It’s the last day in

It’s the last day in the office before Christmas, and as such, there’s not really much going on. Oh! Except that shuttle mission thing. Yeah, that. It’s landing today…somewhere…anywhere. All three landing sites in the U.S. have been called up: Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Edwards Air Force Base in California, and the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. The first chance to land at KSC has already been called off due to rain showers and generally unstable weather, and Florida’s just not looking good in general. Too bad, since KSC is by far the preferred landing site since all they have to do there is tow the orbiter back to the processing facility. At Edwards or White Sands, of course they have to load it on the NASA 747 and fly it back to Florida.
The only problem is that the weather isn’t looking too great at Edwards either. We may actually be headed towards a landing at White Sands — something that has only happened once in the shuttle program, way back on STS-3 in 1982. That particular landing got a horrible reputation because the orbiter ended up full of sand and grit that took a bunch of extra time to clean up. Plus, White Sands doesn’t have the facilities that Edwards and KSC do. But we could land there, which might actually be cool since it’s something different! But the extra processing time would surely postpone the next mission scheduled to use Discovery. Pros and cons, pros and cons.
Here’s hoping for a speedy and safe landing!
Johnny Tri tagged me with the Blog Book tag game, so here you go:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.
I’m at work, so my nearest book is not that exciting — it’s my ARD Support Console Handbook. There isn’t one author, however, I’m currently the handbook manager (in charge of maintaining and updating it) so I guess you could say that I am the author!
Page 123…let’s see, this page is about the background of the ARD mass track, which is a complicated counter that keeps track of how much propellant is left in the shuttle as it ascends from the ground to space.
The sentences requested are: “Prior to lift-off, the ARD is configured with specific mass properties and engine characteristics. This defines a mass and mass flowrate profile that, in turn, defines an acceleration profile. If the real vehicle mass or flowrate differs from what is planned (and loaded into the ARD), the vehicle acceleration profile will differ from the ARD.”
So there’s your lesson in the Abort Region Determinator for today. 🙂