The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 off the coast of Vietnam has prompted a massive multinational maritime search for hints of the plane’s fate. Among the growing armada of surface and aerial search vessels is the US Navy’s venerable P-3C Orion, a long-range surveillance platform still just as effective today as it was in the early Cold War.
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Quietly, NASA keeps advancing in their manned deep space exploration: you’re looking at Orion—the first spaceship that hopefully will leave Earth and the Moon behind en route to Mars and other places in the solar system—powering up for the first time ever. It feels like a restart of Humanity’s journey to the stars after the Apollo program shut down.
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NASA just has released this photo captured almost two weeks ago during spacesuit check tests at the Orion Crew Module mockup. I cannot stop staring at it in awe – it is almost the real thing, it gives you a heavy deja vu, because you saw such scenes billion times when you crawled through the NASA image archives of the Apollo missions.
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Ideally, Astronauts want to return to Earth in fully functional space capsules, but sometimes things can go awry. That’s why NASA is making a point of testing the Orion spacecraft’s parachute deployment system for failures. The team’s latest parachute test saw a test capsule falling from 25,000 feet with two of three drogue chutes rigged to fail and for one of two main parachutes to skip its inflation stage — despite the handicap, the empty craft landed safely. “Parachute deployment is inherently chaotic and not easily predictable,” Explains the Orion’s landing and recovery system manager, Stu McClung. “The end result can be very unforgiving. That’s why we test. If we have problems with the system, we want to know about them now.” NASA plans to perform additional parachute tests at higher altitudes in July to help balance and reduce risk for Orion’s crew. Check out NASA’s official press release and a brief video of the test after the break.
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NASA has always used the desert as its own personal playground, and we’d imagine that its team had a blast in Arizona yesterday, as a mock parachute compartment of the Orion spacecraft was dropped from 25,000 feet above Earth. The dart-shaped object experienced free fall for 5,000 feet, at which point, drogue chutes were deployed at 20,000 feet. This was then followed by pilot chutes, which then activated the main chutes. As you’d imagine, these things are monsters: the main parachutes — three in all — each measure 116 feet wide and weigh more than 300 pounds. Better yet, the mission was successful.
Naturally, all of this is in preparation for Orion’s first test flight — currently scheduled for 2014 — where the unmanned craft will travel 15 times further than the ISS and jam through space at 20,000 mph before returning to Earth. Yesterday’s outing is merely one in a series of drop tests, and yes, it’s important to remove any unknowns from the situation: eventually, humans will be along for the ride.
NASA completes successful parachute drop simulation for Orion spacecraft originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Aug 2012 07:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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NASA didn’t completely dump the idea of manned extra-terrestrial flight. It just needed some space. Before the agency resumes its manned missions sometime in 2021, NASA will need somewhere to put the astronauts. A new generation of reusable spacecraft, capable of zipping beyond the current limits. Something like the Orion Capsule. More »
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