Word: instrumentations
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...island was four miles, with scattered clouds at 12,000 ft. Burnham zeroed in on Nantucket-and ran into one of the island's murky flash fogs, rolling in from the sea with bewildering speed. Burnham, using Nantucket's Visual Omni Range beam, prepared for an instrument approach. But the fog thickened until even VOR was ineffectual. With its field socked in, Nantucket tried to warn the Convair by voice radio-and could not reach it. Flight 258 came in for its landing, flying low over scrub pines. It plowed into the ground 600 feet to the left...
...after Parsons had cut the umbilical cord linking Little Boy and the Enola Gay, the bomb was "final"-a mighty instrument of war. Four minutes from the unsuspecting target city, Parsons threw the toggle switch that put Little Boy on its own battery power. At 0915 on that sunny August morning, Little Boy fell free, tail ticking. Four clocks, four barometric switches, four radar rigs inside Little Boy measured the fall. After 15 long seconds, Little Boy began listening for the faint echoes of its own radar signals to earth. On the igth echo-800 ft. above the rooftops...
Inertial navigation systems are only as old as guided missiles, which brought to a head the brewing problem of modern aerial navigation: how to get a fix at great speed while all the usual sun and star angles are constantly changing. Solution: an instrument that records and remembers earth distance and direction traveled from a known starting point. One of the best systems was developed by North American Aviation, Inc. for the Navaho missile. The Navaho was scrapped, but last February the Navy ordered a Navaho guidance system installed in Nautilus. It was aboard the sub nine weeks later...
Earth-Angled. In inertial navigation, every motion of a ship in any direction is accounted for and automatically computed to give precise distance traveled. The key instrument is an accelerometer -a container holding a weight that can move, against springs, toward one end or the other. The weight acts like a man's head that is jerked back because a cab driver starts suddenly. The weight thus measures a vehicle's thrust (acceleration), and from this information, an electronic computer can determine the vehicle's velocity. Inertial navigation uses two accelerometers, one to measure all north-south...
...weights must move along tangents to the earth's circumference. Otherwise, gravity, as well as lateral movement, would affect the weights. To hold the accelerometers steady, they are hinged to platforms, stabilized by gyroscopes, which keep an unchanging relationship to the earth (the platform of the north-south instrument, for instance, is always at the same angle to the polar axis). But the accelerometers do not remain immovable. Holding their tangential position, they must slowly tip on their platforms as the ship moves. What tips them is a motor that takes its electric cues from the accelerometers...