25 Years of Progress, Episode 9: Transition Years

[Applause] [Applause] [Music] hello I'm Lyn bondre R you're host for our series 25 years of progress our subject is some of the NASA activity during a quarter Century in this n99th episode we cover 1974 1975 and 1976 to put 1974 in perspective that is the year more than 20,000 persons die of small poox in India and at Nasa in 1974 progress continues including work on communication satellites airplane crash tests and solar energy it's called atsf well ATS stands for applications technology satellite Dr wner Von Brown is vice president for engineering and development Fairchild Industries builder of the soon toe launched atsf spacecraft through Master ground stations ATS will broadcast television programs to small inexpensive antenna receivers in other words for the first time here a satellite has enough power and enough beaming capability installed that the signal received on the ground is strong enough for reception essentially by a normal television receiver as a result we can equip thousands of remote locations with receiver sets that can uh get the benefit of direct television the most dominant part of ATS is its 30ft antenna that beams signals to the ground it's shown here unfolding as it will in space from its 23,000 M High orbit ATS can travel around the earth once every 24 hours since the Earth rotates at the same speed the satellite appears stationary during its first year of operation it will be put to good use over the United States one of its major jobs will be to provide Health Services to remote regions uh imagine uh a nurse in a remote uh settlement in Alaska is trying to give birth to a be baby and runs into a medical complication then she can talk back through the satellite using the satellite as a relay to get the advice and support from a medical doctor say in the contiguous uh States or even from Anchorage and he in turn can provide pictorial material as well as voice uh assistance to the nurse While She is delivering the baby on Real Time other besides the health services educational programs ranging from career guidance to teacher training will be telecast to those who need it most uh it has been estimated that in the Rocky Mountain States alone there are about 3 million adult illiterates in addition there of course the children who also sometimes have very marginal School opportunities now as far as Alaska is concerned uh there are about 300,000 people in Alaska and 50,000 of these people are estimated to live in settlements that have no permanent Road access and of course during the winter months and winter is about eight months in Alaska out of a year they are not accessible at all because of ice and snow and darkness so they are completely excommunicado and with this satellite system uh effective School service could be rendered to these settlements in Alaska as well during the second year of operation some 5,000 villages in India will receive telecasts from ATS this example was India where 70% of a population of 570 million people will B benefit from communication satellites by having uh uh at last some education available to themselves is a classical example of a program that allegedly uh uh was the sort of a thing only the super rich can afford is now directly benefiting the poorest of the [Music] poor in a joint project with the FAA NASA is beginning a light aircraft crash safety program at the Langley Research Center in Virginia this is one of 20 flood damaged planes that will be tested the actual facility was originally used by Apollo Astronauts to practice landing on the moon the 240 ft High by 400t long lunar Landing practice area is now laced with cables which are attached to the highly instrumented aircraft before it comes crashing to the ground dummies riding in the passenger seats are instrumented to measure G forces Engineers hope to learn what happens to an airframe Str structure when it impacts and to develop an analytical design tool that can be turned over to the designers and Builders of general aviation planes for this first checkout test the plane is complete except for tail section and engines comparable weights take the place of missing parts and the fuel tanks are filled with water for Weight and Balance this first crash was made at an impact speed of 30 mph future drops will be speeds up to 60 MPH 6 5 4 3 2 1 here you can see some of the resulting damage most of which was confined to the nose and underside of the aircraft crash worthiness tests like these May One Day lead to the design of lightweight aircraft that can absorb much of the Imp impact energy of a crash and hopefully reduce [Music] fatalities it's called emblems short for Integrated Medical and behavioral laboratory measurement system it was designed to medically monitor the well-being of astronauts on distant space flights the system use computers modern Communications and Advanced Medical instrumentation to transmit information on a patient at a remote site to doctors many miles away this will enable Physicians to diagnose conditions and prescribe treatment to train paramedics on the scene emblems if successful this design for space technology will improve health care and medical services to many isolated areas on Earth in just 3 days the sun delivers to us as much heat and light as would be produced by burning the Earth's entire oil and coal reserves plus all the wood of its [Music] forests Dr Harrison Schmid former astronaut and now NASA's assistant administrator for energy programs the big advantage to solar heating and cooling is that there are no fuel costs that through the years once it is installed the primary source of energy is the Sun and only modest amounts of other types of energy are needed in those few times when the sun is not shining and we cannot provide enough stored energy to operate the system this is an experimental solar house at NASA's Marshall space flight center in Huntsville Alabama unlike most houses energy from the Sun is used to heat and air condition this reduces that large portion of most utility bills that go to pay for getting energy from the utility source to the home here's how the collectors on the roof of the solar house work water-filled tubes inside the solar panels absorb the sun's heat using it for direct hot water heating and to operate an absorption refrigeration unit for cooling now let's move into the uh house itself and see what's going on in there as we come into the solar house we see a standard air conditioning unit absorption type air conditioning unit and a heating unit for winter use in the Next Room we have something that you normally wouldn't see in a house we have a bank of instruments that is recording the information from a variety of sensors that are part of our engineering evaluation for example here we're seeing a print out a graph of the amount of solar energy that is hitting the plate collectors on the roof NASA continues to advance science and engineering on a wide front in 1974 to put the following year 1975 into historical perspective that is the year construction begins on the Alaskan oil pipeline a woman from Japan is the first woman to climb Mount Everest [Applause] during 1975 the United States and the Soviet Union cooperate continuing to work on compatible docking and rescue systems from man space flight in July the Soviets launch a spacecraft from the Soviet Union 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 4 3 2 2 engine SE start one zero launch commit we have a liftoff all engines building up thust moving out clear the tower uh Roger power clear Roger Tom you got good thrust on all engin you're right on the money 30 seconds we're on the way aha here he comes uh just above the docking module looks real pretty the two ships rendevu and dock in space spending two days togethering experimenting I approaching please don't forget about your engine less than 5 m distance 3 m contact capture we also have capture your time wheel pass it out are using the PO shaking hands now here the apoll mission is fully [Applause] successful work continues on Space Shuttle development and other NASA work progresses clear alarm at this time we have first this command transed to the first continuous commands these scientists and Engineers are giving commands to the Pioneer 11 spacecraft 500 million miles away it is now hurtling toward the planet Saturn on the second leg of its Mission Pioneer project manager Charles Hall of NASA's as Research Center system here is Jupiter and the five innermost moons of Jupiter and on this board here is shown a projection of the trajectory that Pioneer 11 followed as it approached Jupiter so Pioneer 11 came along here underneath Jupiter around and back and went out in this direction and why were scientists interested in studying Jupiter well for one thing we know that Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field much like the Earth and to date it's the only other planet that has a magnetic field as a result it also has radiation belts like the Earth again we know of no other planet today that has that next stop Saturn after traveling another billion and a half miles Pioneer will arrive in the vicinity of the giant ringed planet in late August 1979 as the 570 lb spacecraft Dives between Saturn's rings it will come within 4,000 Mi of its surface the Rings orbit Saturn out to a distance of 17,000 Mi and could be made up of rocks ranging in size from Pebbles to huge Boulders 3,000 uh miles range to go CRT displays look good This research pilot is simulating a landing of the reusable space shuttle the shuttle is a cargo carrying combination spacecraft and aircraft able to carry large payloads to and from Earth and space 100 times or more it's scheduled for use in the early 1980s one of the men who'd like to fly the shuttle is astronaut Joe Angel here at the space division of Rockwell International in California he describes a full-scale mockup of the big craft what we think think of as the airplane part of the shuttle which is what you see right behind me is 122 ft long that's about the same size as a dc9 has a wingspan of 88 ft and probably it's a little bigger around than a normal cargo carrying airplane a typical Mission starts with a vertical launch after use two solid rocket booster engines are jettisoned and recovered by Parachute once in Earth orbit the shuttle will conduct experiment or rendevu with satellites whatever the mission is Kansas City yes facility I want get pretty good bites on you we've come a long way in weather forecasting since the early balloon launching days thanks mainly to weather [Music] satellites just 15 years ago this month NASA launched the first tyos weather satellite from Cape canabo the views of earth were pretty rudimentary compared to today's highquality pictures but they proved that routine global weather observation by satellite was possible with each succeeding one these weather Sentinels have become more and more sophisticated here the synchronous meteorological satellite two are already in orbit with a third schedule for launch this fall besides transmitting cloud cover pict es every 30 minutes day and night SMS can receive and send environmental information from thousands of manned and unmanned data collection platforms located at Sea in rivers lakes and on land the synchronous meteorological satellite pictures are made into film Loops daily at the world weather center near Washington DC to show Cloud movement over oceans and land masses meteorologists are hopeful that this kind of information will give them Clues to the weather conditions that for instance cause tornadoes and other fast-moving weather systems these model airplanes have something in common with these Rio planes [Music] they are all part of a NASA research program to learn more about vortices tornado like patterns of air that trail behind the wings of airplanes causing varying degrees of turbulence Dave Scott acting director of NASA's flight Research Center in California explains the vortices are dangerous because uh these bundles of energy as they follow behind the aircraft uh leaving awake uh have the capability of turning over smaller aircrafts as they approach a landing and uh because of this we have a great deal of concern that many accidents can be caused by the vortices or these bundles of energies as they uh attempt to turn over an aircraft while all aircraft cause vortices large heavy Jets such as the 747 and dc10 create the more serious problems air traffic density around major airports adds to the severity of the problem because of the many aircraft coming in for a landing and the need to sequence one plane behind the other aircraft are routinely separated at safe distances to avoid the trailing Vortex problem however this often results in increased fuel use and traffic delays smoke generators mounted on the wings of these planes by NASA researchers make it possible to see and investigate the whirling air patterns the research has shown that by adjusting Wing flaps at different angles and by making various design changes the intensity of the vortices can be substantially reduced Viking a mission to soft Land Two 1200 lb spacecraft like this on the surface of Mars and search for Life there launched separately on August 11th and 21st the Vikings spend nearly a year traveling to Mars with the first arriving in mid June 1976 in preparation for a July 4th Landing once at Mars the spacecraft are placed into orbit around the planet the orbiters onboard cameras begin methodically photographing potential Landing sites to make sure they are safe the lender is then commanded to separate from the Orbiter and starts its 6-hour descent through the Martian atmosphere a parachute pops out about 20,000 ft above the surface finally three terminal descent engines fire at 4,000 ft from touchdown serving as brakes for the plunging spacecraft the Lander now slowly descends and softly lands its camera views the surrounding landscape the place we want to land is in the northern hemisphere now I'm going to tell you about the reasons for this the first site is here it's called kryy it's a low broad flat Valley flowing from the floor of a giant chasm the caprais chasm that flows deep and low it combines the combination of of biological interest geological interest the youthful stuff that must have flown from this Chasm system system into this very low area the second site is is more Northerly now that site was selected primarily because of our interest in in water Sidonia represents one area at uh at a high latitude where there is the possibility that sometime during the year for some small period that there could be transient liquid water and for the biological reasons that liquid water is absolutely Paramount one of the most interesting science experiments is the sampling device a small shovel on the end of a telescoping arm will reach out scoop up some Martian soil then drop it into a chemical analyzer on the Viking landing craft if there are Mars Quakes they will be transmitted through Vikings legs to an onboard seismometer throughout the mission the orbiters continue photographing and thermally mapping the surface they serve also as relay stations for data from the Landers much other NASA activity takes place in 1975 but we can only scratch the surface here in another scientific related development in the following year 1976 legionaires disease kills 29 persons who attend an American Legion convention in Philadelphia NASA launches the communications technology satellite or CTS in 1976 a joint venture of NASA Lewis and Canada the CTS program experiments with a high-powered satellite for distribution of Public Service information to small inexpensive antennas some in remote areas other 1976 NASA activity includes computer graphics and research on sending energy from space to Earth the gap between drawing board and the time before a new plane is certified to fly has always been considerable now with the help of computers like these in the computer Graphics Lab at NASA's as Research Center this Gap may be shortened the computers some capable of three-dimensional visual displays are available to help researchers deal with a wide range of problems before going to the expense of building a plane or even a wind tunnel model what we're looking at here is the ability to actually view real objects that is three-dimensional objects and scenes the way they would normally appear to you if you were looking actually out of a window say the operator sitting at the console is able to control through the uh pencil like device he has in his hand the viewing parameters on how he would like to view the scene and as you can see by he can actually change his viewing angle by moving the uh pencil like device on the uh data tablet to say go above the scene and look down on the airplanes or going down or he's looking up at the aircraft or in fact actually rotating his uh Chase plane if you will around the aircraft inform formation this is only a demonstration program of the capabilities of the hardware but it is a great Aid in uh enabling the investigators the research scientist here at ases better understand some of their problems when they're three-dimensional in nature air trailing over the wings of planes in Flight especially large planes forms tornado likee patterns called vortices because the FAA requires minimum separation distances between aircraft the vortices do not present a danger they do however limit the number of airplanes that can take off and land within a given time the problem is one that researchers would like to eliminate and it can be studied using the computers we see a 747 flying away from us the researcher has positioned some uh vortexes at the various places that they are created in aircraft notice the flaps the uh ends of the Wings he would like to see how these uh surfaces or the vortexes interrelate with one another as the plane moves away you can see the V uh vortices on the back wings were move clear down underneath the airplane it is hoped that doing this computationally will save wind tunnel test time to determine what modifications might be made on the wing the flaps the engines so forth to minimize the turbulent flow that results behind the aircraft researchers are also using computer Graphics to study how life might evolve on another planet such as Mars here a molecule described in three dimensions it's only through the use of uh these three-dimensional displays could the researcher have any idea at all on how these complex shapes interrelate how they might have connected in Years Gone by and U through this mechanism we hope he'll have a better understanding of some some of the lifeb building processes that went on millions of years ago this is NASA's gold stone tracking station near barow California normally used to communicate with interplanetary spacecraft the big 85 ft Venus Dish as it is called is now also serving as a research tool to study the problems of beaming converted solar energy from a satellite in space back to Earth where it can can be reconverted to electricity for the test the 85- Ft antenna represents an energy satellite from its vage point in space it would collect and convert sunlight energy into electricity a mile away a 25- ft High set of receiver panels called the rect tenna plays the role of a ground station made of aluminum the more than 4500 small rectenna elements are t-shaped and about 4 in is long they work like a TV antenna to gather and filter the microwave energy converting it to electric current that could be fed directly to a utility on a hillside beneath the receiver Tower a bank of 17 lights begins flickering on reaching full intensity as the power increases the lights go off and on as the big antenna tilts up and down and swings right and left now on the rect tenna now off the results have been very promising as go gold stone researchers successfully collected the microwave beam and converted it to usable electricity with an efficiency of 82% and those are some of NASA's 1976 activities during our next program we cover some 1977 and 1978 NASA progress I'm Lyn bandant he [Music] okay looking good Roger Clum be on a [Music] roll Columbia Houston your go at 40 go 40 [Music]