Lost First Words

Fifth! yeah I know... *stupid*

"Wpai" schreef in bericht
...
"Jeez...Sevent man on the moon.
I suppose they wll never make a movie of this trip and our names will be
forgotten even before we splash in the Pacific"


"Matt J. McCullar" schreef in bericht
om...
Does anyone know what potential first words on the surface of the moon
Jim
Lovell and Fred Haise would have said, had they actually made a landing
on
Apollo 13?

Matt J. McCullar wrote:

Does anyone know what potential first words on the surface of the moon Jim
Lovell and Fred Haise would have said, had they actually made a landing on
Apollo 13?

Hopefully not "Hey John, what was that bang up there?"

MSH

MSH wrote:


Hopefully not "Hey John, what was that bang up there?"

MSH


Yup, that would have been about _The_ nightmare scenario.
Question of the week...what would NASA have done then?
Try to send Apollo 14 to recover the bodies, or just leave them there,
and terminate the program?
I can't picture them sending another Apollo mission to the Moon and just
leave the dead astronauts stranded there.
I would assume that the LM would ascend into orbit to see if it could
lend any aid to the CSM (the two LM astronauts would have nothing to
lose in this scenario) So how long can the CSM stay in lunar orbit given
the somewhat iffy orbital dynamics of the Moon that we have discussed
here before? Months or years? Does it then crash into the Moon, or get
perturbed out of lunar- and into solar- orbit?

Pat

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
...So how long can the CSM stay in lunar orbit given
the somewhat iffy orbital dynamics of the Moon that we have discussed
here before? Months or years?

Depends on exactly what orbit it's in. If memory serves, Apollo 13 wasn't
going to use the "drop the LM off in an elliptical orbit and then go back
up to a circular orbit to wait for it" technique used on Apollo 14, but
even for an initially circular orbit, LLO lifetime can vary enormously
depending on details. Could be a couple of years, could be a couple of
months.

Does it then crash into the Moon, or get
perturbed out of lunar- and into solar- orbit?

It crashes. It's vanishingly unlikely that perturbations would pump
enough energy into a lunar orbit that low to convert it into a (lunar)
escape trajectory. Mostly, what an encounter with a mascon does is to
randomly change the orbit's plane and eccentricity a little bit, without
altering the orbit's energy noticeably. If the eccentricity gets too
large -- and it doesn't take much for a low orbit -- the orbit intersects
the surface.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Henry Spencer wrote:

Depends on exactly what orbit it's in. If memory serves, Apollo 13 wasn't
going to use the "drop the LM off in an elliptical orbit and then go back
up to a circular orbit to wait for it" technique used on Apollo 14, but
even for an initially circular orbit, LLO lifetime can vary enormously
depending on details. Could be a couple of years, could be a couple of
months.




In this case some real digging could probably come up with the exact
orbital parameters from NASA's originally planned Apollo 13 mission
archives- presuming they still exist.... this is way beyond my abilities
though.
I would imagine for the sake of the return to orbit of the LM, and its
rendezvous and docking with the CSM they had the CSM's orbit and the
influence of any mascons it passed over worked out in detail for each
individual orbit.

Pat

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
depending on details. Could be a couple of years, could be a couple of
months.

In this case some real digging could probably come up with the exact
orbital parameters from NASA's originally planned Apollo 13 mission
archives- presuming they still exist...

Unfortunately, our gravity maps of the Moon are still uncertain enough
that even this wouldn't yield a definitive answer, unless the orbit was
*very* close to what Apollo 14 used.

(The nearside is well enough mapped, but the gravity map of the farside
that came out of Lunar Prospector data is an exercise in numerical
guesswork -- the data analysis required *many* questionable assumptions.
The general features are probably right, but the details and intensities
are very speculative.)

I would imagine for the sake of the return to orbit of the LM, and its
rendezvous and docking with the CSM they had the CSM's orbit and the
influence of any mascons it passed over worked out in detail for each
individual orbit.

They tried, but the gravity maps weren't good enough (and still aren't).
There were a lot of on-the-fly corrections, and at least one short-notice
you're-getting-too-low orbit adjustment.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |