Apollo Missions.docx

The Apollo Missions In 1961 US President John F Kennedy set a goal for the country to land an astronaut on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. he supported the goal with funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. he challenged NASA to meet the goal by 1970, which was less than 9 ye...

The Apollo Missions In 1961 US President John F Kennedy set a goal for the country to land an astronaut on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. he supported the goal with funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. he challenged NASA to meet the goal by 1970, which was less than 9 years away. NASA called the Moon program, Apollo. During the Apollo program, the people at Nasa worked together to solve problems. This included engineers, inventors, scientists and technicians. They often solved Problems by creating products like machines or computer programs. Some solutions required NASA to develop new technology. technology is any product or process made to solve a problem. In this activity, you will learn about the process NASA used to solve the challenges of the Apollo missions. Getting Off the Ground When the Apollo program started, NASA engineers and scientists thought that meeting the president's deadline was nearly impossible. At the time, many NASA Rockets were not able to overcome Earth's gravity to get into orbit. Usually they failed. NASA Engineers realize that they would need to test a lot more Rockets to improve the design. This would let them create better rockets by learning from their mistakes and then modifying their designs. Each test rocket took months to build, test, and evaluate before launching. The engineers knew that building one rocket at a time would take too long and they would miss the deadline. To solve this problem, engineers brainstormed ways to build multiple rockets at the same time. NASA decided to build multiple rockets at a location away from the launch pad. As they thought about this idea, Engineers identified the constraints, which are things that limit the possible solutions to the problem. One constraint was that the Rockets had to be built in an upright position. Another constraint was that the test Rockets had to be protected from the outdoors. The constraints of the problem led to the design solution. In this case, the solution turned out to be massive! NASA built the largest single story building in the world in which to build the rockets. called the Vehicle Assembly building, it is so large it forms its own weather system, including clouds that form below the ceiling. The decision to build the Rockets away from the launch pad caused a tricky problem. It meant that NASA would have to move the rockets to the launch pad after they were built. no one knew how to move 3 million kg rockets from the VAB to the launch pad. as Engineers work to solve this problem, they identified criteria. criteria are the goals and desired features of the solution. There were two important criteria for building the rockets. First, the Rockets needed to remain in an upright position while being transported. Second, they could not be jostled during the trip to the launchpad. NASA engineers define the criteria and constraints of the problem precisely so the solution would more likely be successful. While working on this problem, one engineer on the team was inspired by a large mining equipment. The engineer's idea led the team to design and build the massive “crawler-transporter.” The crawler Transporters slowly and gently carried the huge rocket in an upright position from the VAB to the launch pad. The VAB and the crawler transporter made it possible for engineer's to build, test, and evaluate rockets more quickly. Landing on the Moon By 1962, NASA was launching a small spacecraft with a person aboard into Earth's orbit. however, designing a spacecraft that could land and relaunch from the Moon was a much bigger challenge. One problem was that if the astronauts landed the spacecraft on its side on the Moon's surface, like an airplane, it could not launch again from that position. Because of this the first design was one where the rocket would turn around and land feet down. This met the criteria of being able to relaunch from the Moon. However, it would take a lot of fuel to slow the rocket to stop, turn it around, and then relaunch it. it would take so much fuel, in fact, that the rocket would be too heavy to launch from the Earth and overcome its gravity. The fuel constraint made designing this spacecraft difficult. Since the solution was not obvious, NASA Engineers brainstormed many ideas for landing and relaunching a spacecraft on the Moon. One of the most outrageous ideas was to send two connected spacecraft to the Moon. one spacecraft would carry three astronauts and remain in orbit around the Moon. The second spacecraft would disconnect from the first spacecraft and carry two astronauts down to the Moon's surface. When the two astronauts completed their Moon exploration, they would launch the second spacecraft from the surface and reconnect with the first one. The idea of two separate spacecraft was rejected by nearly everyone involved. They thought the reconnection of the two spacecraft while in orbit around the Moon, was impossible. The reconnection of the spacecraft would happen 240,000 miles from earth. there would be no chance of rescuing the astronauts if there was a problem. even a tiny miscalculation could cause a misconnection, which would result in the death of astronauts left to float away in space. Eventually, engineers tested the idea with a model. they did not have computers that could simulate what would happen. Instead, they calculated the movements of the two spacecraft by hand. NASA engineers knew that models of all kinds are important for testing a solution. to improve the design, they calculated and tested the model of reconnecting spacecraft. They then redesigned the most promising solution based on the test results. They repeated this process again and again. Finally, NASA was confident that the calculations showed how a two spacecraft design was possible. Despite what seemed like a crazy idea, the data supported this design solution better than other solutions. This model became the basis for the final two spacecraft design that went to the Moon. The spacecraft that remained in the Moon's orbit was the command and service module (CSM). The spacecraft that landed and relaunched from the surface of the Moon was the lunar module (LM), pronounced Lem. Getting Home Safely In 1969, Apollo 11 landed two astronauts on the surface of the Moon and returned them to Earth unharmed. The event was watched live by 600 million people, the majority of whom did not own a tv. At that time, the US population was only 200 million. That means at least 2/3 of those watching were outside of the United States. When the Apollo program ended in 1972, a total of 12 astronauts had landed on the surface of the Moon over nine missions. Although celebrated as a huge success, the Apollo program had some tragedies and disasters. One well-known disaster happened during the Apollo 13 mission. An oxygen tank exploded while the spacecraft was on its way to the Moon. The situation was life-threatening for the three astronauts. the engineers on the ground, who were trained to expect anything to happen, we're surprised and confused. they had spent years simulating all of the disasters they thought could happen but they had not simulated this one. Until Apollo 13, the engineers did not think it was possible for this disaster to happen. When the explosion happened in the command and service module (CSM), the astronauts were forced to shut it down. They moved to the lunar module (LM), which was attached to the command and service module (CSM). It was their life raft while they figured out what to do next. The LM could support two astronauts for the 1.5 days it took to travel to the Moon surface. but there were three astronauts in it that needed support for the 4-day trip home to earth. With the additional people in the lunar module (LM), they needed more filters to remove the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts. This was critical because too much carbon dioxide in the air would be fatal. There were spare filters in the Command and Service Module (CSM), but these filters did not fit in the lm. They were box shaped, and the filter sockets in the lunar module (LM) were cylindrical. During the crisis, Engineers back on Earth quickly designed, built, and tested resolution. They built an adapter that would allow the cube shaped filters to fit into the round sockets. An important constraint was that they could only use the simple materials that the astronauts had, such as parts from their spacesuits, a plastic bag, a book cover, duct tape, and a towel. Sharing the solution with the astronauts onboard turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of the crisis. The engineers could not Transmit a diagram or picture of the device. Instead, they made a list of instructions for the astronauts. They read the instructions over the radio while the astronauts carefully wrote them down. building the filter adapter, even with the instructions, was challenging for the astronauts because they had not seen it. they had no idea what the filter adapter would look like. Despite this, the astronauts successfully built the adapter and survived. The quick and thorough solutions by the NASA engineers saved the astronauts aboard Apollo 13. Designing New Technology Just about everything designed and built during the Apollo program was a new technology at the time. One device that had a large impact during the years of the Apollo program was the computer. At the beginning of the program, computers were rare and unreliable so they were not used. Later on in the program, NASA installed one of the first mainframe computers. By today's standards, NASA's mainframe computing power was puny. The machine took up an entire room but had the computing power of less than a single cell phone. The CSM’s onboard computer had the capabilities of today's basic calculators. It is not surprising that when the Apollo program began, any software to land a spacecraft on the Moon did not yet exist. Margaret Hamilton, who invented the term “computer engineering”, led the team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that created the Apollo Guidance Computer. This system was in charge of in-flight software. One of the programs her team designed was the one that guided the lunar module to land on the Moon's surface. Hamilton had strict requirements while designing the software program. She insisted that the program be tested and redesigned until it worked reliably. Once completed, NASA used the program in flight simulations. They tested it again and again to make sure it would work in all situations. This process allowed the team to refine and optimize the program, meaning to make it as good as they could within the constraints. The software program was groundbreaking because it could handle more than one job at the same time. For example, to land the lunar module on the Moon, the software prioritized hitting the target correctly over the softness of the landing. prioritizing tasks was an important feature of the guidance computer during the Apollo Moon landings.