft (longer wavelength) X-ray experiments, while NASA furnished a hard (shorter wavelength) X-ray experiment built by American Science and Engineering of Cambridge, Massachusetts... opposite charge Certain other properties are also reversed, including the magnetic moment Antiparticles are the basis of antimatter The antiparticles of the electron, proton, and neutron are the positron, antiproton, and antineutron, respectively An encounter between an electron and a positron results in the instantaneous total conversion of the mass of both into energy in the form of gamma rays When a... version of the WAC Corporal The Aerobee Aerobee An Aerobee 170 on its transporter at the White Sands Missile Range U.S Army/White Sands Missile Range 10 aerobraking was one of two rockets developed by the U.S Navy in the 1940s the other being the Viking—to loft scientific instruments into the upper atmosphere An unguided two-stage vehicle, the Aerobee was launched by a solidpropellant booster of 80,000-newton . mass, thereby carrying the heat away from the rest of the structure. See reentry thermal protection. Able (1) A modified form of the Aerojet AJ-10 second stage of the Vanguard rocket used as the. point of the orbit). The entire operation requires the vehicle to operate autonomously while in the planet’s atmosphere. aerodynamics The science of motion of objects relative to the air and the. 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright