I hope you can answer this question and if not I hope it gives you food for thought as it has me.

Regarding the moon landing hoax. I didn’t see the fox special on it but I have heard of it. I don’t disbelieve that the landings happened.

My question regards the Apollo 13 story. According to the story the spacecraft got cold when it had to power down all non essential equipment after it lost power after the accident. It got so cold that the astronauts cought colds, their breath fogged when they exhaled and condensation formed on the inside if the ship.

My question is, since the closed ship was in direct raw sunlight with no aptnospheric
insulation and with a solar exposure equivelent to the equatorial desert, at high noon, 24 hours a day for 5 days. Like a car parked in direct sunlight with the windows rolled up. How did they throw off all that heat as well as the heat produced by their bodies?

Part of the "answer" is that some of the light was reflected by the skin of the ship and the heat coming in from the sun side of the ship was radiated away from the shaded side. Some of the light comming through the windows would have been trapped inside the ship by the greenhouse effect. The astronauts mentioned they were irritated by the bright light coming in the window. They did not mention that they were warmed by that light.
Also the condensation pattern inside the ship was as if the ship was in contact with cold water. The tempreture was cold enough to condense the water but not freeze it as it would if the ship was in contact with somthing else of a different tempreture. Which is a very narrow range.

As you may know, because anything in direct sunlight in space gets hot as well as heat
produced by the bodies of the astronauts, heat builds up. Heat removal apparatus is a major design feature of spacecraft and spacesuits. Turning off those apparatus to conserve energy would have created an overheating problem not an over cooling problem.

Naturaly, having thought up this complex of peculiarities I have also bult up some
suspicions as to what may have really happened. I have three main possibilities, from the picayune to the tragic.
One is that it was a publicity stunt to reaquire waning public intrest and funding. another is that there was a covert mission under way and the disaster was a cover. Finaly, that the mission was actually lost and the story was fabricated to cover the fact.
In all cases the hoax, if it was a hoax, could have been carried out in the mission
simulators using one of the preplaned disaster scenareos that all crews train under. As is part of the story the people on the ground were trying to help the men up there. So there was a lot of activity at the mission simulators at that time. Since the mission was notoriously under reported by
the media before the accident. NASA had more than usual freedom to set up the hoax. If it was a hoax I suspect mostly the covert mision because there are earmarks of planning evident in the events as told by the story. The under reporting could have been planned as a cover for a planned covert mission. In the planning stage of the cover story someone thinking to make the hoax as realistic as possible may have said ‘It’s cold in space, so if we say they lose power then they should get cold.” Not knowing that space in fact is niether hot nor cold. An object in the sun gets very hot and an object in the shade gets very cold. That fallacy was and still is a common myth. A person including it in the story may have pointed out that people know that “It’s cold in space.” so convinced all involved that the simulator had to get cold or the cover would be blown. That error in the planning stage, when being set up may have had the crew asking themselves “How are we going to get this simulator cold”. Rather than build a huge refrigerator to cool the simulator they may have just set it up in a tank of cold water. Setting up in an artificial environment would also explain why the bright lights of the powerful floodlights set to simulate the sun irritated the
astronauts but did not warm them.
Since as this story is one of NASA’s finest hours and everyone involved seemes more than
willing to talk. If you ask some questions sensitive to this scenario of your contacts in NASA and they suddenly freeze up, could you let me know that? If you answer this I would ask the question of why anything else in direct sunlight in space gets hot but this
didn’t.

Yours
David Samuel
dpsamu@yahoo.com
1337 Esplanade Ave.
New Orleans LA
70116

You don't say whether this "Apollo 13 story" is the movie, or a NASA report. The movie, from all I hear was a good one but it is a movie. Movies tell stories and a story needs conflict of some sort.

As to temperature. An object that absorbs and radiates all wavelengths equally, i.e. a black body, at the orbit of the earth will assume a temperature of 288 deg K. or 13 deg C (55 deg F). If the object doesn't absorb all of the energy of the sun but reflects half of it, the temperature could be as low as -31 deg C (-24 deg F). So the temperature of Apollo 13 would probably be somewhere between these extremes.

The three astronauts provide about 40 calories/sec which would help keep things warmer.

The "Story" is the official NASA complex of reports including the reports of the astronauts, TV and filmed images from the inside of the ship, the mission control personel, the news media as well as hundreds of other sources. The movie was based on those reports but the cold was not made up to create conflict in a movie. It is part of all accounts of the Apollo 13 events. As to "black body" issues. A non rotating body reaches tempretures of some 200 degrees F on the sun side and some 200 below zero F on the shady side. Some energy would be reflected from the sun side, some would be radiated from the sun side, some would be conducted by the material of the ship to the shaded side and radiated from that side, none would be convected away because there is no convecting medium in space. At any rate the ship should have been hot on one side and cold on the other. Were it the case that the ship was throwing off heat in these manners then the condensation on the interior of the ship would have been on the shaded side and none on the hot side. I never heard any mention in any report that the ship was rotating, hot on one side and cold on the other or had any other asymetrical deviation from evenly cold even when the astronauts were in the direct, raw sunlight comming through the windows of the ship. Put your hand in direct sunlight on a sunny day and see how much heat it gets.


SAMU

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SAMU on 2001-11-03 15:15 ]</font>

OOPS! before I edited this I said "I don't know where you live", and I just noticed it's New Orleans. You're forgiven. I've heard that you only have two seasons there, summer and February.

Anyhow, if you ever get one, try your hand experiment on a cold day. I'm in Toronto, and on a cold winter's day I can stick my hand out of the sleeve of my thick parka and feel some warmth on the the sunlit side.

The rest of me is still frozen stiff.

The best way I've found to beat it (other than the two day drive to Florida) is to consume a warm mixture of fermented, distilled grain with some carbohydrates and fats. Irish coffee. Let's see if NASA will include that in the next emergency ration kit.

_________________
Free speech; exercise it or shut up!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: The Rat on 2001-11-03 16:10 ]</font>

The cold you feel in Toronto is caused by convection and conduction of heat to the cold air in contact with your hand carrying heat from your hand. Niether of those occur in space, only radiation and reflection. Prevent the heat from escaping by convection by keeping the heat transfered to the air by conduction trapped in the insulation of your parka and the heat stays and keeps you warm.

As I pointed out in the initial post, the pattern of condensation was consistant with a conduction convection pattern of cooling as if the ship was in contact with somthing either cold air or cold water. I suspect cold water because cold air might have been cold enough to freeze the condensation. Cold water on the other hand could only have cooled it to just above the freezing point of water unless it was salt water in which case it could have been cold enough to freeze, but it didn't freeze. So, fresh water.

SAMU

As was previosuly pointed out, you cannot just say how hot something will be when you place it 1 AU from the Sun. The reflectivity of the object is critical. A white sheet placed in Earth orbit will be much cooler than a black one. Something that reflects 40% of the light that hits it (which is roughly what the Earth does) will actually have a temperature below freezing (assuming it rotates rapidly). The Earth's atmosphere's greenhouse effect is what keeps us above freezing.

So your comment about 200 Fahrenheit is essentially meaningless unless you say what the material is. For an Apollo capsule, which is highly reflective, the ambient temperature would be quite low.

__________________
Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

Under normal circumstances, the problem facing the Apollo spacecraft designers was not how to keep the spacecraft warm, but how to keep it cool. Apollo had a lot of heat sources inside: the astronauts (only a small factor) and scads of electronic equipment, which in those days was far less efficient than today's equivalents. The problem was bad enough that the Lunar Module actually used a coolant fluid that circulated (absorbing heat from the equipment), and was then vented overboard, taking the heat with it.

To minimize the amount of heat that the cooling systems had to handle, the Apollo spacecraft (plural) were made very reflective (think shiny side of the aluminum foil). Therefore there was little thermal gain from solar radiation -- by design.

There was another factor as well, although I don't know whether it made any difference in the net thermal equation. It was not desirable to have one side of the spacecraft baking in the sun (and the other side freezing in shadow) for long periods, so it was standard practice to place the ship in "passive thermal mode". This was a controlled roll, with a rate on the order of one RPM, that allowed the ship to be evenly exposed on all surfaces. This was done during the Apollo 13 mission, even after the explosion. While it may not have reduced the solar heating of the interior, it did prevent then from pointing the windows at the sun and getting some warmth that way.

Indeed, it did get quite cold in the spacecraft, because most of the electronic gear was turned off. IIRC, the cabin temperature dropped to the low 40's (F) -- not much warmer than a refrigerator. And the astronauts didn't have any warm clothing. I'm not sure why the EVA suits couldn't be used, but even if they could, there were only two of them.

The DVD of Apollo 13 includes a very nice "making of" documentary. I was amazed at how much trouble they went through to make it accurate. Of course, they played up the drama a bit in some places, but the only major change they made to the story was a flare-up of tempers between the astronauts. They said in the documentary that it didn't happen that way in reality, but they wanted some way to show how the tension was getting to them.

It's a great movie, the more so for it's accuracy. What other movie has actually filmed it's actors in real free-fall? (It was robbed of a well-deserved special effects oscar by that stupid pig movie "Babe". [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_evil.gif[/img] Grrr! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_evil.gif[/img]) This DVD is one of those I intend to buy for myself as soon as I can. I highly reccommend it.

__________________
...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

The 200 degree tempreture I mentioned was based on tempreture mesurements made of moon rocks, which have a high degree of refletivity, in direct sunlight. Certainly the combination of heat gain to heat loss could have resulted in a tempreture coincidentaly in the narrow range between condensation and freezing. The command capsule was covered in silvery material to reflect sunlight. Why? To reduce heating. The landing stage of the lander was covered with gold mylar laminate to reflect sunlight heat and landing rocket heat. Why? To reduce heating. The assent stage of the lander where the astronauts spent most of their time during 13 was not silvered to reflectivity. I find it remarkable that the combination of reflectivity, radiation and heat absorbtion and retension resulted in an average tempreture that resembles immersion in cold water. So I remarked on it. Were it me up there freezing my ears off, I would have spent plenty of time in the window with the sun shinning in to warm them up and to heck with rotating the craft at 1 RPM to maintain even heating which was by all accounts too durned cold to begin with. I know I wouldn't have complained that the light was irritating as the astronauts did. Although sodium arc light is very irritating and not very warming. Review every documentary you see about 13 from the perspective of the tempreture and you will spot an ever increasing number of peculiarities. For example the lithium hydroxide co2 scrubber problem with co2 as a measure of metabolic heat produced by the crew.

As to the tempreture here in New Orleans. It's not the heat it's the humidity. But on the topic of the air here. Even a mile and a half downwind from Bourbon Street on a Saturday night the air could be described as downright flamable.
Back to astronomy. Did you know that here in New Orleans on a clear night we can see many of the Space Shuttle's reentries? It is a spectacular sight. It streeks across the sky like a slow meteor from horizon to horizon in about 8 seconds. It's a fiercly glowing shooting star flickering as it passes through "chop" of varying density air with a glowing contrail 25 miles long. Five minutes later it's landing in Florida.

SAMU

SAMU

I'm intrigued by your logic. Let's compare Apollo 13 with other Apollo missions.

With all their instruments switched on, and everything operating normally, the other Apollo spacecraft maintained an acceptable temperature.

Now let's switch off most of the equipment, which produces heat, and see what happens to the temperature. If everything else is equal, the temperature's going to drop.

Incidentally, there's NO WAY they were not going to keep Apollo 13 in the Passive Thermal Roll. I understand that this was vital to prevent damage to several vital systems, including the heat shield. After all, I'd rather be cold for several days, than get cooked when my heat shield fails.

And as for Apollo 13's problems, to question whether the explosion was staged, don't forget that virtually every other Apollo mission suffered a range of problems, some of which could easily have caused an abort: Apollo 6 had three engines fail, including two on one stage; Apollo 10's lunar module went into wild gyrations while separated from the Command Module; Apollo 11 had programming bugs in its software which nearly caused an abort before landing; Apollo 12 was struck by lightning; Apollo 14's Command and Lunar Modules had problems docking...and they're just the ones I know about.

The other Apollo spacecraft had cooling systems working. The way a cooling system works in space is by compressing the heat and radiating it. The rate of heat lost by radiation is directly proportional to the tempreture of the radiating object. The hotter the object the faster the energy radiation. By compressing the heat to a radiator, a functioning cooling system is able to throw off heat fast enough to balance heat comming in to maintain a comfortable temprature.

Quote:
"there's NO WAY they were not going to keep Apollo 13 in the Passive Thermal Roll. I understand that this was vital to prevent damage to several vital systems, including the heat shield."

And what would have done the damage? Heat.

As to the mention of two EVA suits. I know I saw three astronauts in spacesuits board the rocket. Also, regarding those spacesuits. The profile of all the Apollo flights has the astronauts removing their suits after launch and putting them back on for the landings and reentries. I have seen the films of all the crewmen donning their suits before the flights and they each have at least 3 guys with pliers and monkeywrenches and screwdrivers helping them get them on. I realize that in a weightless capsule it would be somewhat easier and with the other astronauts to help...But, if you've ever seen how cramped the Apollo capsule is you can see that removing and redressing with a hard spacesuit gives a new meaning to the word cramp. And where did they store those big bulky suits anyway? Exept for the occasional loose glove floating around I don't recall ever seeing the suits sticking out of some corner. With the extremly limited space in the ship it seems the most efficient storage place for the suits would be on the crew's bodies.

As mentioned in the initial message I suspect a covert mission. I don't think they staged an explosion. I think they may have staged an entire mission to cover a covert mission. If a covert mission, did they actually land? Possibly, possibly not. Did they bring a lander with them at all? Possibly, possibly not. Did they bring several tons of somthing else with them? Possibly,...possibly.

SAMU



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SAMU on 2001-11-04 03:40 ]</font>

High reflectivity?????? The albedo (reflectivity) of the moon is 0.07-0.11 (i.e. black as fresh laid asphalt). Not exactly "a high degree of reflectivity".

Assymetric thermal gradient!

_________________
All else (is never) being equal.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kaptain K on 2001-11-04 08:15 ]</font>

Actually, there are at least two ways to get rid of excess heat in space. One is to radiate it. Another is the one I mentioned in my earler post: use a coolant to absorb the heat, and dump the coolant (and its heat) by venting it. I'm not sure what you mean by "compressing" the heat; I don't believe heat is compressible. Concentrating it, perhaps? or compressing a coolant fluid, as in a refrigerator? I am not aware of any active refrigeration systems on Apollo, except those in the space suit life support systems. If there was any active refrigeration, it would have been shut off to conserve energy (which was the most limited resource after the explosion). So yes, that would have tended to make the capsule warm up, not cool off -- *if* there was active refrigeration, and *if* the remaining heat sources in the cabin were producing more heat than passive radiation could remove.

As another poster pointed out, this is incorrect. The heat shield, for example, was not exposed to sunlight during the mission (it was covered by the Service Module); and even if it were, the heat wouldn't have bothered it. After all, it was designed to survive far greater heat during reentry (and dissipate that heat by ablation). The purpose of "passive thermal mode" was to keep all external parts of the spacecraft at moderate temperatures, rather than have some parts baking in the sun and other parts freezing in shadow. It was the temperature difference (gradient) that was undesirable.

The problem with any space suit (either the launch-day pressure suits or the moon suits) is that they are not like regular clothing. They don't "breathe". For this reason, they require active thermoregulation systems -- coolant pumped through the liner -- and this means they consume power. Once again, that was the resource they could least afford.

My guess would be that an astronaut wearing a "turned-off" spacesuit would begin to overheat, sweat profusely, and eventually die of heat stroke.

Well, I don't know about anybody else, but this sounds to me like pure paranoid conspiracy-mongering. What on earth (or off it) would the point be? And if there were such a covert mission, how has it been covered up so thoroughly for so long? There would have been hundreds of people involved. This argument can also be applied to the standard "moon hoax" theory, and it's equally powerful here.

The problem is, your proposed conspirators are both too smart (clever enough to organize a huge coverup and keep it secret for 40 years) and too dumb (not smart enough to figure out whether the cabin should get hot or cold).

So the idea of a vague conspiracy to do something-or-other isn't very persuasive to me. And you got to this because you have an intuitive suspicion (with no supporting evidence) that it got too cold in the spacecraft? Sorry, no sale.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Donnie B. on 2001-11-04 14:16 ]</font>

Did this happen during the launch into space or during re-entry and/or landing?

__________________
"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." [Carl Sagan]

During launch. The "stack" was actually struck twice, and it caused a major electrical outage in the command module. However, the Saturn V launch vehicle had a completely independent guidance system that was well-protected from electrical discharges, and it continued to function perfectly.

After they got into orbit, the crew and ground controllers got the command module powered up again, did a full system checkout (which showed no damage), and decided to go ahead with the mission. I doubt whether today's NASA would do the same. In fact, it's not at all clear that they made the "prudent" decision then.

Incidentally, this incident caused NASA to change its launch rules in respect to electrical storms; they require much larger distance from the nearest storm now. The reason it happened, which no one had realized until then, is that the plume of ionized gasses from the engines created a low-impedance path from the launch vehicle to ground. In effect, the spacecraft was the tip of the world's tallest lightning rod!

Quote:

"High reflectivity?????? The albedo (reflectivity) of the moon is 0.07-0.11 (i.e. black as fresh laid asphalt). Not exactly "a high degree of reflectivity"."

I didn't say it is as reflective as a mirror or fresh fallen snow. But I can see from here that it's not as black as asphalt.
Still the usually quoted surface tempreture range is +200 degrees F. in the sun and -200 degrees F. in the shade. Nearby where I live we have beaches made of a unique type of sand. The sand is made of sphericly shaped grains of quartz. When the grans grind against eachother when you walk on them they squeek. The sand is also sugar white. But try walking across it bare foot at noon, it's hot. Also try touching a silvery chrome bumper in the sun just after noon, it's hot. As mentioned in the initial message, the spacecraft were in equatorial equivelent sunlight 24 hours a day for 5 days. To throw off that much heat by passive methods to the point of discomforting coldness goes against many design concerns I have heard of.
SAMU

Here is a drawing from the nasa website of the command module showing one of eight!!! electrical system radiator panels and one of two large environmental control system (ECS)radiator panels .

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...rams/ad004.gif

Here are many more pictures of Project Apollo.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo.html

Also see here.

http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/News/2001/...tationCool.asp


Here is part of an essay written by 13 commander Jim Lovell

An engineering test on the vehicle showed
that its mechanisms could survive seven or eight hours in space without water cooling, until the guidance system rebelled at this enforced toasting.

Later in the same essay:

TIRED, HUNGRY, WET, COLD, DEHYDRATED
The trip was marked by discomfort beyond the lack of food and water. Sleep was almost
impossible because of the cold. When we turned off the electrical systems, we lost our source of heat, and the Sun streaming in the windows didn't much help. We were as cold as frogs in a frozen pool, especially Jack Swigert, who got his feet wet and didn't have lunar overshoes. It wasn't simply that the temperature dropped to 38 F: the sight of perspiring walls and wet
windows made it seem even colder. We considered putting on our spacesuits, but they would have been bulky and too sweaty. Our teflon-coated inflight coveralls were cold to the touch, and how we longed for some good old thermal underwear.

See here
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/factshee...apubs/suit.gif
Note the liquid cooling and ventalation garment. Is this a red handed lie here?
SAMU





<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SAMU on 2001-11-04 16:42 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SAMU on 2001-11-04 17:11 ]</font>

I'd go with that. Questions about nagging (apparent) inconsistencies are one thing--to make a leap to cover-up and hoax are another.

Worse, it seems that the data that he's using to "prove" his case is ... other NASA missions. Apparently, those are still believed to have happened--but the participants don't seem to have known anything about how they operated.

<font size=-1>[Fixed formatting of quotes]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: GrapesOfWrath on 2001-11-05 07:27 ]</font>

You are not correct. The reflectivity of the Moon (known technically as the albedo) is indeed roughly that of asphalt or a blackboard. The Moon looks white because it is brightly lit in a dark sky. A piece of asphalt the same size as the Moon, at that distance, sitting in full sunlight would look the same.

Instead of guessing, you could research this. The information isn't hard to find. Try a web search on "moon albedo" and see what you get.