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Soyuz Breaks Speed Record To ISS
Zothecula writes "A manned Soyuz spacecraft set a record for traveling to the International Space Station (ISS), arriving six hours after launch instead of the usual two days. Soyuz 34 lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday, March 28 at 4:43 p.m. EDT (08:43 GMT) and docked with the ISS at 10: 28 PM EDT (03:28 GMT). It was able to catch up and match trajectories with the ISS in only four orbits using new techniques previously tested in ISS rendezvouses with Russian unmanned Progress cargo ships."
Using new techniques the time for news event to slashdot front page has been decreased to four days.
I went to see what's ArsTechnica been up to lately, and holy cow has that site grown in the last couple of years! They have all the topics I'm interested in, and apparently, not days late. Also, they don't have contempt for their members.
So, I'm going to type in a random password for my Slashdot account and log out.
G'bye Slashdot editors, go fuck yirselves!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
HOE. LEE. SHIT. Slash accepts unicode now?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The launch window is like half a second long for this kind of approach, so if anything at all goes wrong during the countdown the launch is off until the next window, typically several orbits later.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Subtle. In the rythym of the overall broadcast. A few years ago they did a piece on Weekend Edition about how Bloomberg was pushing for a limited set of "authorized" ringtones in NYC to combat noise polution. I was having a not-sure-if-serious moment until the article ended and the promotional bumper indicated that the show received support from "Soylent" corporation. Hearing that ubiquitous NPR voice cheerily exclaim that "Soylent Green is People" had me out of my chair.
If we're going to dredge up old, irritating Usenet crap because it's 4/1, you could at least pretend that B1FF had been made into a Slashdot moderator. Then we could have two pages of ASCII art at the end of each slashpost, and make all the mobile RSS users cry.
You'll be back, just like the rest of us: slaves to some long distant memory of a once great site ;-)
Meeting a launch window that small is a real achievement; that's awesome.
However, the Launch Window is highly dependent on the abilities of the launch vehicle; and the Soyuz is ancient and rather limited compared to its younger siblings.
I'm wondering if it's a limitation of orbital mechanics, a limitation of a surviving crew, or a limitation of the Soyuz launch vehicle that makes the launch window so small.
For example, many modern EELV's are capable of putting a similar mass into orbit in less time (widening the launch window), though at possibly non-survivable levels of acceleration...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
The editors thought it would be pretty hilarious to make Slashdot even more unusable for April Fools'. The OMG Ponies layout was a good one, because it didn't decrease the usability of the site. Putting Rot13 all over the home page is just stupid. I'm surprised they didn't encrypt the titles also, actually.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Also, they don't have contempt for their members.
This is the funniest thing I've read for the whole of April Fool's. The contempt level is the same: You aren't a "member" - you're a product that is sold to the site's advertisers. In both cases, you've got the same status as a sheet of toilet paper: Your fate is to be covered in some ad executive's excrement and disposed of.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
The launch window is small because ISS has to be essentially lined up in orbit in a tight tolerance (called the phase angle) to rendezvous this quickly. Usually the Soyuz plays "catch up" over 2 days by flying lower (and faster) than ISS. You can control the closing rate between the vehicles by altering the altitude difference between them, which allows you to make up differences in the orbits between the vehicles. Those differences are usually just fallouts of other things, like having uncertainty in launch dates, getting the altitude just right for other vehicles (there is about a rendezvous a month at ISS), etc. It's not because Soyuz is slow, it's because spreading the rendezvous over 2 days gives you some targeting flexibility.
You have less margin to work with when you are trying to get there in 4 orbits instead of 34 orbits. Hitting that target with both ISS and Soyuz is hard but it's more about ground targeting than performance of the launch vehicle. The launch vehicle didn't give any extra oomph to get there faster, the ground essentially had the vehicle phasing in a tight tolerance at launch. They also sped up some of the tracking that was being done and turning that around into updated burns for the next orbit instead of coasting to a set of burns the next day, which was a bunch of work for the ground in a short period of time.
The Russians that devised this actually published it - it's an interesting read if you have access to the journal or want to spend $32:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576510001633
Worst...sig...ever!
The fastest to ISS, but not the fastest docking ever... I believe that record belongs to Gemini 11 which docked on it's first orbit - 96 minutes after launch. Gemini 8 managed the first ever docking between spacecraft in orbit a mere six hours and thirty three minutes after launch.
In the past they've taken four days in order to allow the crew time to get used to weightlessness, and to check out the spacecraft - doubly important for Soyuz since it'll be there for months and doubles as the crew's escape pod. That being said, the 'express' profile has been chosen for no other reason than to save money on mission control personnel... (Though they're trying to spin it otherwise.) In reality, I suspect those controllers are employed year 'round, but the money is only debited from the ISS program when a Soyuz is in [active] flight - making any real savings illusory.
Well, here this place used to get at least daily posts from Carmack or Bruce Perens, or people from the Antartica missions, for example. Also, always good posts from the usual users from that time like jafac, Millenium, BoredAtWork and others. What ruined this place lately are the ridiculous and stupid flame wars between Android/Google fans and Apple/iOS fans that drop comment quality to Yahoo or Youtube levels, with some Microsoft or Samsung fans or shills for good measure.
But then you stumble with posts like this:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3604217&cid=43334125
and patience gets rewarded.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!