It is raining here as another winter storm bears down on California, so I thought I’d be lazy. WUWT readers like a puzzle. This is a relatively easy one I think -take your best guess as to what caused the big dust plume, then see the answer and more photos after the break.
Soyuz TMA-18 Descent Module Landing
A comment on Reddit claims the dust below is from retro rockets fired just before landing to soften impact, and not from the impact itself.
The four-quadrant dominant plumes appear to support that claim.
full slide show here
Just think, 20 years ago these would be top secret photos, my how the world has changed.
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Well, there goes the Soyuz soft landing mechanism. We can’t have that pesky CO2 sprayed about so haphazardly anymore
Climate Progress has a problem with commenters who attempt to post refutational information to his silly conclusory pronouncements. I can’t get anything on screen yet.
“It was a missile.”
Oh, sorry, wrong thread …
/sarc
.
A fine replica of the “acorn-shaped” UFO that landed in Norvelt Pennsylvania oh so many years ago.
PhilM says:
November 20, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I think it happened as the Apollo program wound down to its early termination. A combination of having no plan of what to do after Apollo reached its political goal, and some of the protests from the civil rights movement about funding moon walks but not minority schools, plus Watergate and all that other stuff led to abandoning the team that could put people on the Moon.
When people gripe “We can put a man on the Moon but we can’t cure the common cold,” I point out:
1) We can’t put a man on the Moon any longer.
2) Learning how to cure the common cold is the harder task.
Skylab was a program to take advantage of leftover Apollo hardware while the Space
Shuttle was built and intended to be a fast turnaround vehicle.
Enjoy your lazy Saturday 🙂
You deserve it.
You mean when your own leadership runs out of money.
Amazing.
Amazing it managed to land right alongside those lonely truck tire tracks going diagnally across the screen. What a coincidence. If I were a more suspicious person I might suspect the truck is what dropped off the capsule and then got out of the frame while the action shots were taken.
Actually that was filmed outside the moon landing sound stage here in Houston.
pat says:
November 20, 2010 at 1:22 pm (Edit)
Climate Progress has a problem with commenters who attempt to post refutational information to his silly conclusory pronouncements. I can’t get anything on screen yet.
Keep trying, I’ve managed to sneak a few in under the radar.
This was the best, in response to a ludicrous ocean heating graphic:
“I can see you’ve had the crayon box open again Joe, but have you seen the latest OHC data?”
Darn! I was sure it was Al Gore landing in Cancun.
[+1. ~dbs]
I thought it was the payload from the Trident missile launched off the Southern California coast at dusk instead of after dark because somebody forgot about setting the clocks back. Oops, I mean the airplane.
Dave Springer says: “Amazing it managed to land right alongside those lonely truck tire tracks going diagnally across the screen.”
I should point out that, from a topological standpoint, there are an infinite number of points that satisfy that condition.
I thought it might have been Stardust’s abortive landing recently when the helicopter missed hooking its drag chute. I was hoping it was a drag chute that deployed too late in a racing vehicle James Cameron was driving for a new movie starring Al Gore who was also in the vehicle.
Aha, so that’s the conclusion to the mysterious missile plumes over Cali earlier.
And the detonation like plumes upon landing is the from having squeezed three hippies into a too a small tin can trying to flee into orbit who, by the forces of gaia, aptly made it return too sudden too hard whereupon the three fat hippies expunged all their flatulence all at once at the same time in a really cramped and too small a place for all that gas to fit. Therefor the end kaboom-result. One can clearly see the evidence of all this what with the charcoaled scorched sides.
But question is, where’d they all go?
One giant steppe for mankind. 😉
Being a space junky for life, I knew exactly what this was because I watched the Apollo-Soyuz mission and the landing.
I do like the idea of alternate captions. How about:
1) Failed attempt at carbon sequestration.
2) Janet Napolitano enjoying burritos under a sun shade.
3) GM futures, illustrated.
4) Voters testing golden parachutes for former public officials.
“If the dust plume is from braking rockets wouldn’t the ground below the capsule be scorched?”
Never mind the ground, look at the capsule. Impressive picture, and for the occupants, I’m sure a better than average answer to ‘how was your commute?’ Even if I were to become rich and shameless enough to afford a break to the ISS, I think I’d wait till the ride home was a little more comfortable. Shame we seem to have given up on space exploration in favour of NASA’s navel gazing and rent seeking though.
Apollo had 3 chutes all of which worked except on Apollo 15 I think where only 2 opened(designed to be OK with that). Does that Soyuz have a reserve chute?
Cool!…. It would be great to be up there.
It would be great to go back to the Moon…. To send more probes to Venus, Mars, the outer planents, to do real science, instead of spending money and time on a Climate hoax….
Perhaps one day… Perhaps soon.
In no particular order, yes, Soyuz has a reserve chute, the retros are solid fuel (probably ammonium perchlorate composite, but I can’t find a reference), the diagonal track is a coincidence (the landing zone is in their equivalent of Kansas, lots of farmland and offroad vehicles), and the ground isn’t scorched because the plume blows the dirt away too fast. To scorch the surface requires something that doesn’t erode fast, like concrete- take a look at Masten or Armadillo’s videos on Youtube.
Rocket engines do a *great* job of blowing dirt around- when we tested our 5M15 engine at XCOR, just a few minutes’ worth of total run time removed a lot of dirt from the downwind end of the test stand pad, even when firing parallel to the surface.
An interesting detail about the solids- they are triggered by a gamma ray back scatter sensor, which detects mass, not anything light like grass, wheat, or snow (common ground cover in the area Soyuz usually lands). Clever design.
>Bernd Felsche says:
>November 20, 2010 at 5:42 pm
>One giant steppe for mankind. 😉
THAT was enough to make me laugh. Nice!
The round parachute terminating in a cloud of dust reminds me of a prized tee-shirt I had in my college skydiving days about 30 years ago- a very similar image, surrounded by the slogan “Feet, knees, forehead!” Man, was I glad to graduate to a ram-air canopy…
#2 (Janet under the sunshade …)