Showing posts with label Space Race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space Race. Show all posts

October 19 - Mariner 5 Flies by Venus!

  Posted on October 19, 2021


This is an update of my post published on October 19, 2010:





During the 1960s, there was a Space Race, with Cold War enemies Soviet Union and United States trying to outdo each other in exploring the solar system.

At first, the USSR pulled ahead by being the first to successfully launch a rocket into Earth orbit (Sputnik 1 – 1957) and then by being the first to put a man in space (Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1 – 1961). A few months after each of these Soviet successes, the US was able to match the feats with Explorer 1 (1958) and Alan Shepherd in a Mercury spaceship (1961).


Many Americans would say, however, that the US won the Space Race because of the daring manned moon landings and explorations. To this date, this feat has not been matched by astronauts from any other country.

But, you ask, what does all of this have to do with Venus?

The Soviet Union and America's space program, NASA, chose a wide variety of projects, including exploring nearby planets, during the time of the Space Race. These planetary flights were all unmanned, and many of them did not succeed for one reason or another. Launch failures and loss of contact (in the latter case, the fate of the spacecraft is often unknown) happened with some regularity. However, when a mission worked, the data gathered by the spacecraft is beamed home and enriches the scientific knowledge for the entire world.


Here are some of the flights deemed failures:
1961 
USSR Sputnik 7
USSR Venera 1
1962 
US Mariner 1
USSR Sputnik 19
USSR Sputnik 20
USSR Sputnik 21
1963 
USSR Cosmos 21
1964 
USSR Venera 1964A
USSR Venera 1964B
USSR Cosmos 27
USSR Zond 1
1965 
USSR Venera 2
USSR Venera 3
USSR Cosmos 96
USSR Venera 1965A

And to offset all that failure during that four-year period:

1962 
US Mariner 2

Finally, in 1967, both nations met with success in exploring Earth's nearest planet. On October 18, 1967, the Soviet Venera 4 became the first probe to analyze another planet from its surface. And the very next day, October 19, 1967, the United States' Mariner 5 did a successful fly-by. Both spacecraft were able to send back important data that tells us a lot more about our “sister planet.”

Sister planet??? Umm...


Not only is Venus the closest planet to the Earth, it is the closest planet to ours in size. That is why it is called Earth's sister planet.

But it's not very much like Earth in some pretty crucial ways.

Here is a picture of what it might look like on Venus. It's really, really hot.


REALLY hot!

Like 900 degrees Fahrenheit! (500 degrees Celsius). That's hot enough to melt lead, zinc, and some alloys of aluminum!

Venus's atmosphere is 90 times thicker than Earth's, with thick clouds of sulfuric acid! Yikes!

But maybe future humans will colonize the atmosphere of this hellish planet and live there? Check out this outrageous sounding idea in this article.


Here are some photos we've pieced together from missions to Venus:






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December 6 - Gladys West Is Not So Hidden Now!

Posted on December 6, 2019

The movie Hidden Figures displayed for all the world people who were part of one of the biggest accomplishments of humankind: going to space and returning safely back to Earth.


But...why would a movie about folks involved with early space exploration be called "Hidden Figures"? For sure, the NASA astronauts were literally paraded before the public, and even the NASA engineers and administrators whose names did not get mentioned on TV or in magazine articles, let alone become household names, certainly weren't hidden from view. We got to see rooms full of them working busily during countdowns and touchdowns - and see them cheer, shake hands, maybe even jump up and down when a flight was successful.


But there were some Space-Race workers who were hidden from view.

I was alive during the Space Race, and I definitely never saw photos of rooms full of women - including at least one room full of black women - doing the computations necessary to achieve each launch and orbit and all the rest of it! I never knew until recently that computers, back then, were humans - and that women were used as human computers because they were careful, speedy, reliable - AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO BE PAID MUCH! 

Sheesh! These invaluable women - women who used their degrees in mathematics, women upon whom the lives of the oh-so-valued (male) astronauts relied - were not shown that they were valued with professional status and (generally speaking) promotions. Sigh.

The movie Hidden Figures at last drew our attention to these long-overlooked contributors, more than half a century after the Space Race began. That movie showed a room full of black women acting as human computers - and later learning programming - but especially featured Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.



Today we celebrate another human computer - another once-hidden figure: Gladys West.


One of West's accomplishments was a complex project of computing the exact shape of the Earth. You may think, "Hmph, that's not so complex - the Earth is a sphere!" But actually, because of the Earth spins, it is an oblate spheroid - which just means that it's flattened at the poles, like a slightly squashed sphere. West had to consider gravitational and tidal forces as she computed the Earth's shape.

"Okay," you may think, "I agree that it's complex. But who really cares?" The answer to that is: we ALL care. Modern technology that involves GPS - like our beloved map apps, plus flying and other forms of transportation, location services like finding lost hikers, keeping pets and elderly relatives safe, law enforcement, and so much more - relies on West's mathematical work!

On this date in 2018, Gladys West was inducted into the Air Force Hall of Fame, one of the Air Force's highest honors.




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December 15 – Celebrating a Soviet Space Feat

Posted on December 15, 2016

The “Space Race” between the Soviet Union and the United States, back in the second half of the 20th Century, was super competitive and nationalistic – in other words, very “rah! rah! my country! – not nearly as nice as the current science-oriented cooperation between Russia, the U.S., and other space-faring nations.

But of course it was WAY preferable to war between our two nations!

And the Space Race did motivate some great accomplishments, as each nation tried to be first to do X, Y, or Z.


On this date in 1970, the Soviet Union became the first nation to successfully soft-land a spacecraft onto a planet. The spacecraft was Venera 7, and the planet was Venus.

Soft-landing is, of course, the opposite of crash-landing. The Soviet Union was first to crash-land a spacecraft on Venus, too – they accomplished that with Venera 3 in 1966 – and it was also the first nation to crash-land a spacecraft onto any body in space. (That first-ever was waaaaaaayyyyyy back in 1959, when a Soviet spacecraft intentionally crashed onto the Moon.)

Crash-landing is cool – scientists get all kinds of data and photos transmitted back until the actual moment of impact – but soft-landing is even cooler. With a soft-landing, the spacecraft can continue to take photos and gather and send information about everything from soil and air to temperature and other weather conditions. Also, of course, manned expeditions have to be soft landings.

But soft-landing isn't incredibly easy. The Soviets had to try four times to do a soft-landing on the Moon before they succeeded. And the Moon is way easier than Venus – it's closer, of course, and it has no atmosphere. Venera 4, 5, and 6 were apparently crushed by atmospheric pressure before they could impact Venus! 

Hoo, boy, that atmosphere of Venus! It's incredibly thick – about 90 times more mass pushing on every inch of the spacecraft than Earth's air does. And it's got a thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds – yes, the burn-the-skin, poisonous kind of acid! And it's really, really hot! The greenhouse effect we're nervous about here on Earth – often called global warming or global climate change – has really gone crazy on Venus, and day-time temperatures reach more than 460 degrees C (which is 860 degrees F!!!).

But after having several spacecraft being crushed by Venus's atmosphere before they could be crushed by slamming onto the ground, Soviet engineers were able to build a space probe that could withstand the pressure and the acidic clouds

and the heat. The Venera 7 parachute might not have worked perfectly, because the spacecraft hit the ground harder than desired. And the probe seemed to go silent as soon as it did the not-all-that-soft soft-landing. But after a few weeks Soviet scientists discovered that a really weak signal had been transmitted for 20 minutes and was sitting, waiting to be discovered, on their recordings. 

Our best guess is that, after landing, the probe had fallen on its side and therefore the medium-gain antenna was not able to send a strong signal to Earth. 

Thanks to Venera 7, humans learned for the first time just how hellish Venus is!

The photo above is from a much later U.S. spacecraft,
and the picture below is an artist's attempt to show us what Venus
would look like from the surface.

(By the way, back in the long-ago past, people hoped that there would be all sorts of lifeforms and maybe even human-like creatures living on Venus.)


Here is a strange video called "A Walk on Venus." Of course it is totally fiction -- humans haven't ever landed on another planet -- not yet, at least! -- although of course astronauts have walked on the Moon.





Also on this date:







































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