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NASA Tests Heaviest Chute Drop Ever
Iddo Genuth writes "NASA and the US Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000-pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the ground. The booster landed softly without any damage. This was possibly the heaviest parachute drop ever, and NASA is planning to perform even heavier drops of up to 90,000 pounds in the next few months."
Afraid not. Parachutes work by increasing air drag. An incoming asteroid would be moving at something like 30 miles per second. The parachute would only have at most a couple of seconds to work. Having said that, if you had a boundary case of an asteroid that would lose a considerable portion of its energy to the atmosphere, but still have enough to cause significant property damage, then you could attach an inflatable balloon (I believe they call it a "ballute") to the front to increase the cross-sectional area of the asteroid, so it would lose more energy to the upper atmosphere. Those asteroids are probably too infrequent to bother planning for.
When will America start using SI units as the standard? Pounds don't mean anything to me.
Cool? Try hot. As in dropping it like it's hot.
Well, some of the larger 747 models have a maximum takeoff weight of over 900,000 pounds. I wouldn't expect ballistic recovery systems for them just yet.
The midsection? Where the wings are attached? The wings. The part that (barring the small portion of the lift that comes from the body of the plane) the entire plane is suspended from in flight already?
Those asteroids are probably too infrequent to bother planning for.
That's it. You've just chosen our doom.
Qxe4
Maybe someday I'll be able to take up skydiving after all!
Yeah, but when you use an alias like Karganeth you're Totally speaking a language I understand! Now I have to go dig my Orcone out of his storage pen and take him for a run in the dog park....
But then we wouldn't have known how to build a reusable shuttle, which I'm sure left some residual science in other fields as well.
Some things are worth doing just for the sake of it.
Seriously, this is a useless measurement, it's way over things I know about. I need it in something practical, like how many libraries of congress is it?
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My first thought was that this had something to do with the new waste recovery system. Ever since the Pizza Hut pastas came out, I've been a ready and willing contributor of test samples.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well over 350,000 pounds Boeing 767 so don't get any ideas.
Planes would probably break up as well. Great that you attached to the mid section but you'll probably loose either the front 3rd or the rear as the thin cabin torsions apart.
If you could guarantee the front third would survive it would help sell business class tickets in these troubled times.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
WTF? If it "landed softly" it didn't "crash".
Besides, most accidents are on takeoff, landing, or when the pilot didn't notice the mountain. No time to deploy parachutes.
The original press release is here.
This is pretty old news. If you want up to date news from NASA, subscribe to the RSS feed.
The shuttle concept in an of itself is not a terrible idea, however it got horribly warped by the Air Force's unrelenting requirements (i.e. payload bay size, etc.) and morphed into something horrendously inefficient.
There are certain parts of rockets that lend themselves much more to re-use than others. In this case, I believe the intent for Ares rockets is to replace the nozzle each flight -- they decided it was cheaper to build consumable thruster nozzles for each flight than to re-process the expensive, intricate cooling designs for keeping a nozzle in good enough shape to use again.
Aikon-
More importantly, how can the submitted article say the rocket "crashed" yet then immediately afterward say it landed softly. Are those two terms not mutually exclusive?
I suppose one could have a soft "crash landing" in an airplane, with the definition of a "crash landing" being: An unscheduled landing due to mechanical problems. But in this case, the parachute system apparently worked flawless ly, exactly as it was designed. So even the loosest definition of "crash" would not fit.
Can someone please fix the article?
Perhaps to this:
Thanks.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm curious about the engineering reasons for using one really big chute instead of a cluster of smaller ones as on the Apollo command module.
I might have read this wrong, but I read it as a 3 stage system, pilot chute to pull out the drogue, drogue chute, and then a cluster of 3 main chutes.
11. Everything is air-droppable at least once.
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I drank what? -- Socrates
Personally I'm with the 'nuke it out of the sky' school of thought, but you have to understand that a large portion of the energy will still hit the earth.
A single solid asteroid hitting the earth will release the kinetic energy, mostly into the ground, creating a big shockwave, earthquakes, etc.
The remains of an asteroid that has been nuked will still hit the earth with all that kinetic energy (minus a tad from the Nuke), however since it's now small particles it will be unlikely to damage the earth, it will simply add all that energy to the atmosphere. The result will likely be a huge jump in temps around that area, probably for a 500mile radius. Eventually the energy will dissipate and things will get back to normal.
Basically it's the difference between a laser and a heat-lamp, both could put out the same amount of energy, but one is focused on a single spot causing destruction, the other is dissipated over an area causing general warming.
It would be interesting to see someone calculate the amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere and what the effect would be (how high the temps would jump, the potential of weather disruption, the amount of radioactive material from the nuke that would follow the rest of the asteroid back, etc). Just to make a complete comparison between a ground strike by an asteroid and a general dumping of the energy into the atmosphere.
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AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
Sixty years later, NASA manages an extra 10000- lbs. Wake me when they manage 100000 lbs.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Better than a marshmallow man, right?
Besides, most accidents are on takeoff, landing, or when the pilot didn't notice the mountain. No time to deploy parachutes.
Indeed. Slamming into mountains is common enough to be given an acronym: CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
"For $79 more we can try EXTRA-HARD not to kill you in-flight."
Thanks, I'll walk.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It partly depends on how far away it is from earth when we discover it.
If we can get it when it's at the same distance as the moon we only need to divert it about one degree. At larger distances even smaller diversions are needed.
If going for a bomb though it seems the best option would be to try and blow a chunk off the side.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
you're saying that planes mostly crash when they meet the ground?
Well all crashes involve the ground (or the water) at some point sure but the question then becomes why they meet the ground (or the water).
Sometimes the pilot is deliberately interacting with the ground (takeoff and landing) but something goes wrong in the interaction
Sometimes the pilot doesn't realise the ground is there (say due to a navigation error or instrument) and therefore hits it even though they still have control over the aircraft.
Sometimes something goes wrong in flight that renders the plane unable to recover sufficiantly to land safely (what is sufficiant recovery to land safely depends to a huge extent on where the incident happened).
A parachute would only help in the last of theese cases (and probablly only a subset of those, a 747 parachuting down in an urban setting would probablly do quite some damage to both itself and what it landed on). The GP is asserting that such cases are a minority of accidents.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
there had to be quite a few detonations to get the (small) craft moving anywhere at speed. A single blast won't do it.
now my quote from the wikipedia article on the machine you're talking about
The smallest 4000 ton model planned for ground launch from Jackass Flats, Nevada had each blast add 30 mph (50 km/h) to the craft's velocity.
If you call a 4000 spaceship small, i don't want to know what would be big for you.... As a side note, you're somewhat right, as the nukes had a built in reaction mass that "pushed" the ship. But the part about "blast chambers of precise dimensions" is a bit off too, a huge plain shield of a special material isn't a blast chamber and doesn't have precise dimensions at all (it just has to be huge enough to protect the ship).
Impact energy is roughly proportional to the diameter cubed (volume or mass). All of those tiny asteroids that hit every day just do not add up to all that much. The damage to the earth's biosphere will be roughly proportional to the energy transferred which actually makes a water impact worse than a land impact unless you happen to be under it. For civilization, either can be catastrophic just because of weather effects. An impact like the one in Arizona is small on this scale although no doubt bad for the locals.