How do you lose a rocket booster?
December 4, 2015 7:00 AM   Subscribe

A decades old mystery is now solved! After many attempts searching through Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) images, the Apollo 16 S-IVB rocket booster impact site has been identified.

During the Apollo exploration of the Moon, beginning with Apollo 13, the massive, upper stage (known as the S-IVB stage) that helped propel astronauts to the Moon, were directed to impact the Moon. The energy from these impacts was measured by seismometers left on the surface (by previous Apollo astronauts) to understand the internal structure of the Moon. [...] In the case of Apollo 16, radio contact with the booster was lost before the impact and thus the impact location was only poorly known.
posted by tocts (15 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is that a penis in your pocket?
posted by fairmettle at 7:27 AM on December 4, 2015


There is something really neat about seeing a 40+ year old smear on the Moon that was put there by humans. Neater still that it is so fresh and untouched and will remain fresh and untouched for thousands of years.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, one of my favorite things ever is seeing spaceships from other spaceships.
posted by bondcliff at 7:30 AM on December 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Smashing!
posted by Capt. Renault at 7:34 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


And cue the moon landing hoaxsters in 3..2..1..
posted by briank at 7:37 AM on December 4, 2015


Good, now that they found it they can go clean it up. Nothing worse than a litterer.
posted by backseatpilot at 7:45 AM on December 4, 2015


Humans for scale
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:48 AM on December 4, 2015


"... traveling at relatively low velocity (2.6 km per second, 5800 mph)."

Ah, subtle, dry, engineer humor.
posted by k5.user at 7:53 AM on December 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


Is that a penis in your pocket?

Yes, but don't worry, it's not mine.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:54 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Nothing worse than a litterer.

Oops: "The S-IVB booster can be imagined as an empty soda can hitting the surface"

But wait, there's more!

"just an outer metal shell with very little interior mass (all of the fuel was used to send the astronauts toward the Moon and the tanks were empty). During the impact, much of the energy went into crushing the booster and only a shallow crater was formed."

I imagine the black and white paint scheme of the Apollo rockets against the grey of the Lunar dust.
posted by Gelatin at 7:59 AM on December 4, 2015


Ah, subtle, dry, engineer humor.

In spaceflight? 2.6km/s is pretty slow. LEO velocity is about 8km/s*, New Horizons, after the burn of the last booster stage, was moving out at 16.2km/s.


* Launches from the Earth's surface need about 10km/s of ΔV, 2km/s are lost to gravity and atmospheric drag, the rest is the velocity needed to stay in orbit. Again, getting to space is easy, rockets the size of telephone poles can hit 1000km above the surface, but they fall right back down. Getting to orbit is *much* harder, because you need to not only get up there, you then need to add about 8km/s to the velocity to stay up there.
posted by eriko at 8:03 AM on December 4, 2015


I have said it before and I'll say it again, one of my favorite things ever is seeing spaceships from other spaceships.

Have you seen this recent one?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:07 AM on December 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


Random Apollo 16 trivia:

The Commander, John Young, was the second man to visit the Moon twice. He had previously been the Command Module Pilot (CMP) on Apollo 10, which was a practice run for the Moon landing.

The CMP for this mission was Ken Mattingly, who had been bumped from Apollo 13 for fear of him getting measles in lunar orbit.

Random high res image from the lunar surface.


View of the Apollo 17 S-IVB after separation.

Before leaving lunar orbit, the crew launched a small satellite, who's erratic behavior helped NASA figure out the odd dynamics of low lunar orbits.

At some point on the flight, one of the astronauts, Ken Mattingly (CMP) lost his wedding band. Later, when he was doing a spacewalk on the way back to earth (collecting film canisters), the ring floated out of the cockpit, bounced off the astronaut standing in the doorway and towards Mattingly, who managed to catch it.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:11 AM on December 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


In spaceflight? 2.6km/s is pretty slow. LEO velocity is about 8km/s*, New Horizons, after the burn of the last booster stage, was moving out at 16.2km/s.

And compared to other lunar meteorite strikes, slow. Here's a moon strike recorded via MIDAS with an impact velocity of about 17 kms-1, so coming in a little faster than New Horizons went out. arxiv.
posted by zamboni at 9:43 AM on December 4, 2015


Ben Feist, big brother of *the* Feist, *that* Feist, has put together a site which does a real-time broadcast of the Apollo 17 mission.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:37 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Since the dawn of time, mankind has yearned to destroy the moon..."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:41 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


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