Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...main electrical circuits is lifeless," Swigert radioed. "It's off. It's dead." The mysterious blast had also affected two of the service module's three fuel cells, which produce the bulk of the command module's vital electrical power. It quickly became obvious that a moon landing was now out of the question; mission rules forbid a lunar landing if even one fuel cell becomes inoperative. The loss of two requires the earliest possible return to earth. Even worse, the second oxygen tank was now also rapidly spilling its precious cargo. Unless the venting could be stopped, there would...
Aquarius responded well, but mission planners were still faced with a number of agonizing decisions. How could they best bring the distressed spacecraft home as quickly as possible but with a minimum of risk? A "deep-space abort"?turning the spacecraft around before it reached the moon and sending it back to earth?was obviously beyond the power of the lunar module's small descent engine. Odyssey's big propulsion engine, in the service module, was powerful enough to turn Apollo in midflight, but Houston was reluctant to try using it. Controllers were concerned that the engine might have...
...astronauts could use a small burn of the Aquarius descent engine to jog Apollo 13 back into a "free-return" trajectory, the combination of the spacecraft's velocity and lunar gravity would do the rest, slinging the ship around the moon and hurling it back on a direct course to the earth. Ironically, Apollo had been on a free-return trajectory, but its course was changed in preparation for the lunar landing...
Thus, five hours and 25 minutes after the service-module explosion, the lunar module's descent engine was fired. Had it not burned, Apollo 13 would have swung around the moon but missed the earth on the return trip by 2,951 miles and gone into a wide-ranging earth orbit, stranding the astronauts. But the lunar module engine performed reliably. With only a 30.7-second burn, it put Apollo 13 on a course that would carry it toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Houston?and the world?breathed easier, but Mission Control knew that the burn was only...
There were additional alternatives, but the choice was not simple. If the astronauts could successfully fire the service module's powerful engine behind the moon, they would splash down in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil in only 38 hours. Again Mission Control decided not to risk firing a possibly damaged engine. If, on the other hand, the 26-ton service module were jettisoned after rounding the moon, a long burn of the small Aquarius descent engine would impart about the same velocity to the lightened spacecraft, setting it down in the South Atlantic in less than 40 hours...