Bad weather in Florida is forcing NASA to land the Shuttle at Edwards Air Force in California at 12:49 Pacific time. An hour before hand they’ll start the braking maneuvers to de-orbit. You can watch the landing on NASA TV, and I’ll be updating my Twitter page about it, too.
Update: You can also get the news from the official NASA Landing Blog.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
|
| Bad Astronomy is a Wikio Top Blog! Clearly, Wikio has excellent taste. | |
 | ||
 | Bad Astronomy was chosen as one of Time.com's Best Blogs of 2009. |
 |
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:52 am
They are Back Home!!
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
Niiiiiiiice!
Thanks for the heads-up.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:54 am
looks like its down and safe.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 am
Great news…I know I was a bit concerned about the thermal blanket.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 am
Ah. So that audio problem thing wasn’t just me. Good to know.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 am
It was purty!
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Ok, so why do they just let the shuttle sit there for so long after it touches down? Are they waiting for it to cool down or what? Shouldn’t the air have cooled it down after it slowed to its terminal velocity?
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:14 pm
According to one of the astronauts who was commenting on a news program, even an hour later the shuttle is still warm, and they can feel the hear coming off it when they disembark.
But some of the reasons it sits there so long is because checklists have to be gone through, switches have to be safed, etc. They can’t just land and jump out.
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Really. Huh. I’m surprised that it takes so long to cool down.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Here in inland SoCal, we heard a sonic boom earlier which we didn’t identify until I saw the Atlantis news story later. Very cool!
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:43 pm
There’s some info on post landing activity here:
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/nasafact/pdf/LandingSS-2005.pdf
June 22nd, 2007 at 10:23 pm
gopher65 said: “Really. Huh. I’m surprised that it takes so long to cool down.”
Remember, the tiles are like the coals in a firewalking fire – they may be hot, but they give out heat slowly. That way they don’t transfer heat to the Shuttle’s structure underneath.
June 23rd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
gopher65 Says: “Ok, so why do they just let the shuttle sit there for so long after it touches down? Are they waiting for it to cool down or what? Shouldn’t the air have cooled it down after it slowed to its terminal velocity?”
There are two things at work here. First is heat dissipation, which has already been mentioned. Those tiles are specifically designed to have INCREDIBLY slow heat propagation. This is, of course, to prevent the friction and compression heat from reaching the aircraft structure during reentry, but once the tiles are heated up, they are just as slow to cool off. There’s a famous publicity photo of a chunk of tile material that had been heated to incandescence, but someone (whom I hope got hazardous duty pay) is shown holding it by the corners with their bare fingers!
The second issue is volatiles. The APU’s in the tail end (which run the hydraulic pumps and other miscellaneous equipment) run off of hydrazine, which is both toxic and corrosive. They want to make sure that the H’zine and other volatiles have completely dissipated before approaching the vehicle.
- Jack