NASA Tests Heaviest Chute Drop Ever 226
Iddo Genuth writes "NASA and the US Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000-pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the ground. The booster landed softly without any damage. This was possibly the heaviest parachute drop ever, and NASA is planning to perform even heavier drops of up to 90,000 pounds in the next few months."
Cool - now how much ... (Score:2)
Re:Cool - now how much ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cool - now how much ... (Score:4, Informative)
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Besides, most accidents are on takeoff, landing, or when the pilot didn't notice the mountain. No time to deploy parachutes.
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Besides, most accidents are on takeoff, landing, or when the pilot didn't notice the mountain. No time to deploy parachutes.
Indeed. Slamming into mountains is common enough to be given an acronym: CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain).
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you're saying that planes mostly crash when they meet the ground?
Well all crashes involve the ground (or the water) at some point sure but the question then becomes why they meet the ground (or the water).
Sometimes the pilot is deliberately interacting with the ground (takeoff and landing) but something goes wrong in the interaction
Sometimes the pilot doesn't realise the ground is there (say due to a navigation error or instrument) and therefore hits it even though they still have control over the aircraft
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Even if you had a chute big enough, most airline accidents occur at take off and landing, altitudes well below where a parachute recovery system would be effective.
Remember the old Road Runner cartoons? Whenever the coyote would try a parachute he'd turn into a lawn dart, then the parachute would pop out of the smoking hole in the ground?
Kinda like that.
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The midsection? Where the wings are attached? The wings. The part that (barring the small portion of the lift that comes from the body of the plane) the entire plane is suspended from in flight already?
Re:Cool - now how much ... (Score:5, Funny)
Well over 350,000 pounds Boeing 767 [wikipedia.org] so don't get any ideas.
Planes would probably break up as well. Great that you attached to the mid section but you'll probably loose either the front 3rd or the rear as the thin cabin torsions apart.
If you could guarantee the front third would survive it would help sell business class tickets in these troubled times.
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"For $79 more we can try EXTRA-HARD not to kill you in-flight."
Thanks, I'll walk.
1 Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
When will America start using SI units as the standard?
In NASA's case, it would take something big to make them see sense. Like, say, loosing a major space probe.
Re:1 Question (Score:4, Insightful)
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An American pint is actually a copy of a British pint in 1707. The British later changed over to Imperial in 1824. Also, pretty much all of Southern Australia uses a 425 ml pint, and they call the normal 570 ml Australian pint an "Imperial pint", even though its slightly larger than an actual Imperial pint.
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Also, pretty much all of Southern Australia uses a 425 ml pint,
What!? Thats a schooner, not a pint. Only in Adelaide would that piddling amount be called a pint.
Hmmm... maybe when I thought I was ripped of with a US-pint it was even worse than I realised, and the bastard gave me a schooner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_beer#Beer_glasses [wikipedia.org]
Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
An American pint is actually a copy of a British pint in 1707. The British later changed over to Imperial in 1824.
We had a choice between Liberty and More Beer. I'm still not sure we chose wrong.
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It is. This leads to an interesting situation in the UK, where nearly everything is metric except beer, milk and road signs. If you buy milk it's in the same size carton it was 30 years ago, but it's labelled "568ml" instead of "1 pint" (or multiples). A pint of beer is a pint of beer, although you get slightly larger glasses in a lot of pubs with 1 pint marked by a line about 4mm from the rim of the glass. Depending on what you drink, a pint of beer might be a bit less than a pint, because some room is
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Thankfully the Germans have it much simpler... The standard size glass in Bavaria was 500ml, and the larger "Mass" size is 1L :-)
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This is mandated by law. About 5-10 years ago, the courts ruled that pubs selling "pints" of beer could not use a pint glass -- the head reduced
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- Known as a either a pot or a middy, depending on what state you're in, in all states of Australia except for SA
- SA calls this glass a Schooner
425ml Glass
- Called a Schooner everywhere except for SA
- Called a pint in SA, except for in Irish pubs
570ml Glass
- Called a pint everywhere in Australia, except for SA
- Called an Imperial Pint, or IP in SA, except in Irish pubs where it is just a Pint.
And there you have it.
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Just give me a beer mate!!!
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"Even the English do not use English units any more for anything more important than beer glass sizes. "
THERE IS *NOTHING* MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SIZE OF A BEER GLASS.NOTHING!
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So true. I wish I had mod point right now.
"Pounds don't mean anything to me" (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but when you use an alias like Karganeth you're Totally speaking a language I understand! Now I have to go dig my Orcone out of his storage pen and take him for a run in the dog park....
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It's a shade over 6428 stone. If you have problems visualising that, imagine 918 weaklings or 357 burly rugby players. Which is 17 teams (with substitutes) composed entirely of loosehead props.
Better?
Re:1 Question (Score:4, Interesting)
In other cases it's easier to use the SI units, like if you are a scientist trying to calculate the velocity of things falling. People who need to do this already DO use SI units.
Finally, there are times when it doesn't really matter which one you use, like when you are weighing yourself, does it really matter if you use kilograms or pounds? Not really. The effort to change there just isn't worth it for most people. If we talked to Europeans more often, it might be, but.......
Incidentally, it isn't just Americans. Other countries use a mix of measurements as well. For example, in El Salvador, they use centimeters to measure their height, kilograms to measure their weight, and liters to measure their water, and gallons to measure their gas. I believe Taiwan uses some traditional measurements as well.
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for what it's worth from news reports I've seen and from talking to people, UK still seems to use stones to measure human weight.
Yes we do, in general :) And a stone is 14lbs.
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I never understood that unit of measurement. Where'd you guys get such regularly-sized rocks? Over here in the colonies, they're all very inconsistent.
Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
I believe the unit was standardised on the weight of Winston Churchill's right testicle.
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The ones who care already do. In some cases, it is easier to use the empirical system, for example, I can't imagine having to do construction with millimeters, but 1/8 and 1/16 inch are the perfect tolerances of precision when framing a house. The millimeters are just too hard to see because they're so close together. Try it sometime. I guess in Europe they must use them, so it must be doable (or maybe that's why they use bricks so much in construction instead of wood!)
I live in Australia and I do all my house framing in millimetres. I have never had trouble seeing a millimetre.
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you've only got mils, and they're way closer together than 32nds.
How is that?
1/32" = 1/32"
1mm = 1/25.4"
Seems to me that mms are further apart than 32nds.
Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
Metric, motherfucker, do you speak it?
1 answer! (Score:2)
Since I know a thing or two about conversions, I've looked this up for you. The answer is the following: 50,000 (British) pounds is roughly 53,823 euros.
I don't know what the answer is for Canadian pounds though... Sorry!
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Well here in the UK, a 50,000 pound dummy rocket is regarded as quite expensive. You'd think a dummy would be a lot cheaper than that. I'm sure I saw one on eBay for a half-a-dozen monkeys.
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Feet, miles and knot based units are the de facto standard in aerospace. The scientists
use SI units, the pilots do not. For a software I wrote I had to use SI units internally
and had to convert those values to feet/miles/knot based ones before passing them into a
pilot specific software. I work in germany (at the DLR if it matters).
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Perhaps when your country manages to accomplish its own space program, you can use whatever units YOU prefer. Then again, if you have trouble dividing lbs by two to get approximate kg, it may be a while.
Then you can have the pleasure of reading constant carping from the cheap seats complaining about the most trivial issues.
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I don't know but when I watch top gear they talk about miles per hour and miles per gallon. When I read Bike Magazine I see 0-60 times and miles per gallon even though they give the tank size in liters!.
When I go to UK car websites they also give miles per gallon.
Seems like the US isn't the only country that uses none SI units in the press.
I am willing to bet that they used SI for the actually engineering.
1 lb = 0.453592 Kg is your conversion formula.
Now get over it and move on.
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When will America start using SI units as the standard? Pounds don't mean anything to me.
Translation: "I am too stupid to do unit conversions with Google."
But at least I've learned that whining about things not conforming to a more widespread system is a good way to get "insightful" mods. When will China start using the roman alphabet as the standard? Hanzi characters don't mean anything to me. When will Linux start using cmd.exe as the standard? /bin/bash doesn't mean anything to me.
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Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
Here we have a situation where a single large country - with too much power and inertia in these matters - is pointedly ignoring what the rest of the world is doing, and forcing the use of an arcane, unwieldy, incompatible standard on the rest of us.
Thank goodness this sort of thing doesn't happen in the IT industry.
Re:1 Question (Score:5, Funny)
Sheesh, you Esperanto guys just never give up ...
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Tons would be good. Metric tonnes are approximately the same as imperial tons. I think the US uses "short tons" which are 900kg, so quite a bit less - but you'd still have a reasonable approximation, and when people in the UK and EU see "tons" in an American article we mentally adjust for it not *quite* being as heavy.
Let's try it and see how it works:
"On February 28, 2009 a 25-ton dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the gro
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An Imperial ton is 2000 lbs(pounds)
1 kg = 2.2 lbs
A metric tonne is therefore 2200 lbs
An Imperial ton is 20 cwt (hundredweight)
A hundredweight is 100 pounds
The US uses pounds because it sounds bigger IMHO
Re:1 Question (Score:4, Informative)
An Imperial ton is 2000 lbs(pounds)
An Imperial ton is 20 cwt (hundredweight)
A hundredweight is 100 pounds
The US uses pounds because it sounds bigger IMHO
In the US, maybe. In the UK:
An Imperial Ton is 2240 lbs
A Hundredweight is 112 lbs
Sounds like the US uses small measures because it seems like things weigh more/are bigger over there.
Same goes for pints/gallons.
US pint = 16 fl. oz. UK pint = 20 fl oz. No wonder your cars get so few miles/gallon. No wonder your petrol (sorry, gas) is so cheap.
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England didn't start using the 20 floz pint until 1824. The previous 16 floz unit was defined as 1/8 of the British wine gallon -- about 231 cubic inches -- and had been since 1707. I'm not positive about the force/mass bit, but I'm pretty sure the same 1824 change made a hundredweight 8 stones, making it 112 lbs instead of 100 lbs used in the
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As far as I'm concerned things like the units used in Gas/Petrol, glasses of beer, road signs, and the side of the road we drive on all are a part of a country's culture and there's no huge need to change them. Sure it would make things simpler for people visiting, but it's not a necessity.
Measurements used in scientific experiments on the other hand I feel should be standardized. The scientific community isn't just based in one country, and using a bunch of different measurements isn't only an inconvenienc
Thank you NASA! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank you NASA! (Score:5, Funny)
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What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster? (Score:2)
Recovering, fixing, and verifying the booster is an expensive proposition. How much does the recovered booster actually cost? The entire reusable Shuttle idea was kind of dumb because it was cheaper to stick with expendable launch vehicles than drag a huge piece of deadweight into space every time. What is the difference here? (Seriously.)
Re:What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some things are worth doing just for the sake of it.
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I'd argue that much less was learned building the shuttle. Thats why they are having so much trouble building a new launch vehicle now -no one knows how to build one first hand. If they had been building rockets for the last 30 years, the technology would have been improving in each iteration. We would be in an entirely different situation now.
Re:What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster? (Score:4, Interesting)
The shuttle concept in an of itself is not a terrible idea, however it got horribly warped by the Air Force's unrelenting requirements (i.e. payload bay size, etc.) and morphed into something horrendously inefficient.
There are certain parts of rockets that lend themselves much more to re-use than others. In this case, I believe the intent for Ares rockets is to replace the nozzle each flight -- they decided it was cheaper to build consumable thruster nozzles for each flight than to re-process the expensive, intricate cooling designs for keeping a nozzle in good enough shape to use again.
Aikon-
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The shuttle nozzles are expendables, they are ablatives.
The 'reusable' solids concept is about 4-5x heavier than it could be. This reduces lift efficiency, AND increases complexity. The Shuttle SRBs are the single MOST COMPLEX SRBs I have ever seen. I've seen the engineering drawings.
Not to mention the man-hours involved in refurbishing the things.
SRBs on the scale of the Shuttle and larger are far too inefficient. Cheap liquids are the way. Kerosene and alcohol are relatively easy to manage. And an e
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Take a step further (Score:2)
How many libraries of congress? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, this is a useless measurement, it's way over things I know about. I need it in something practical, like how many libraries of congress is it?
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Well go to your local library of congress, and just drop my name, and they'll help you set it up for a single load.
No M-1 Abrhams, then (Score:2)
At roughly 140,000 lbs, they're still out of reach.
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I can't find the link but it has been thought of. All you have to save is the cabin. That is just an aluminum can
no fuel, no engines, no cargo
Heaviest chute drop? (Score:4, Funny)
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Say "NASA just had a huge chute drop" fast to someone and watch their response.
crashed softly? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? If it "landed softly" it didn't "crash".
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You left out "Before it"
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Please explain how it could land before crashing, or vice versa.
Only one chute (Score:2)
I'm curious about the engineering reasons for using one really big chute instead of a cluster of smaller ones as on the Apollo command module.
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I'm curious about the engineering reasons for using one really big chute instead of a cluster of smaller ones as on the Apollo command module.
I might have read this wrong, but I read it as a 3 stage system, pilot chute to pull out the drogue, drogue chute, and then a cluster of 3 main chutes.
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Oh. The picture showed one big chute with the whole arrangement pretty near the ground.
Original NASA press release (Score:4, Informative)
This is pretty old news. If you want up to date news from NASA, subscribe to the RSS feed [nasa.gov].
to hell with parchutes (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
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They aren't as viable as you might think because flyback stages are expensive to build, expensive to operate and are maintenance intensive.
Not entirely true actually... While they are the heaviest, the generally aren't the most expe
Parachutes are a drag. (Score:2)
So. We're back to parachutes. While I suppose it's better than just letting the boosters crash, we're still not where we need to be. The age of the rocket is over, dammit, and serious work needs to be done on the next generation earth-to-orbit vehicles.
This means space planes (The X-prize made it out of the atmosphere, if not the gravity well, on a private sector budget) or cool stuff like the Delta Clipper.
Parachutes in the year 2009 is not a re-entry mechanism worthy of the manpower and money NASA has at
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Yeah, and get rid of wheels and the printing press as well!
Maglev trains don't need wheels, and modern Print-on-Demand systems do not require a press.
Just sayin'.
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DumbedDown = MoreSmarterer.
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Crashed or Landed? (Score:2)
It's only a joke that any crash you can walk away from is called a landing. So did the chutes not work and the thing crashed? Or did they work and it landed? Make up your mind!!!!
One of the rules (Score:3, Funny)
11. Everything is air-droppable at least once.
-Seven Rules of Highly Effective Pirates [wikipedia.org]
Other large parachute systems (Score:2)
Para-Flite's MegaFly [defense-update.com], for example, is a 30,000 lb payload guided parachute system (GPS-steered to land at a designated LZ), with a variant of it being tested up to, IIRC, 42,000 lbs, with 50,000 lbs being a goal. It's still basically a development system, but similar systems are regularly used for 8,000 and 10,000 lb payloads.
Granted, ai
I'm not impressed yet. (Score:3, Informative)
Sixty years later, NASA manages an extra 10000- lbs. Wake me when they manage 100000 lbs.
CONGRABULASHUNS! (Score:2)
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/938744/ [ebaumsworld.com]
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Re:A good start (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, how can the submitted article say the rocket "crashed" yet then immediately afterward say it landed softly. Are those two terms not mutually exclusive?
I suppose one could have a soft "crash landing" in an airplane, with the definition of a "crash landing" being: An unscheduled landing due to mechanical problems. But in this case, the parachute system apparently worked flawless ly, exactly as it was designed. So even the loosest definition of "crash" would not fit.
Can someone please fix the article?
Perhaps to this:
Thanks.
Re:Astroid Net? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Astroid Net? (Score:5, Funny)
Those asteroids are probably too infrequent to bother planning for.
That's it. You've just chosen our doom.
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Rate of descent... (Score:2)
How can it "crash to the ground" and "land softly" all in the same paragraph...?
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I've never understood this argument. Let's take a look at this: Every day, THOUSANDS of tiny meteorites impact the atmosphere. Of that, only a tiny fraction ever reach the ground. The vast majority of them burn up in the atmosphere. Of the ones that reach the ground, a tiny fraction of the original tiny fraction actually impact on land. A tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of the tiny fractio
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Personally I'm with the 'nuke it out of the sky' school of thought, but you have to understand that a large portion of the energy will still hit the earth.
A single solid asteroid hitting the earth will release the kinetic energy, mostly into the ground, creating a big shockwave, earthquakes, etc.
The remains of an asteroid that has been nuked will still hit the earth with all that kinetic energy (minus a tad from the Nuke), however since it's now small particles it will be unlikely to damage the earth, it wi
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You make an excellent point, but you also fail to take into consideration how much energy will not be transferred via the asteroid bits that simply miss the earth due to being blasted off into space by the force of the nuclear detonation. It just seems logical that reducing a large single mass strike down to a smaller mass spread out over a wide area is going to be significantly less damaging. Also, any heat transferred to the atmosphere is going to be transferred primarily to the upper atmosphere, where
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It partly depends on how far away it is from earth when we discover it.
If we can get it when it's at the same distance as the moon we only need to divert it about one degree. At larger distances even smaller diversions are needed.
If going for a bomb though it seems the best option would be to try and blow a chunk off the side.
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Impact energy is roughly proportional to the diameter cubed (volume or mass). All of those tiny asteroids that hit every day just do not add up to all that much. The damage to the earth's biosphere will be roughly proportional to the energy transferred which actually makes a water impact worse than a land impact unless you happen to be under it. For civilization, either can be catastrophic just because of weather effects. An impact like the one in Arizona is small on this scale although no doubt bad for
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Not after the fuel burns out.