NASA Ames Research To Close Largest Windtunnels

Makarand writes "The world's largest and second largest wind tunnels operated by the NASA Ames Research center will be shutdown after 60 years and may remain shut unless major defense contracts from the Pentagon or the private sectors are available. The largest windtunnel will be fired up for the last time in June for four hours. It will test the parachutes that will land the Mars exploration rovers onto the Red Planet next year. Fewer defense contracts and the increasing use of computer simulations are being cited as reasons for the windtunnels to face closure."

Comments

Testing??

[photonic]

The largest windtunnel will be fired up for the last time in June for four hours. It will test the parachutes that will land the Mars exploration rovers onto the Red Planet next year.

With both of the Mars rovers practically on the launch pad (one lauches in June, one in July) isn't it a bit late to test the parachutes now? Have they found another last minute metric convertion error??

Re:I'm surprised.

[Currawong]

Despite the advances in super computer technology that allow the behaviour of even very complex materials to be tested in a virtual environment, a wind tunnel may still be a far cheaper and less time-consuming option, especially with one-off experiments (such as for the Mars landing parachute mentioned in the article). The wind tunnel tests the actual thing, and although it takes time to setup, a supercomputer takes a considerable amount of time, work and money to program to mimic the effects of the wind tunnel and the item being tested.

Re:I�m surprised.

[ForestGrump]

Well, supercomputers are super computers.

However, no software is perfect.
Isnt the surest way of knowing how an object will behave in the wind is to run it through a wind tunnel?

After all, consider sending a probe to mars. What if the parachute checked out OK in a computer simulation, but doesn't apply to real physics because of some bug?

Its not a matter of money, but a matter of time.
To see a probe destroyed after years of hard work is very sad, especially when it could have been avoided by placing it in a wind tunnel.

Wind tunnels are a necessary part of research and science.
-Grump
BTW, I don't know anyone that works wind tunnels.

Wow! This brings back some memories!

[The Mutant]

My first job out of University was working as a computer operator at a wind tunnel.

We did lots of commerical and military stuff, and I'm really not surprised to find the F117 and a few other machines that I prolly shouldn't mention not on their list of aircraft we helped build.

For a young geek in Western New York, this was a radically cool job. When I started working there we used a bunch of IBM 1401's, at the time their largest single installation of these machines.

Later we became a DEC shop, and beta tested their PDP 11/70 series of machines.

Prolly the neatest thing - aside from the computers that is - were the models. There were a group of craftsman that would carefully, over a period of months and sometimes years, hand craft these incredibly accurate models of the various aircraft.

But they weren't just static models, being integrated with hundreds of air pressure sensors.

I worked on what was called the 'Data Reduction Team'; our machines captured, in real time, data from these sensors and later we could model the prototype aircrafts performance - should it be built that is!

Far cheaper to spend a few months in a wind tunnel testing various models then to build the real thing and have it crash.

When working we were a 24/7 shop, and although the money was good, that was the rub. The biz was largely defense driven, and after a few years I got tired of the binge and purge nature of working in defense.

But the story had a happy ending, as I landed a gig at Bell Labs and never looked at the defense industry again.

Re:Racing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) can never fully replace wind tunnel testing, as CFD cannot calculate all of the parts involved, it drops some of the less significant portions to save time. I have been told that if all portions were calculated, it would take roughly 100 years to figure out the flow over something like a 747. The result from CFD is 'good enough' but cannot guarantee that some small effects will be magnified into a much bigger one by some synergy. The airplane manufacturers guarantee certain performance from their airplanes, if those things like cruise speed, fuel economy, etc. are not met, even if only by a very small amount, it costs the airlines tons of money over the life of that airplane. That means the airlines lose confidence in the airplane manufacturer and will then look elsewhere for their planes.

Boeing's 777 was tested in a wind tunnel but not the ones that NASA runs but the ones that exist in the former Soviet Union, which are bigger and better. The Soviets didn't have fancy computers to aid in engineering research but they did have cheap labor and controlled material costs so they have some really nice testing facilities and real world testing is always better, just more expensive.

hope they keep the building

[wfmcwalter]

I hope they keep the building (although if they're not using it, I suspect they won't).

It adds another weird element to the already surreal aspect that Ames/Moffet presents, particularly to the north. There's a number of odd (nay, sinister) looking buildings, some positively Quatermassey domes, weird towers, and of course the giant rectangular intake of the wind-tunnel building. The whole place has a cool area 51 big science of the 60s feel about it.

Combine that with the Mountain View city lot beside it, where they keep hundreds of trees and bushes in wooden boxes, ready to be transplanted, lined up in neat little rows - it looks a bit like the set of The Prisoner.

Nearby is SGI's main campus, where they've build a couple of ultra-modern office buildings (not as short of cash as we may have thought). Given that SGI's major remaining customers are NASA and NSA, it's get another little piece of the "look what government money built" zone up by Shoreline.

Re:hope they keep the building

[dfung]

Nice to see a post from a local in this thread.

I never thought about the site as "Prisoner" like but indeed it is. These large structures are very visible from the 101 freeway that runs right by the base, but you can't really appreciate the sheer size of these structures until you're on the base right next to them.

I live in Cupertino, just a couple of miles away. Back when Moffett Field was an active Naval Air Station, there was a yearly Air Show usually featuring the Blue Angels, acrobatic planes, military planes on display on the ground, etc. It was mostly P-3 Orion sub tracking planes flying in and out of there, but there were a lot of big C-130 and C-5 cargo planes going in and out as well. You don't realize how big a C-5 is until you're standing on the cargo deck (they can carry multiple tanks). Or a B-52, or B-1... Totally on a different scale than the fighter planes you see in a movie like Top Gun.

These airshows would attract over 250,000 people a day, and one of the fun things that they did was open up the blimp hangars as well. They are the most visible landmark of Moffett - it housed pre-WWII-era dirigibles which were the old sub-hunters. They too were much larger than the Goodyear/Fuji blimps you see today. The blimp hangar is among the largest on the West Coast. The doors roll open on railroad tracks, and one year, there were a bunch of hot air balloon rides running INSIDE the hangar - it's over 200 feet tall.

Sadly, there's been talk recently that Hangar One is contaminated with PCB-like chemicals in the lubricants used there over the decades and that it too might need to be torn down.

After the military left and handed most of Moffett Field over to NASA, there was a NASA-sponsored open house in the spirit of the old air shows. You could tell that something was "wrong" even as you arrived - they expected 70,000 people and got something like 300,000. One of the cool things they did during that open house was that they had the big wind tunnel open for tours, something that didn't occur during the military air shows. It's unbelievably cool in a "this-must-be-a-movie" way. I believe the entire interior was done in wood, like a fancy boat, but it's like a wood-lined warehouse. The fans are something like 30 feet in diameter and there was a big array of about six of them. They had examples of instrumented model planes that were tested there in maybe 1/10th scale, and a Space Shuttle model too.

Well, enough blathering. There may not really be good reasons to keep it open anymore, and keeping this all around as a playground for locals is pointless, but it will certainly be missed if this stuff goes.

Re:Funride

[CvD]

Put it on end and you have a vertical windtunnel, a great "ride". It's a little difficult to learn to stay stable, but its a lot of fun. Skydivers use vertical windtunnels a lot to train their maneuvers. But also people who don't wanna jump out of an airplane but do wanna know what it feels like to float on air, the vertical windtunnel is the answer.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Kind of sad

[Anonymous Coward]

My grandfather was one of the directors at mofet field when most of theses wind tunnels were being built. I know that he was one of the primary designers of the 40X80. When i was five, I got to tour the 40X80. It was awe inspiring to see the test platform, the rotors and gaze off into the darkness of the sheer scale of the tunnel from the inside.

It can be economical

[sien]

NASA stopped operating the Langely full scale wind tunnel a number of years ago.

However the Aerospace Engineering Department at Old Dominion University figured they could use the wind tunnel and started to operate it themselves and were able to both train students and make money from it.

Recently the Wind Tunnel has been used to test full scale model of a Wright Flyer that is scheduled to fly at the end of this year.

NASA may not be able to operate these facilities economically, but smaller groups that have less beauracracy and smaller aims often can. You would almost bet that some enterprising University will get a hold of the facilities and start using them.

Re:recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

There is quite a bit of computer science and simulation when you run a wind tunnel. The data is pulled off then "massaged" to correct for wall effects, the presence of the sting (the thing that connects the model to the tunnel) and various other things. Its good to have both CFD and wind tunnels, neither is infallible.

Re:I�m surprised.

[dim]

Actually you can test higher than mach 5. The building I worked in at Ames had a gun tunnel in the basement That tested the shuttle among other things. It would shake the whole building when it went off.

The old Ames setup

[K-Man]

I haven't worked there since the 80's, but at that time everything was run on PDP's, with VAXes upstream doing data reduction. It was ancient even for that time, and everything was configured on disk packs that fit into DEC's washing-machine sized hard drives.

The Standardized Wind Tunnel System (SWTS) was run in all the subsonic and transonic tunnels, and we had a contractual obligation to fix any problem within two hours (the $5000/hour cost figure was the reason for that).

The PDP's ran DEC's RSX-11M operating system, which had a file system and a FORTRAN compiler, and not much else. Processes were limited to 64k (or 32k - can't remember), and it was common to daisy-chain processes together, so that one proc would start (or "unstop") the next. If one proc failed, often due to an arithmetic error, someone would have to get in and restart the chain.

It was clunky, but with experienced people and careful documentation, it was highly reliable. However I never found my experience debugging Teledyne RMDU's to be much in demand in the job market.