LiveChat Roundup - 5/4/2012

By Jim Gerard, NASA INSPIRE Education Specialist, KSC, FL

Happy International Star Wars Day! May the Fourth Be With You!

That said, we had a great chat last night with Johnson Space Center engineer Stuart McClung, who heads up the Orion Parachute Development project at JSC. The 43 INSPIRE students had to be patient, as Mr. McClung had some firewall issues connecting with Blackboard Collaborate. So, as with most NASA projects, we set up our redundant fall-back plan and had Mr. McClung call in by telephone. If you watch the chat via the archive you may not even notice a difference. Once the telephone link was made, the presentation began.

While last weeks chat was about the Orion spacecraft as a whole, Mr. McClung focused in on the development and testing of the primary landing system - the parachutes. While the Space Shuttle orbits at 17500 mph (Mach 25), the returning Orion will hit the atmosphere at 25000 mph (Mach 35), and must be slowed to 17 mph when it hits the water. Deceleration down to Mach .5 will be done entirely by the atmosphere, converting the kinetic energy to thermal energy and dissipating that with the same ablative heat shield used in the Apollo spacecraft. The parachutes will do the rest of the work to give the astronauts on board a safe splashdown into the ocean.

Testing these parachutes has involved multiple drops from US Air Force C-130 and C-17 cargo planes. Not all were successful, but each failure provided data to refine the procedure to produce a safer and more reliable method of recovery. More drop test will finally lead to Experimental Test Flight 1 (EFT-1). Launched via Delta IV Heavy booster, an Orion capsule will orbit the earth twice at a low inclination to the equator, but high altitude to simulate the angle and velocity of the capsule returning from a deep space mission. This will prove the design, and enable NASA to push toward the day that astronauts will leave the earth aboard a US built and flown spacecraft.

Sign up now for two new chats next week! Tuesday night will host a chat with our INSPIRE winners of the RealWorld-InWorld Design Challenge, and on Thursday a chat from Langley Research Center on Computer Flight Control. Sign up on the Discussion Board!