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NASA via EPA
The space shuttle Atlantis, appearing like a bean sprout against clouds and city lights, on its way home, as photographed by the Expedition 28 crew of the International Space Station on Thursday, July 21. Airglow over Earth can be seen in the background. The Atlantis returned to Earth marking the end of the space shuttle era when its wheels touched down for the last time at the Kennedy Space Center.
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This is the most beautiful sight. What a sweet ending. AS the late Jimmy Durante would say "Aurivoir, Alfweidisan and Inka Dinka Doo". Good night shuttle program. Rest easy. Job well done. (please excuse my spelling)
Try again. It's au revoir. If you're going to post, at least spell check or Google it.
Get a life muggle.
@ Wotchermuggle do not be a jerk
Ha! Everyone knows you spell wotchermuggle as wAUtchermuggle...sheesh!
To the contrary, being correct is a vital part of a scientific effort like space exploration. Kudos to wotchermuggle for helping to reduce ignorance, and teach how to be more correct.
Fudgefactor is absolutely correct and very talented - he/she spelled the word(s) phonetically AND in closing, offered an apology. Old school - taught back in the mid 60's. Works brilliantly. A sinseer thankz to mi foniks teechr Mr. Wilson - Gaud rst hz sol. Fudgefactor - POST AWAY!
Wowzers! Doctor Crispy - back to grammar class for you! '....and teach how to be more correct'???? Try - and you REALLY shouldn't - 'and offer his/her guidance regarding spelling and grammar. (Non-judgemental suggestion as opposed to direct attack!)
Both wotchermugal and Doctor Crispy would gain favor to offer their gracious apologies.
That said - breathtaking photo. Imagine - how very large our world - our earth. How truly insignificant and unnecessary our personal judgements of one and other are...
Why didn't you correct the German?
Don't forget "hasta la vista, baby" (excuse my mixed language usage).
In case anyone is confused by this image, it's a long exposure of the shuttle re-entering the atmosphere. The glow is the hot plasma generated around the shuttle as it skids across and then dives through ever thickening air molecules at 17,000 miles per hour (at least initially.)
Is it dive or rather they fire those thrusters and then Earths gravity pulls them down violently? Thats a pretty steep curve from orbit at over 17,000 mph to a few hundred mph. Wow Nice Photo.
That is a more accurate description of shuttle reentry. It is interesting that at higher speeds, orbital escape velocities like those off the moon mission, it is possible to skip of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond.
Can't be too long an exposure- the orbital velocity of the space station from which the photo was taken is roughly 16,600 mph itself. There is a slight blurring of the clouds in the lower half of the photo. Maybe a one second exposure at most? I think we're seeing a lingering trail left behind by the shuttle as it passes through the upper atmosphere here.
when it reaches the correct altitude, the shuttle needs to maintain a speed of 17,500 MPH, so that it can continuously fall "around" the earth, rather than fall "to" the earth. Imagine you are throwing a baseball at ground level...You can throw it as hard as you can horizontally, but the earth's gravity will pull it down, creating an arc of descent. Now, imagine you are on a mountain top and throw that ball again with the same force as you did earlier. The ball will still fall to the earth along an arc. But, if you could get high enough and throw the ball hard enough, the ball's arc would be wide enough so that it wouldn't fall to the earth at all, it would fall around the earth. That's what orbiting satellites do, they fall "around" the earth.
All that's required for the shuttle to land (well, "all" that's required for the shuttle to stop falling around the earth and start falling to the earth), is for the shuttle to slow down a bit (below 17,5000 MPH), so the shuttle maneuvers so that the back end is facing the direction of travel and then the shuttle fires a series of short de-orbiting bursts to slow the vehicle down. This causes the shuttle to fall with more of an arc, and thus begin to enter the outer atmosphere. Once that happens, the friction between the shuttle and the atmosphere causes heat and drag, slowing the shuttle even more and heating it up along the way.
Finally, once the shuttle's speed is sub-sonic, it glides the rest of the way (un-powered) making big "S" turns to shed more speed, until it lines up with the runway, deploys the chute and comes to a rolling stop.
Yep..Scott got it down right.
Plus to help keep the re-entry of a shuttle heating to a minimum the shuttle has an extremely shallow rate of decent...as shown in picture.
Friction can be a real bear.
Have to admit I was surprised at drop angle...would have loved to ride that Disney ride!
Dang! I missed my flight. When does the next one leave?
If you have $60 million for the ticket- soon!
In South Florida, we saw Atlantis' outline glowing with friction from reentry as she passed overhead.
Much to the dismay of the anti-space exploration cults out there the ending of the Shuttle program is your delight because a part of Nasa's history is finished which most are sad about which makes you happy.
But the ending is just another phase in the rebirth of a greater space exploration prorgam that to the delight of the space exploration groups out there is a continuation of the evolution of humanity away from the monkey mentality of the anti-space exploration cults.
That was a hel of a dive!
I don't think it is a "dive," at least not the way it appears in the photo. I believe the brighter glow (in the upper left side of the photo) is the shuttle at lower altitude. The greater friction caused by the thicker atmosphere would generate a brighter glow. (In other words, I believe the shuttle is moving from the center of the photo to the upper left, not from the upper left to the center of the photo.)
I think the "steep" part of the arc is an optical illusion caused by the shuttle being almost directly below the camera. The actual arc in re-entry should be much more gentle than that.
Marty - I think you're right, I just realized that the orbiter must be at the leading edge of the trail. Thanks for the correction.
Marty and David are right - the image is foreshortened. This view is looking almost directly east. The Shuttle left the Space Station about a day earlier. The Shuttle, being at a slightly lower altitude, goes around the Earth quicker than the ISS so it pulls ahead until it reenters the atmosphere. That may sound backwards, but it's just the way orbital mechanics works: The lower your orbit, the shorter your orbit time is - until you stop orbiting, of course.
Do you guys mean that the brighter part of the trail was the begining part of the re-entry and the dimmer part of the trail was after re-entry? 35,000 mph can play tricks with the eye.
@KEVIN
The shuttle's path is from the center of the photo heading forward to what appears to be the top-left, but in fact, it is just further away in distance and actually lower in altitude.
By the way, the shuttle doesn't travel at 35,000 MPH, it (at most) travels 17,500 MPH. Even our fastest satellites just barely go 35,000 after getting gravity boosts.
What a spectacular photo. This type of photo of a re-entry has never taken before. It looks like the shuttle is engulfed in fire with the friction of entering the atmosphere at such speed. What a strong vehicle. It is time for higher pursuits now. Lets Do It!!
I have grew up and watched the maned and unmanned space programs come and go from my house and am somewhat saddened to see this one close. However, I am not sad to see the ones loose their jobs that have kept industry out of this area. All while they lived off of NASA's tit as the rest starved.
Perhaps if you had learned some basic spelling and grammar in grade school you would not be starving.
We could have the shuttle and more if our government wasn't hell bent on seeing us bankrupt by giving millions and millions of our dollars to countries that HATE this country.
Giving millions of money to countries? Hah! We give billions of OUR money to large corporations, my friend. That's where we roll, and it's why we're on the edge of oblivion in this country.
I literally grew up in conjunction with the space program. It was a source of pride, inspiration and world leadership. Those of us who know remember the TV close up image of the Saturn booster. As it lifted off the black letters U N I T E D S T A T E S against the white body scrolled up the screen. You couldn't help but feel the emotion. As this chapter ends it's sad there's no replacement. Somewhere we as a country stopped reaching for the stars long ago.
Something doesn't seem right about that picture. The glide slope would be far too steep for a reentry. If you ever looked at the reentry path taken by the space shuttle you'd see that it goes from beyond Hawaii all the way to Florida. It covers about 10,000 miles to descend about 290 miles.
Also, you can tell how long the exposure was by looking at the motion blur on the clouds below. The space station is going 17,200 mph so the clouds will be moving at a decent rate. You can't even have a 30 second exposure and not have more motion blur than that. The shuttle takes about 35 minutes from entry interface to landing, so that obviously is not the trail left by the entire 35 minute reentry event.
Like I said, the image is distorted by foreshortening - you are looking almost directly along the descending path of the Shuttle.
it cant be too long of an exposure or the stars would be streaked as well as the station moves.... it is either a plasma cloud trail or the shuttle is moving so fast the shutter speed was able to catch it... maybe a couple second exposure at best...
but one of the best shots of mankinds space travel effort... million dollar picture if you ask me...
Seems like once they hit the atmosphere they are falling like a rock. No way could a woman or man keep control of that without the help of computers. Looks like they drop like those old apollo capsules then flare out for landing.
They used to do it without computers, so it is possible.
Why does it seem like that to you? Have you not noticed that the shuttle has wings and a tail? Have you never heard of gliders?
The shuttle was designed to re-enter and land "unpowered", meaning that just gravity and the shuttle's aerodynamics would be the only physical forces required.
While the computers certainly do keep the shuttle on its glide path and help the pilot achieve the correct altitude and speed, the pilot is manually controlling (flying) the shuttle all the way in.
Here is what I don't understand. We sent people to the moon in contraptions that were considered old school as compared to today's technology. But today's technology is compromised by solar flares and micro meteors. We actually sent people to the moon during solar maximums. Why didn't that old school technology fail like this new school technology would fail?
How the heck did we send folks to the moon if these factors existed then like they do now? I find it odd we never lost a man in space due to solar flares or micro meteors. The skin of those capsules were 1/8th inch thick. Even now we have to check the shuttles for damage once in orbit. How did those old school rockets and capsules not suffer some kind of damage?
The damage to shuttle tiles that concerns NASA is not caused by solar flares or micrometeors - it's caused by pieces of insulation and/or ice from the external tank breaking off and hitting the orbiter at high speed during ascent to orbit.
Trot - It was sheer luck. The shuttle flew in low earth orbit so they were somewhat shielded by our magnetosphere. The Apollo missions have been the only ones in which man was removed from the Earth's protective shield. While outside of the magnetosphere if a coronal mass ejection was traveling in their direction, they would have been toast.
For your question on why the older rockets didn't have to be checked, for one the capsule was sitting on top of the rocket, not on the side. Also, a capsule has a heat shield on the bottom which is one piece. The shuttle used ceramic tiles to dissapate the the heat with the leading edges made out of carbon-carbon material. The shuttles outer material is much more fragile than a capsules.
Very cool photo. I hope we return again someday.
I'm surprised by how steep the descent is and like cockatoo I'm curious about the exposure time.
Reentry "interface" (where the shuttle begins to decelerate from air friction) occurs at an altitude of approximately 80 miles (compared to the approximately 200 statute mile orbit of the ISS). The shuttle travels a ground track of approximately 5,000 statute miles between reentry interface and landing. The plasma phase (where the air around the shuttle glows from heating) lasts about 10 minutes. Based on these parameters I would expect the descent path to be much more gradual and take too long for the ISS to photograph without considerable blurring of the background.
I stand corrected - see Marty's reply to Doe Know above.
I'm no expert, but it looks like you have the angle of descent wrong. In the picture, it's not travelling from the 9 o'clock position to the 3 o'clock position. It's more like 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock. The parallax error makes it appear to be going straight down, but actually it's travelling quite a distance.
That's falling with style.
The trail is much longer and shallower than it appears; the view is fore-shortened, we are seeing it from end-on, it looks steeper than it is because the shuttle is traveling around the globe even as it falls towards it.
Don't forget that the earth is rotating in the same direction as the shuttle is coming in. For a while the shuttle would match the rotational speed of a spinning Earth and it would look like they are falling straight down.
When I see the Birds Eye View of Earth from Space of the Blue Planet taken aboard the Shuttle in an IMAX experience, it is Awe Inspiring. Thanks to all at NASA and the Astronauts who have taken us all on a Wonderful Journey. As Neil Armstrong said, "One Small Step For Man...." The Shuttle has been a Giant leap for Mankind. I hope the next Leap is as Wonderful. Keep the Faith and Continue in Space.......
KIB 994 OUT!... ROGER. Job well done Kennedy Space Center. And welcome back to Florida, Mission Control. Glad that we can put everything in one port. - OVER
Our the Earth is so defenceless.
Saw the shuttle re-enter one time. As it passed over the SF Bay area it went from horizon to horizon in seconds. This picture is a GREAT shot. Wonder if there's going to be a video?
I hope the Space center gets back to business soon.....