Word: sextant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SURVEYOR 3 was sent to the moon 31 months ago and was not seen again until Astronaut Richard Gordon, in lunar orbit aboard Yankee Clipper last week, spotted it through his tracking sextant. Yet NASA months ago had planned the entire Apollo 12 mission around a successful landing near Surveyor. How could the space agency know the exact location of this tiny target in the vastness of the Ocean of Storms? The answer lies in a remarkable bit of space-age detective work...
...Charles Stark Draper, 67, director of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To solve the problems of navigation, NASA went straight to the nation's leading authority on inertial guidance. The system devised by Draper for Apollo includes telescopes, a sextant, and a computerized inertial reference "platform" that tells astronauts where they are in space, where they are headed and how fast. But how could they be sure that it would work?, the NASA brass wanted to know. "I told them I'd go along and run it myself," recalls Draper. The on-board navigation...
...Using a sextant, they took star sightings and pinpointed lunar landmarks...
...from the well-functioning spacecraft, Astronauts Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele fought off ennui as they plodded through the humdrum housekeeping and engineering duties necessary to prove their craft moonworthy. They fired and refired the ship's big rocket engine and practiced sighting stars through a sextant; they tested their computers and cooling system, and transmitted to a ground station the same sort of signals a lunar module would send while returning from the surface of the moon. For astronauts and space watchers alike, the high points of the week were the television shows, shot with...
...astronauts will also at tempt to rendezvous with the burnt-out final stage of their launch rocket, using only a sextant and a telescope for direction finding; the Apollo command module is not equipped with rendezvous radar. During their week-and-a-half space journey, they will start Apollo's large, 20,500-lb.-thrust engine eight times to test its reliability. That engine literally means the difference between life and death. On actual moon missions, it will be used to guide an Apollo spacecraft into orbit around the moon, and, later, to fire the craft out of lunar...