![]() Although this phenomenon was a mystery at the time, it was resolved during the flight of Mercury Atlas 7 when Scott Carpenter accidentally tapped the wall of the spacecraft with his hand, releasing many of the so-called "fire flies". The balloon experiment failed when it did not properly inflate on deployment, but the liquid experiment behaved as anticipated.Ī curious event which occurred during Glenn's (MA-6) flight was his report of "fire flies" when he entered the sunrise portion of an orbit. ![]() The other was a device to study the behavior of liquid in a weightless state. One was a balloon, deployed and inflated to measure drag and provide visibility data. To compensate for this the spacecraft was allowed to drift in attitude for an additional 77 minutes beyond the time already built into the flight plan. During the flight there was also concern about excessive fuel usage resulting from extensive use of the high-thrust controls and the inadvertant use of two control systems simultaneously. A random failure of the circuitry associated with the pitch horizon scanner, which provided a reference point to the attitude gyros, occurred. Originally scheduled for launch in early May, the mission was thrice postponed, once (07 May) due to checkout problems with the Atlas launch vehicle, once (17 May) to perform modifications to the altitude-sensing instrumentation in the parachute-deployment system, and finally (19 May) due to detected irregularities in the temperature control device on a heater in the Atlas flight control system.ĭuring the flight only one critical component malfunction was encountered. to: (1) evaluate the performance of a man-spacecraft system in a three-orbit mission (2) evaluate the effects of space flight on the astronaut (3) obtain the astronaut's opinions on the operational suitability of the spacecraft systems (4) evaluate the performance of spacecraft systems replaced or modified as a result of previous missions and, (5) exercise and evaluate further the performance of the Mercury Worldwide Network. The objectives of MA-7 were similar to MA-6, i.e. Scott Carpenter after a medical examination of Slayton revealed an irregularity in his heartbeat. The pilot was originally planned to be Donald K. ![]() Mercury Atlas 7 (MA-7, also designated Aurora 7) was the second orbital flight of an American rocket with a human on board.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |