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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Blowing dust (the orange cloud is dust lit up by sunset light):
http://www.xcor.com/gallery/main.php/v/engines/XR5M15/06-12-19_5M15_5882-01.jpg.html
Video compilation:
Masten VTVL melting the concrete:
…aaand that’s enough off-topic posts from me.
Did they get patted down before they were allowed to fly?
Cosmonauts look like they’re recovering from a 6 month bender.
TMA-18 looks like the old boiler we threw out 25 years ago. I wondered where it went.
AndrewG says:
November 21, 2010 at 12:38 am
“Did they get
patted downfelt up before they were allowed to fly?”Fixed that for ya!
Doug Jones says:
November 20, 2010 at 8:32 pm (Edit)
Very long hover! Lots of energy there, good control.
jorgekafkazar says:
November 20, 2010 at 3:33 pm
An interesting property of infinities is that some infinities can be bigger than other infinities.
For instance while it’s true there are an infinite number of points alongside the tire tracks it’s also true there is an infinitely larger number of points that are not alongside the tire tracks. So even though we’re dealing with infinities we can still talk about greater or lesser probabilities with confidence.
The notion another commenter put forward that the capsule was aiming for an X crossing of tire tracks is absurd on the face of it. The capsule lands where it lands due mostly to the accuracy and precision of its vector when it enters the atmosphere and to a lesser extent the winds aloft once the chute deploys. It has no means of course correction after the deorbital burn.
The slide show appears to show all three lucky cosmonauts being carried away from this landing, could not walk away from it, and the lady later in a hospital bed. So the Russians won the space race?
That is a scary looking little spacecraft.
Can we have some clippers now ?
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/1999/02/resurrecting-delta-clipper.html
The picture of the capsule on the ground looks very similar to published pictures of the chinese capsule that carried their first manned flight. Do the Chinese use Russian technology (or copy it) for their space program?
Phred says:
November 21, 2010 at 11:37 am
The picture of the capsule on the ground looks very similar to published pictures of the chinese capsule that carried their first manned flight. Do the Chinese use Russian technology (or copy it) for their space program?
Yes en no
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/shenzhou.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/fam/soyuz.htm
Robert – great links. Thank-you.
Michael Moon says:
November 21, 2010 at 8:45 am
The slide show appears to show all three lucky cosmonauts being carried away from this landing, could not walk away from it, and the lady later in a hospital bed. So the Russians won the space race?
========================
It’s amazing what six months in zero gravity can do to your muscles.
I can’t join the laments about the US losing the space race. What can humans do on the moon or Mars except huddle in a tiny capsule so they can breathe? Nobody is going to live there or do anything useful there.
Anything useful will be done by robots, and all these trips to Mars with the robotic landers crawling around may not find out much about Mars that is worth knowing, but they provide a lot of information about how to get a robot to the planet and keep it running. That is what counts, and eventually, the robots will be smart enough to do something useful.
And here I thought this was going to be about a new GM SUV commercial.
PS: America isn’t out of the Space Race, I hear the Chinese bought NASA for a song.
Well I wonder if that would work for cars; just have a retro-rocket in the front of the car; and have it fire when the car first contacts a tree; so the rocket slows the car and doesn’t bang up the tree too much.
Many years ago; when I worked for a much bgger name brand company; in a three storey building; the company sponsored a raw egg drop contest for the engineers; and anyone else who figured they could out design the MEs. The idea was to construct a vehicle into which you inserted a raw chicken egg, and these were all dropped from the roof of the building. Lots of us went up on the roof just for the heck of it; and to see these Rube Goldbergs dropped onto the hard concrete below.
All manner of contraptions were dropped, and the vast majority of them resulted in a suitably shattered egg.
One of my ME colleagues took his lunch up there with him; which consisted of one of those paper rolled “tubes” of Saltine crackers. So he was eating crackers; while everybody was dropping parachutes and boxes of packing foam and stuff. The machine was limited to no more than one foot in any dimension. He was down to his last dozen crackers by the time somebody asked him why he wasn’t competing; and he consumed another could while he was filling out the entry form and getting an egg.
So he dropped the egg down inside the paper tube on top of the last nine saltine cackers; and simply tossed the tube over the side. Well the crackers and egg weight kept the tube bottom downwards, and air drag held the open top of the tube upwards.
Then we all went down to the ground to examine all the messy broken egg machines, and this guy just handed them back his unbroken egg, and finished his lunch of nine more broken carckers.
So so sad that after the Shuttle is retired next year, the only way for humans to get out into space will be in those 1960-era Soviet spacecraft. Even the Chinese are copying them for their upcoming orbital flights. . . .
[It makes one wonder who really won the “space race” … The Chinese are infamous for thinking long term – for fighting the entire war, not just the first PR battle until the next news cycle is over. The next election is over. Robt]
Rub Adub says:
November 22, 2010 at 3:24 am
I can’t join the laments about the US losing the space race. What can humans do on the moon or Mars except huddle in a tiny capsule so they can breathe? Nobody is going to live there or do anything useful there.
Anything useful will be done by robots, and all these trips to Mars with the robotic landers crawling around may not find out much about Mars that is worth knowing, but they provide a lot of information about how to get a robot to the planet and keep it running. That is what counts, and eventually, the robots will be smart enough to do something useful.
When a geologist back on Earth sees something intresting through the rover-camera it will take two weeks to hit the brakes and make a 180 degree turn while a geologist in a spacesuit on the surface of Mars can do that in just under 5 minutes.
Agree with Rub Adub, why send monumentally expensive, manned spaceflights to the moon, which is minimally interesting/useful, when you can send cheap, much less risky robots to asteroids, Mars, the edge of the Solar System, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or moons of any of them, which are far more interesting than the dead, atmosphereless moon. NASA figured out that the moon was a dead end early on (except perhaps for military purposes), and moved on. The USA is far, far, far ahead of any other country when it comes to space exploration. NASA realized way back that it’s a huge waste of resources attempting manned space exploration vs. robot exploration. Smart people, they.