History
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Technology
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Topography
Contents Foreword 6 Introduction 8
HISTORY
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Rockets, Sputnik and Satellites The “Muttniks”: Animals in Space Vostok and the Cosmonauts Astronauts and The Mercury Seven The Space Race and First Orbit Countdown, Lift Off Space Walk Re-entry and Splashdown Tickertape Parade Handshake in Space Space Shuttle Space Station
TECHNOLOGY
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TOPOGRAPHY
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Cape Canaveral and Beyond
Phases – From Full to Crescent
Mountains of the Moon
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo
Earthrise
The Lunar Ranges
Mighty Saturn
Eclipse
Features and “Lands”
The Trench: Mission Control
Far and Near Sides
Valleys
Cargo and Booster
Shadow
Impact Craters
Docking and Transfer
Lunar Surface
Moondust
Heat Shield
Touchdown: Man on the Moon
Whole Earth
Solar Panels and Gyroscopes
Maria – Moon’s Basins
Last Moonwalk
Orbit, Landing and Rendezvous
Plains
Translunar/Transearth Injection
Seas and Oceans
Lunar Module and Command Module
Lakes
Lunar Rover Vehicle and Spacesuits
Marshes and Bays
The Missions and the Men 162 The Technology and the Machines 170 Glossary 180 Index 182 Acknowledgments and Picture Credits 184
History
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history | 19
Vostok and the Cosmonauts The race for space transformed the Cold War into a tangible benefit for humankind. In 1958 Sergey Korolyov, the USSR’s chief rocket designer, wrote a paper that proposed a moon landing objective. It spurred NASA into developing the F-1 rocket engine with sufficient thrust to support a manned mission to the moon. While NASA focused on fewer goals, the Soviet effort remained diverse – to put people on the moon and to send people orbiting around it, resulting in different rockets, vehicles and spacecraft. Soviet lunar probes were launched secretly in 1958, followed publicly by Luna 1 in early 1959, but it missed its target. That September Luna 2 crash-landed on the moon to become the first man-made object to reach another planetary body. A month later Luna 3 flew by the moon and took the first photographs of its “dark side”. Meanwhile, the Soviet manned programme, as well as building on the lessons of the Sputnik prototypes (see pages 14–17), was utilizing defence technology: the Zenit spy satellite to configure its spacecraft and a redesign of the R-7 ICBM from its ballistic missile program to produce the liquid oxygen-kerosene powered Vostok rocket with a stage-1 thrust of nearly 4,000kN (equal to 900, 000lb/408,000kg of force).
left Assistants of the special laboratory of the USSR Academy of Sciences handle the moon rock container brought back by Luna 20, an unmanned mission in February 1972.
right Vostok I, designed by Sergey Korolyov and Kerim Kerimov, was the first human spaceflight. Launched on April 12, 1961, its duration was 1 hour and 48 minutes.
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solar panels and gyros c o p es | 75
Solar Panels and Gyroscopes A mission into space, manned or unmanned, is a triumph of technology. A spacecraft protects itself from the sun using heat shields (see pages 72–73) at the same time as it uses panels to convert solar energy into a mission power supply. The first spacecraft to use solar panels was the Vanguard 1 satellite, launched by the US in 1958, and such panels are now an integral element of space vehicles – but crucial to the sourcing of solar power is the need to precisely control orientation, which is where machinery such as Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMG) come into play. Here (right) ] the Canadian Space Agency’s Dave Williams spacewalks during STS-118 to replace a failed 600lb (270kg) CMG. One of the early experiments conducted by the Apollo lunar missions was to measure the composition of the solar wind on the lunar surface. More recently NASA’s lunar architects have looked at using the moon as a platform in space to harness the sun’s immense energy and transmit it to earth.
below Attached to the end of the Orbiter Boom Sensor System Scott Parazynski checks out the deployed solar array of the International Space Station after the space shuttle (STS120) mission’s fourth extravehicular activity on October 23, 2007.
BELOW Alan L. Bean walks in space outside the Skylab Space Station during the second manned mission Skylab 3 (July 28–September 25, 1973). The Earth and Skylab are both reflected in Commander Bean’s visor. Three EVAs totalled 13hrs, 43 mins.
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valleys | 151
The TaurusLittrow Region On December 11, 1972, US astronaut and geologist Dr Harrison Schmitt and mission commander Eugene Cernan landed on the moon’s surface to explore the Taurus-Littrow region as part of NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. They remained for 75 hours, using a specially designed Lunar Rover Vehicle. Visible here are the Sculptured Hills (far left), the East Massif (centre) and Bear Mountain (far right). Dr Schmitt is the only scientist to have landed on the Moon and Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission.
below Astronaut and Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), composite image. The LRV (centre left) was an electric vehicle designed to be capable of traversing the lunar surface while in the low-gravity vacuum of the moon. The aluminum alloy LRV had a mass of 462 lb (210kg). Three LRVs were driven on the moon (Apollo 15–17), each making one traverse per day during a three-day mission. The Apollo 17 LRV went 22.3 miles (35.9km) in a total drive time of 4 hours 26 mins, the greatest range from the Lunar Module being 4.75 miles (7.6km].
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Copernicus Impact Crater The impact crater Copernicus is located in eastern Oceanus Procellarum, slightly northwest of the centre of the moon’s Earth-facing hemisphere (it is visible using binoculars). The crater was given its name by Italian Jesuit Giovanni Riccioli, who opposed Copernicus’s revival of the heliocentric system and is quoted as having “flung Copernicus into the Ocean of Storms” (Oceanus Procellarum). Nineteenth-century lunar mapper Thomas Gwyn Elger called it the “monarch of the moon”.
below Astronaut John Young on the moon on April 21, 1972, during the Apollo 16 mission. He is operating the specially designed chest-mounted 70mm Hasselblad camera.
right Copernicus, viewed from Apollo 11 in 1969. Estimated to be 800 million years old, the crater interior was photographed by Lunar Orbiter 2 in 1966 and by Hubble in 1999.
Coordinates Diameter Depth Colongitude
9.7° N, 20.0° W 58 miles (93km) 2.4 miles (3.8 km] 20° at sunrise
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history | 101
Cape Canaveral and Beyond In July 1962 NASA established its Launch Operations Center on the east coast of Florida, which it renamed in late 1963 to honour the president who had put the USA on the path to the moon. Indeed, in November 1963 Kennedy had visited Launch Complex 37 to have the Saturn rocket system explained to him by Dr Werner Von Braun. The director at that time was Dr Kurt Debus, who had supervised the development and construction of launch facilities at Cape Canaveral from 1952 to 1960 for the US Army (these were also renamed to be part of the John F. Kennedy Space Center). During a tenure that lasted through four presidents (July 1962–November 1974), Debus oversaw Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab, and the highlights he presided over included John Glenn’s first orbital flight, Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, and the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew.
LEFT Kurt Debus, Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center, surveys banks of television monitors prior to the lift-off of the Saturn SA-6 vehicle carrying the first unmanned boilerplate model of the Apollo spacecraft on May 28, 1964
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left The lunar module Eagle approaches the command module Columbia for docking on July 21, 1969, following 21 hours and 36 minutes on the moon’s surface and moonwalks totalling 2 hours and 31 minutes. The view of Earthrise over the lunar horizon provides a dramatic and majestic backdrop. Eagle was left behind in lunar orbit as the astronauts set off back to Earth, arriving on 24 July.
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Docking and Transfer A successful trip to the moon was designed around the need for spacecraft – in Apollo’s case the command module and the service module – to dock and transfer. NASA investigated this from the early 1960s, with a preliminary outline specifying that the two spacecraft be navigated to within a few feet of each other and held to a relative velocity of less than six inches per second, as well as stressing the need for adequate protection against radiation. At the same time various docking procedures for Apollo were examined and by March 1969 the chosen method was ready to be properly tested. Apollo 9 was the third crewed Apollo flight and the first one to include the Lunar Module (LM). The primary objective of the mission was to assess all aspects of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, including its operation as an independent self-sufficient spacecraft and the performance of docking and rendezvous manoeuvres. The goal was to simulate any operations, including extra-vehicular activity (EVA), that might be performed in actual lunar missions.
right Apollo 9 astronaut and lunar module pilot Russell L. Schweickart performs EVA in Earth orbit on March 6, 1969, three days into the mission. The space-walk lasted 38 minutes, part of an Earth-orbit test of the Apollo spacecraft, which also included the rendezvous between the Apollo 9 command and lunar modules, Gumdrop and Spider. The duration of the entire mission was 10 days, 1 hour, 1 minute.
left Apollo 17 was the sixth and last Apollo mission in which humans walked on the lunar surface. Here, the command and service module America is viewed from the lunar module Challenger, west of the lunar crater Becvar. Apollo 17 was the first night-time launch of Apollo and lifted off on 7 December 1972 after a 2-hour, 40 minute delay due to a malfunction of a launch sequencer. The launch was on Saturn V SA-512 from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. overleaf Apollo 17’s Saturn V rocket on Pad 39-A at dusk on November 22, 1972. This multistage liquid-fuel rocket was 363ft tall (110.6m), 33ft (10.1m) in diameter, and had a mass of 6,700,000lb (3,038,500kg).