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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."
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
What is the point of the internet?
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.
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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.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.