What was Apollo 13?

The

Apollo 13 mission is best known today because of the very popular and mostly accurate film from 1995 Apollo 13 . The film with Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris documents the story of an almost disastrous attempt at a mission to the Moon, which surprisingly did not end with the death of astronauts, Jim Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Hais. Instead, exceptional planning, intelligence and the ability of astronauts and ground crews to think quickly, these very brave gentleman brought home after significant disorders at the Apollo spacecraft command module. Apollo 13 would be the third mission to perform a lunar landing, not if for extremely dangerous technical problems. One of them, an explosion of one of the two main oxygen tanks, is well known. Suddenly and without warning during a routine procedure called mixing of oxygen tanks, a standard process and a test to make oxygen stable at higher levels of atmospheric pressure and colder temperatures.

6 The central engine cut off two minutes before the end of the planned fuel burns and the crew had to rely on several other engines to get at the necessary distance. This first technical problem was not an important factor in the later events of the oxygen tank, but NASA later helped to develop a better plan for engine design, as this could be significant problems.

The greater problem of the oxygen tank explosion that helped power the command module was the biggest problem. There was considerable fear that the Apollo 13 Would crew ran out of oxygen and relied on part of the spacecraft on the lunar module (LM). LM was designed only for two people and one of the first problems he had encountered after an oxygen explosion was that LM could not adequately filter carbon dioxide for three people. The exceptional ingenuity of the ground crew allowed astronauts to create a better filter with materials available on the boat.

Since the explosion of oxygen tanks affected the energy on the spacecraft, the second and the main problem was how to safely get astronauts home. The monthly landing was discarded and the ground crew came on the way to use the gravity of the moon by a single rotation around the moon to push the Earth's ship, in the so -called free return trajectory. The ground crew had to first instruct astronauts to use LM to repair the course of the ship in extremely difficult circumstances.

Through great thinking and planning and many anxious moments of the course and the return on free return worked according to plan. Apollo 13 astronauts have safely returned to the ground, without injury, store the bladder infection that Fred Haise was acquired. The mission, made on April 11, ended, not if successfully, with the lives of the crew still intact 17th April. The oxygen tank explosion appeared for two days into the mission, which caused an extraordinary anxiety for astronauts and ground crew when they tried to nAgain the way home.