Saturday, May 4, 2019

Apollo 13

Apollo 13
After the landing of the Apollo 11 on the moon, six more Apollo missions followed by the end of 1972. Apollo 13 was one such mission, and was intended to be NASA’s third moon-landing mission. However, a malfunction in the rocket turned the mission into one for survival.  The spaceflight stands today as a demonstration of NASA innovation saving lives on the fly, and has been featured in a movie.
The astronauts on the mission were Jack Swigert, Jim Lovell, and Fred Haise. Lovell was the world's most traveled astronaut. He had three missions and 572 spaceflight hours of experience. He was in Apollo 8, the first mission to circle the moon, and flew two Gemini missions.
 The Apollo spacecraft was made up of two independent spacecraft joined by a tunnel: orbiter Odyssey, and lander Aquarius. The crew lived in Odyssey on the journey to the moon. It was launched on April 11, 1970. However, on April 13, when they were nearing the moon, mission controller Liebergot noticed a low-pressure warning on a hydrogen tank. At first, they thought that the hydrogen tank just needed to be resettled- a fairly routine procedure. Moments later though, power disappeared and oxygen pressured dropped. The crew notified Mission Control, with Swigert famously uttering, "Houston, we've had a problem." (It was the movie that changed the line to “Houston, we have a problem").
Luckily, the Aquarius was functional enough to provide a place for the crew to stay until they neared Earth. The Aquarius didn’t have a heat shield, so they would need to be in the Odyssey for entry. The crew was forced to power down every non-essential system in Aquarius to preserve power. They had no source of heat and had to ration food and water.
Lovell, Haise and Swigert returned safely to the Pacific Ocean on April 17. Despite the mission being aborted, it was called a "successful failure" because of the experience gained in rescuing the crew.The spacecraft design was reconfigured with better wires and an extra tank, and subsequent missions did not face the same problem.
In 1994, Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger co-wrote a book about Lovell's spaceflight career that primarily focused on the events of the Apollo 13 mission. The book was called "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13", and spurred the movie "Apollo 13" (1995), which starred Tom Hanks. The movie won two Academy Awards and was filmed in cooperation with NASA.

Sources:
https://www.space.com/17250-apollo-13-facts.html

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