NASA Video Shows What It's Like To Reenter the Earth's Atmosphere 75
astroengine writes: In a mesmerizing new video released by NASA, the Dec. 5 reentry of the Orion test space vehicle is chronicled — and it's a phenomenal 10-minute ride from fiery reentry to sudden splashdown into the Pacific Ocean. (YouTube Link.)
Makes me moist... (Score:2)
... especially the splashdown
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That time that it takes for the main chutes to fully open has got to be a real nailbiter.
I could be by design...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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Parachute Reefing (Score:5, Informative)
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Hopefully that's not what made you irate!
Makes me want to play some KSP (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't really appreciate what NASA does until you build your own rocket, load it up with little green men, and crash it dozens of times while you try to learn how to orbit. Kerbal Space Program taught me how impressive this achievement really is.
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Staying within our atmosphere (or orbit!) is loads easier than leaving it. Of course, Boeing and Airbus do what they do with ridiculous safety, so I suppose it depends on your metric for impressiveness -- how you weight safety vs. mechanical/physical difficulty.
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Not to diminish the work of those you mention, but yes. Yes it is.
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No, no it really isn't. You just mistake the commonplace for the unimpressive. If we had 20000 rockets flying per day but for some reason only had 12 cars a year, you'd be rhapsodizing about cars.
That's just the way people are.
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Right, because all tasks are of equivalent difficulty. No achievement is harder than any other. The differences are just marketing.
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Well, the velocities and accelerations involved are higher by an order of magnitude or two. The consequences for failure are more immediate and severe. And while the first cars and planes were essentially hacked together in garages, the first space capsules required the resources of entire nations to build, and even then failure was frequent.
Again, go play some goddamn Kerbal Space Program and then tell me that spaceflight is no harder than anything else. There's a good chance that you won't be able to reac
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And just when you think you know how to do it you install the RO mod and wonder how the HELL they can pull it off at all.
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The delta-V budget to reach LEO is staggering, if you've played KSP a lot. You can pretty easily get 10-15% payloads to orbit around Kerbin, but Earth payloads are more like 3-5% at best.
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Yes. Same reason the tethers are different colors. Suppose a failure occurred and >1 chute was lost, it's scientifically valuable to determine which one went first and to observe the failure modes. Varied pigments and patterns make such reconstruction easier if needed.
Some better music? (Score:1)
Baby's on fire... Better throw her in the water [youtube.com]
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The music is from (fairly sure) the movie Sunshine.
Perspective (Score:4, Informative)
For those like me, who just watched the video and didn't understand the point of view 'til quite late on, the camera is pointing back along the direction of flight.
Also, for some reason the video has strange out-of-focus side-pieces that are distracting and annoying. The view itself is gorgeous and amazing.
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the "side panels" look to be some kind of kludge to appear to gracefully fill a HD screen, while keeping the main view (the center window) fairly distortion free...
On the reentry: absolutely mesmerizing, the adverts had it spot on.
While I don't always appreciate the *WAY* NASA spends its money (or is forced to by Congress), I do applaud an excellent mission. Ever since I watched (and re-watched) the video feed of the Curiosity landing sequence, I've gained a new appreciation for the effort that goes into
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Fuck money. You know when the US made its biggest leaps ahead? When money was pumped into NASA for the moon shot. The 60s where THE decade. World leader in anything technology, and not resting on its "we're #1, why try harder?" spot but gaining enough momentum that it lasted well into the 80s before anyone could come close in any field of technology. Jobs were plentiful and people had money, and they spent that money on more things, creating more jobs. And with the success in space came a really powerful "c
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Re:Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
For those like me, who just watched the video and didn't understand the point of view 'til quite late on, the camera is pointing back along the direction of flight.
Also, for some reason the video has strange out-of-focus side-pieces that are distracting and annoying. The view itself is gorgeous and amazing.
The sidebars are an effect of the smarphone's ascendence . Since asshats like to take vertical movies with their phones, they have to add shit along the sides to put them in a normal aspect ratio. Its usually blurred out repeats from the main video.. Since the camera video was square, they added the sidebars. I'd rather just see the original video than the presumably "keel" stuff.
But not to take away from it, it is pretty great stuff
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Informative)
Next time, put the countdown timer plus some altitude, velocity and maybe heat shield temp data in the side bars. That'll look much cooler than the widescreen kludge.
Re: Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe a running graph of speed and altitude, g-forces, marks for when the various chutes open or are released. That'd be much better than this.
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No, you're thinking too much, you need to feel the beauty of this planet instead, and for that we need the video as uncluttered as possible. IMO.
Re: Perspective (Score:2)
I would also be very pleased to have the raw video (compressed slightly for convenience) in the native aspect ratio.
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native aspect ratio.
Right. This is of most interest to geeks anyway. And we understand that, looking through a round porthole, there's only so much you can do with a widescreen format.
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Or maybe phone makers shouldn't make shitty products which create the sidebars in the first place. You never had this problem when shooting analog movies, it has only occurred when we "upgraded" to digital.
The world doesn't exist only left to right. It also goes up.
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You never had this problem when shooting analog movies
Because nobody was stupid enough to film in portrait mode.
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Because nobody was stupid enough to film in portrait mode.
This. A complete lack of thought. There are a litany of reasons that video or film is shot in landscape mode from the get, which is it is more or less how we percieve the world, to the panning effect being more sensible in horizontal format. A vertically formatted horizontal pan would be more likely to induce vomit than an inspiring view.
Now all this goes out the window for still imagery. A portrait of a person's face, which is inherently taller than wide, lends itself to a vertical image. As well, verti
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Since asshats like to take vertical movies with their phones, Or maybe phone makers shouldn't make shitty products which create the sidebars in the first place. You never had this problem when shooting analog movies, it has only occurred when we "upgraded" to digital.
You do have the choice of holding the camera horizontally. And certainly in photographs there are very valid aesthetic reasons to have the choice.
And that is the reason I call the folks who make the vertical movies "asshats". Because they can make a very nice video if they simply turn their camera horizontally. It will fit on a Television screen, it will fit on a Youtube screen.
The world doesn't exist only left to right. It also goes up.
True. But making a video involves movement, and often between people and their environment. People tend to be beside each other
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Bad music. Wish they had a front facing camera. Why not get a go pro sponsorship?
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem with Apollo was that the command module had nothing like the supplies of consumables that would be needed for another spin around the Earth, and it was moving substantially faster than LEO speeds - it wouldn't be reentering in another ninety minutes. And the Apollo CM h
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Re:Re-entry is done wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Space Shuttle attempted to do what you describe, coming as close to that ideal as reentry dynamics would allow. It still required a 40-degree angle of attack during the hot part of deceleration. The final approach may look airliner-like, but the sink rate was something like seven times that of a Boeing, a requirement of the delta-wing design, which in turn was imposed by the need to reenter without stripping off the wings.
The Orion capsule may look like a throwback to the Sixties, but it's the most tolerant, safest design of all.
Relax. NASA has this down to a science. (Score:3)
Re:Re-entry is done wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Everybody, please read OP's comment and understand that it provides us a valuable learning opportunity.
Suppose you read a popular press article about a complex subject (like space flight) and all the experts in the field have concluded that it should or has to be done one way, or one of a few ways. Having read a summary and maybe spent 5 minutes on Wikpedia still hasn't revealed why it's done this way. The two most important things to do now are to admit that you don't know, and realize that that's perfectly okay because admitting you don't know is the first step on the path to knowledge. Ask a question with non-hostile phrasing; This will invite people to provide helpful, explanatory responses and you will, as the saying goes, come off smelling like roses.
Or you can go OP's route, and we'll all laugh at your dumb ass for being stupid enough to think that spending 5 minutes reading Wikipedia makes you smarter than all the experts who've ever worked on rocketry. Then we'll put the Cone of Shame on you and make you sit in the corner while we chalk up yet another mark in the "true" column for the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis. At some point, we'll probably idly speculate whether your attitude is causative or symptomatic of your total inability to get laid and decide the answer is "yes."
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They are "doing it right", there's just no way to do it the way you seem to think it should be done because of the speeds involved and the physics of orbiting.
Low Earth Orbit is only achievable with a speed of roughly 7.8 km/s (17,450 mph, 28,080 kph). Compare that to our regular "smooth controlled flight just like regular flight", with airliners topping roughly 600 mph (1,000 kph), and the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft ever made (the magnificent SR-71) only approaching 2,200 mph (3,500 kph).
The mec
about time (Score:3)
Blue? (Score:1)
Why does the sky appear to so quickly transition from black to blue around the 6 minute mark?
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Sounds like a reasonable explanation. Thanks.
This video is better. (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The most mesmerizing is not the video itself (Score:2)
New video recorded during the return of NASA’s Orion through Earth’s atmosphere this month provides a taste of the intense conditions the spacecraft and the astronauts it carries will endure when they return from deep space destinations on the journey to Mars.
NASA is quietly, but openly, talking about going to Mars. It means I will be over 60 years old when they finally do it. But I will be there to watch the launch, and will be cheering and crying when they land on Mars. My parents saw the first man walking on the moon, via TV, and barely understood what they say. We *will* understand what we'll see. We will.
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What's it like? (Score:2)
Hot.
The music (Score:2)