Friday, March 27, 2015

What happened to the spacecraft Apollo 13?I would like to know the full story of the apollo 13!

The mission began with a little-known smaller incident:
during the second-stage boost, the center (inboard) engine shut down two minutes early.
The four outboard engines burned longer to compensate, and the vehicle continued to a
successful orbit. The shutdown was determined to be due to dangerous pogo
oscillations
that might have torn the second stage apart. The engine
experienced 68g vibrations at 16 hertz, flexing the thrust frame by
3 inches (76 mm). The engine shutdown was triggered by sensed thrust chamber pressure
fluctuations. Smaller pogo oscillations had been seen on previous Titan and Saturn
flights (notably Apollo 6), but on Apollo 13 they were amplified by an unexpected
interaction with turbopump  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation">cavitation. Later missions
implemented anti-pogo modifications that had been under development. These included
addition of a helium gas reservoir to the center engine  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_oxygen">liquid oxygen line to
dampen pressure oscillations, an automatic cutoff as a backup, and simplification of the
propellant valves of all five second-stage engines.


En
route to the Moon, approximately 200,000 miles (320,000 km) from Earth,  title="Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson_Space_Center">Mission
Control asked the crew to turn on the hydrogen and oxygen tank stirring fans,
which were designed to destratify the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic">cryogenic contents and
increase the accuracy of their quantity readings. Approximately 93 seconds later the
astronauts heard a loud "bang", accompanied by fluctuations in electrical power and
firing of the attitude control thrusters. The crew initially thought that a  title="Meteoroid" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid">meteoroid
might have struck the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module">Lunar Module
(LM).


In fact, the number 2 oxygen tank, one of two in
the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_service_module">Service Module
(SM), had exploded. Damaged  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene">Teflon
insulation on the wires to the stirring fan inside oxygen tank 2 allowed the wires
to  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit">short-circuit and ignite
this insulation. The resulting fire rapidly increased pressure beyond its 1,000 pounds
per square inch (6.9 MPa) limit and the tank dome failed, filling the fuel cell bay
(Sector 4) with rapidly expanding gaseous oxygen and combustion products. It is also
possible some combustion occurred of the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mylar">Mylar/ href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapton">Kapton thermal insulation
material used to line the oxygen shelf compartment in this
bay.


The resulting pressure inside the compartment popped
the bolts attaching the Sector 4 outer aluminum skin panel, which as it blew off
probably caused minor damage to the nearby high-gain  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_S-Band">S-band antenna used for
translunar communications. Communications and telemetry to Earth were lost for 1.8
seconds, until the system automatically corrected by switching the antenna from
narrow-band to wide-band mode.


Mechanical shock forced the
oxygen valves closed on the number 1 and number 3 fuel cells, which left them operating
for only about three minutes on the oxygen in the feed lines. The shock also either
partially ruptured a line from the number 1 oxygen tank, or caused its check or relief
valve to leak, causing its contents to leak out into space over the next 130 minutes,
entirely depleting the SM's oxygen supply.


Because the fuel
cells combined hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity and water, the remaining fuel
cell number 2 finally shut down and left the  href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Command/Service_Module#Command_Module_.28CM.29">Command
Module
(CM) on limited-duration battery power. The crew was forced to shut
down the CM completely and to use the LM as a "lifeboat". This had been suggested during
an earlier training simulation but had not been considered a likely scenario. Without
the LM, the accident would certainly have been fatal.

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