Appolo 1

Apollo 1 is the official name that was later given to the never-flown Apollo/Saturn 204 (AS-204) mission.

 It's command module (CM-012) was destroyed by fire during a test and training exercise on January 27, 1967 at Pad 34 (Launch Complex 34, Cape Canaveral, then known as Cape Kennedy) atop a Saturn IB rocket. 

The crew aboard were the astronauts selected for the first manned Apollo program mission: Command PilotVirgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. All three died in the fire.

Even though the ignition source of the fire was never conclusively identified, the astronauts' deaths were attributed to a wide range of lethal design hazards in the early Apollo command module. 

Among these were the use of a high-pressure 100 percent-oxygen atmosphere for the test, wiring and plumbing flaws, flammable materials in the cockpit (such as Velcro), an inward-opening hatch that would not open in this kind of an emergency and the flight suits worn by the astronauts

A seven-member board conducted a comprehensive investigation to pinpoint the cause of the fire and  

the final report  was  submitted to the NASA Administrator. 

The report presented the results of the investigation and made specific recommendations that led to major design and engineering modifications, and revisions to test planning, test discipline, manufacturing processes and procedures, and quality control. 

With these changes, the overall safety of the command and service module and the lunar module was increased substantially. The AS-204 mission was redesignated Apollo I in honor of the crew.

AS-204 was to be the first manned flight of a command and service module (CSM) to Earth orbit, launched on a Saturn 1B. CM-012, the Apollo 1 command module, was a Block I design built for spaceflight but never intended for a trip to the moon since it lacked the needed docking equipment.

The AS-204 mission was scheduled for the first quarter of 1967, having already missed a target date for the last quarter of 1966. The flight was to test "launch operations, ground tracking and control facilities and the performance of the Apollo-Saturn launch assembly" and would have lasted up to two weeks, depending on how the spacecraft performed.

Quick facts on Appolo 1

Launch Pad :Pad 34-A (7)

Rocket: Saturn-1B AS-204 (4)

CSM-x ()

Apollo Pad Fire

Crew

• Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Command Pilot
• Edward H. White II, Senior Pilot
• Roger B. Chaffee, Pilot

Backup crews

April - December 1966

• • James McDivitt, Command Pilot
  • David Scott, Senior Pilot
  • Rusty Schweickart, Pilot

This crew flew on Apollo 9.

• December 1966 - January 1967
  • Walter Schirra, Command Pilot
  • Donn Eisele, Senior Pilot
  • Walter Cunningham, Pilot

This crew flew on Apollo 7.

The Appolo Program

The Apollo Program was a human spaceflight program undertaken by NASA during the years 1961–1975 with the goal of conducting manned moon landing missions. 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It was accomplished on July 20, 1969 by the landing of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Michael Collins orbiting above during the Apollo 11 mission.

 Five other Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last one in 1972. These six Apollo spaceflights are the only times humans have landed on another celestial body.The Apollo program, specifically the lunar landings, is often cited as the greatest achievement in human history.

Apollo was the third human spaceflight program undertaken by NASA, the space agency of the United States. It used Apollo spacecraft and Saturn launch vehicles, which were later used for the Skylab program and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. These later programs are thus often considered to be part of the overall Apollo program.

The Apollo program included a large number of uncrewed test missions and 11 crewed missions. The 11 crewed missions include two Earth orbiting missions, two lunar orbiting missions, a lunar swingby and six Moon landing missions.

Click on the button and check out the updated Apollo interactive (Requires Flash Player).

The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Six of the missions -- Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 -- achieved this goal. Lunar surface experiments included soil mechanics, meteoroids, seismic, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields and solar wind experiments

Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit another celestial body.

Apollos 7, which tested the Command Module, and 9, which tested both the Command Module and Lunar Module, were Earth orbiting missions. Apollos 8 and 10 tested various components while orbiting the Moon, and returned photography of the lunar surface. Apollo 13 did not land on the lunar surface due to a malfunction, but during the brief orbit around the Moon, the crew was able to collect photographs.

The goal of the program, as articulated by President Kennedy, was accomplished with only two major failures.

 The first failure resulted in the deaths of three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire. 

The second was an in-space explosion on Apollo 13, which badly damaged the spacecraft on the moonward leg of its journey. The three astronauts aboard narrowly escaped with their lives, thanks to the efforts of flight controllers, project engineers, backup crew members and the skills of the astronauts themselves.Apollo 17 marks the time of the last moonwalk and also the last manned mission beyond low Earth orbit.

After the last lunar landing, total funding for the Apollo program was about $19,408,134,000. The budget allocation was 34 percent of the NASA budget.

The program set major milestones in the history of human spaceflight. This program stands alone in sending manned missions beyond low Earth orbit. 

From today i shall bring to you information on the Appolo Program , mission by mission

starting from Appolo 1 going till Appolo 17..

Chandrayaan 1- Mission to the moon

ISRO is the best one who can tell you about Chandrayaan here is the link to the ISRO Brochure

but if you wish to read on please do:

What is Chandrayaan-1??

On 56th indepence day, August 15 2003, India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced. “Our country is now ready to fly high in the field of science. I am pleased to announce that India will send her own spacecraft to the moon by 2008. It is being named Chandrayaan-1″. In Sanskrit (language of Ancient India) “Chandrayaan” means “Moon Craft”. 

Moon has always fascinated Indians from ancient days and now 21st century india is ready to land on moon! Chandrayaan-1 is the first mission towords the dream. 

In Chandrayaan-1, the lunar craft would be launched using Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) weighing 1304 kg at launch and 590 kg at lunar orbit. Lunar craft would orbit around moon 100 km from moon surface. 

Objective

Scientific Objectives

The Chandrayaan-1 mission is aimed at high-resolution remote sensing of the moon in visible, near infrared (NIR), low energy X-rays and high-energy X-ray regions.

Specifically the objectives are: 

i) To prepare a three-dimensional atlas (with high spatial and altitude resolution of 5-10 m) of both near and far side of the moon. 

ii)To conduct chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface for distribution of mineral and chemical elements such as Magnesium, Aluminum, Silicon, Calcium, Iron and Titanium as well as high atomic number elements such as Radon, Uranium & Thorium with high spatial resolution.

The Simultaneous photo geological, mineralogical and chemical mapping through Chandrayaan-1 mission will enable identification of different geological units to infer the early evolutionary history of the Moon. 

The chemical mapping will enable to determine the stratigraphy and nature of the Moon’s crust and thereby test certain aspects of magma ocean

Mission Objectives

1.To realise the mission goal of harnessing the science payloads, lunar craft and the launch vehicle with suitable ground support systems including Deep Space Network (DSN) station. 

2.To realise the integration and testing, launching and achieving lunar polar orbit of about 100 km, in-orbit operation of experiments, communication/ telecommand, telemetry data reception, quick look data and archival for scientific utilisation by scientists.

Mission Sequence

(sorry but i have obtained this data from the ISRO webite so it may be a bit too technical for your liking..)

1:Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR, Sriharikota by PSLV-XL (PSLV-C11) on 22 October 2008 at 06:22 hrs IST in an highly elliptical initial orbit (IO) with perigee (nearest point to the Earth) of 255 km and an apogee (farthest point from the Earth) of 22,860 km, inclined at an angle of 17.9 deg to the equator. In this initial orbit, Chandrayaan orbited the Earth once in about six and a half hours.

2:Subsequently, the spacecraft’s Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) firing was done on 23 October at 09:00 hrs IST, when the spacecraft was near perigee, to raise the apogee to 37,900 km while the perigee to 305 km. The spacecraft took eleven hours to go round the Earth once.

3:The orbit was further raised to 336 km x 74,715 km on 25 October at 05:48 hrs IST. In this orbit, spacecraft took about twenty-five and a half hours to orbit the Earth once.

4:The LAM was fired again on 26 October at 07:08 hrs IST to take the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to extremely high elliptical orbit with apogee 164,600 km and perigee at 348 km. Chandrayaan-1 took about 73 hours to go round the Earth once

5:On 29 October, orbit raising was carried out at 07:38 hrs IST to raise the apogee to 267,000 km and perigee to 465 km. Chandrayaan’s present orbit extends more than half the way to moon and takes about six days to orbit the Earth

6:On 4 November at 04:56 hrs IST, Chandrayaan entered the Lunar Transfer Trajectory with an apogee of 380,000 km

7:On November 8 at 16:51 hrs IST, the spacecraft’s Liquid engine was fired to reduce its velocity to insert the spacecraft in the Lunar orbit (LOI) and enable lunar gravity to capture it. As a result, the spacecraft goes in an elliptical orbit with periselene (nearest point to the moon) of 504 km and aposelene (farthest point from the moon) of 7,502 km

8:The first orbit reduction manoeuvre has been carried out successfully on November 9 at 20:03 hrs IST. The spacecraft is now in lunar orbit with 200 km periselene. The aposelene remains unchanged (i.e 7,502 km).

9:After careful and detailed observation, a series of three orbit reduction manoeuvres were successfully carried out and the spacecraft’s orbit was reduced to its intended operational 100 km circular polar orbit on November 12

10: On 14 November at 20:06 hrs IST, the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) was ejected from the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft and hard landed on the lunar surface near the South Polar Region at 20:31 hrs IST after 25 minutes journey. It placed the Indian tricolour, which was pasted on the sides of MIP on the Moon.

11: Currently, the scientific instruments/payloads are being commissioned sequentially and exploration of Moon with the array of onboard instruments have begun.

Black Hole

A black hole is a theoretical region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic radiation (e.g.visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon.In simple words ,a black hole is like a vaccum cleaner...but different..

when you use a vaccum cleaner, you will see the dirt, and crumbs start to move towards the vacuum cleaner.  A black hole is similar to a vacuum cleaner,cleaning up debris left behind in outer space.(this is just a simple defintion to give you the picture....it's not actually like a vaccum cleaner at all as you will see later in this post)

But,it is not suction power that makes things fall into a black hole.  Suction would not be strong enough.  Instead a black hole uses the power of gravity to pull things towards it. 

            

 Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of stars at least 10 to 15 times as massive as the Sun. If a star that massive or larger undergoes a supernova explosion, it may

 leave behind a fairly massive burned out stellar remnant. With no outward forces to oppose gravitational forces, the remnant will collapse in on itself .

The star eventually collapses to the point of zero volume and infinite density, creating what is known as a "singularity ". (Singularity is a term often used to refer to the center of a black hole, where the curvature of spacetime is maximal. At the singularity, the gravitational tides diverge; no solid object can even theoretically survive hitting the singularity).

     As the density increases, the path of light rays emitted from the star are bent and eventually wrapped irrevocably around the star. Any emitted photons are trapped in

to an orbit by the intense gravitational field; they will never leave it. Because no light escapes after the star reaches this infinite density, it is called a black hole.

 But contrary to popular myth,and the simple defintion that i gave earlier, a black hole is not a cosmic vacuum cleaner. If our Sun was suddenly replaced with a black hole of the same mass, the earth's orbit around the Sun would be unchanged. (Of course the Earth's temperature would change, and there would be no solar wind or solar magnetic storms affecting us!we probably wont survive if this happens)    To be "sucked" into a black hole, one has

 to cross inside the Schwarzchild radius. At this radius, the escape speed is equal to the speed of light, and once light passes through, even it cannot escape.

  A common question is that "If we can't see them then, how do know that they are there?" 

Since black holes are small (only a few to a few tens of kilometers in size{this may sound big but it is really small when you consider the whole universe}), and light that would allow us to see them cannot escape,thus, seeing a black hole floating alone in space would be hard, if not impossible, to see. 

However, if a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, or is close to another "normal" star, the black hole can accreate matter into itself. As the matter falls or is pulled towards the black hole, it gains kinetic energy, heats up and is squeezed by tidal forces. The heatingionises the atoms, and when the atoms reach a few million degrees Kelvin, they emit X-Rays. The X-rays are sent off into space before the matter crosses the Schwarzschild radius and crashes into the singularity. Thus we can see this X-ray emission.

    Some of you must have heard about wormholes and wondered what it is.....If you ever dreamt of travelling through space in a wormhole,then im sorry to dissapoint you...but as far as i know, worm holes are more science fiction than they are science fact.

 

A wormhole, in theory, is an  opening in space-time that one could use to travel to far away places very quickly. The wormhole itself is two copies of the black hole geometry connected by a throat - the throat, or passageway, is called an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It has never been proved that worm holes exist and there is no experimental evidence for them, but it is fun to think about the possibilities their existence might create. so keep dreaming...you may just find that travelling through wormholes is possible...

The Universe

The Universe is a huge wide-open space that holds everything from the smallest particle to the biggest galaxy.... 
No one knows just how big the Universe is... Astronomers are trying to measure it all the time but so far an exact size has never been found and probably never will be. 
About 13 billion years ago, a powerful explosion called the Big Bang took place and this set the Universe into motion and it continues today. 
This motion may stop, change direction, or keep going forever. 
The universe is so vast and full of surprises....no one exactly knows what may happen next....every second,many stars are born and at the same time many of them die. All the stars nebulae,supernovas,quasars ,black holes and all make the universe a truly wonderful place to study. 
one thing though which bothers me as well as many others is a question... 

"Is anybody out there?" 

through this blog i'll bring forward whatever i know about the universe,and also about our ventures into space....