![]() After closing the hatch and sealing the vehicle away from the ISS, springs launch the vehicle away from the space station.The journey back to Earth aboard a Soyuz vehicle takes about 3.5 hours. These include spacecraft such as the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shenzhou, and Soyuz programs that use ablative heat shields made of a special ceramic material designed to slowly burn away as the spacecraft encounters the high-temperature plasma flow in front of the bowshock associated with re-entry.Īstronauts often describe re-entry with ballistic capsules as a series of car crashes as opposed to the smooth glider-like landing of the space shuttle. The rescue teams would then assist the crew with egressing the space shuttle, including medical checks by flight surgeons.Įssentially, ballistic capsules are rockets and the parts of the spacecraft that astronauts ride back to Earth. ![]() The shuttle would then land similar to airplanes on runways with landing gear and a parachute deployed while rolling down the strip to help slow it down even further from about 200 mph.It utilized S turns and other flight patterns to increase drag, reduce speed, and reduce the heat that built up from the re-entry into the atmosphere.Next, the shuttle turned nose-first once out of orbit and entered the atmosphere with its belly down toward the atmosphere to use drag along its blunt bottom to help slow it down and then pull the nose up to about 40 degrees.First, the shuttle flew backward to slow down from orbit speed, and then the orbital maneuvering engines (OMS) would thrust it out of orbit and toward Earth.The shuttles were gliders, meaning they were able to adjust their flight pattern to help reduce the amount of heat building up including S turns, making re-entry not too dissimilar from landing in an airplane. ![]() (Columbia’s RCC was damaged during liftoff which caused it to burn up during reentry and was the reason for the Columbia disaster.) ![]() On the space shuttle, special silicone tiles on the aluminum skin helped provide insulation, but on the nose and edges of the wing where it would get hottest was a reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) composite. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |