Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2019 i Air & Space

Inspired by aspen leaves, researchers at the University of Warwick believe they can increase the life expectancy of robots exploring Mars—or any other slightly windy planet. Even though the Mars Opportunity rover had an impressive run—15 years—it depended for energy on its solar panels, and when a planet-wide dust storm blocked sunlight, the rover’s fate was sealed. The Warwick scientists have devised an energy-harvesting mechanism that could be used as an emergency generator. Using mathematical modeling to better understand the physical properties that make the aspen leaf tremble in the slightest breeze—notably, the flat shape of its stem—they designed a mechanical equivalent. The resulting device uses a cantilever beam to mimic the stem and a curved blade tip with a circular arc cross section acting like the main leaf. Low-speed…

During its glory days in the 1930s, Shanghai’s Longhua Airport, with a stylish Art Deco terminal, served as the city’s main airport. That changed with the construction of a new international airport a couple of decades later. A nearby aviation facility that served Longhua, home to five enormous fuel tanks, was shut down. But, the sprawling, roughly 116,000-square-foot facility is now enjoying new life as an art and entertainment center, called Tank Shanghai. The firm OPEN Architecture has converted the tanks into “containers of culture,” serving as venues for concerts, art exhibitions, and even a restaurant.…

ABOUT TWO WEEKS BEFORE the Apollo 11 mission was launched to the moon, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman was in Moscow on a courtesy trip on behalf of NASA. The visit had been planned for months but the timing could not have been worse. American astronauts were getting ready to land on the moon while it appeared as if the Soviets had ceded the race. On the evening of July 4, 1969, Borman was at the ornate U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow, surrounded by several veteran cosmonauts who seemed reticent if not outright glum. The following day, Borman visited the Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City, where he met with cosmonaut coordinator Nikolai Kamanin. One of the few Soviet space program managers with a public profile, Kamanin was also a…

IT HAS BEEN A DIFFICULT DECADE for airline travel and those who investigate accidents. June 2009 saw the disappearance of Air France Flight 447, with 228 passengers and crew, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. After a month of futile deep-ocean searches, the batteries on the flight data recorders’ underwater locator beacons were assumed to be dead and the search was called off. Nearly two years later, the black boxes turned up after extensive mapping of potential flight paths. Investigators from multiple countries are still shaking their heads over what transpired in the case of EgyptAir Flight 804, which plunged into the Mediterranean Sea in May 2016 with 66 people on board. The Airbus A320’s flight data recorders were recovered less than a month later, but the data proved to be…

THE BOOK Jon Ziomek has written a riveting account of the errors that unfolded before the worst civil aviation disaster in history, when on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets—KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736—collided on a runway at Tenerife island, killing 583 people. WHY THE AUTHOR DECIDED TO WRITE IT “Many years ago, I met Caroline and Warren Hopkins, two of the crash survivors, who lived near me in suburban Chicago. Although Caroline had written a diary of their experiences as passengers on the Pan Am 747, they wanted the help of a professional writer in getting their story told publicly.” A CHAT WITH JON ZIOMEK This accident seemed so preventable. What was the critical turning point? The Spanish government, which governs the Canary Islands,…

Extras The People Who Made the Moonshot On newsstands now, a new collector’s edition —with astronaut profiles and stunning photographs—recounts the greatest engineering triumph of the last century and previews the 21st century missions to return to the moon. In the next issue California On Fire Last year’s fire season in California proved that the state must wage war to combat fires. When firefighters on the ground call in air support, Cal Fire Aviation responds by dropping water or fire-retardant from airplanes and helicopters long retired by the military. Cal Fire’s pilots must precisely place their loads—or risk losing lives and houses to the flames. It’s as close to military flying as a civilian can get.…

From the Sea to Space “I WOULD HEAR OR SEE A PBY CATALINA FLY BY, AND WOULD RUN DOWN TO THE SHORE TO SEE IT LANDING IN THE MENAI STRAIT.“ Your article “Legends of an Ocean-Crossing Seaplane” by Stephen Joiner (Apr./May 2019) brought back memories of my youth. In 1944, I was a seven-year-old English boy when my father was transferred to the Isle of Anglesey off the north coast of Wales. I would hear or see a PBY fly by and would run down to the shore to see it landing in the Menai Strait. We would watch as the “boat” would taxi to the slipway where men would wade out and bolt on wheels so it could be pulled across the road into the Saunders-Roe factory. The barely…

Shortfin mako sharks can swim as fast as 80 mph, earning themselves the moniker, “cheetahs of the ocean.” That unique trait has caught the attention of the U.S. Army and Boeing, which have funded research to find out whether there’s something to be learned from the ocean predators that could help aircraft fly faster. A research group led by aeronautical engineer Amy Lang of the University of Alabama closely examined shark skin samples and tested them in water tunnel experiments. They were especially interested in approximately 0.2-millimeter triangular scales, resembling tiny teeth, located on the shark’s flanks and fins. The scales can flex at angles in excess of 40 degrees from the shark’s body, which impedes the flow from reversing near the skin. The researchers found the scales rise automatically,…

On September 2, 2015, a three-foot meteor broke into pieces that rained down near a Turkish village. After examining 343 of those fragments and other evidence, an international team of 79 researchers announced they were able to determine the meteor’s return address: the Antonia impact crater on the asteroid Vesta, which is 156 million miles from Earth. The detectives relied on a variety of clues to pinpoint the origin site. For instance, the fragments turned out to be “howardites.” Scientists know howardites formed on Vesta, since the samples they’ve studied on Earth reflect light in the same manner as the surface of the distant asteroid. Taken together, the clues pointed to the Antonia impact crater, which was among the many surface features on Vesta photographed by the NASA Dawn spacecraft…

In 2015, the Smithsonian’s first ever Kickstarter campaign raised—in just hours—more than $500,000 to preserve Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit, down to the particles of lunar dust that still cling to its surface. On July 16, the spacesuit will go on display for the first time in 13 years. It will eventually go into the Destination Moon gallery when it reopens in 2022.…

Dispatches from Planet 3 BY MARCIA BARTUSIAK. YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. 296 PP., $26. Reading about astronomy can be intimidating for a lay audience because of the complexity of the physics—and sometimes the disagreements among scientists. Ask any space historian to explain why Pluto is no longer a planet, for example, and the conversation will need to encompass International Astronomical Union politics, how much debris a planetary body clears from its own path, and how our views on Pluto changed after the New Horizons probe flew by in 2015. How can such a discussion be explained briefly? Luckily, Marcia Bartusiak’s book does. Dispatches from Planet 3 is a collection of 32 short essays on topics ranging from how much water Mars has to the contributions of Albert Einstein. Bartusiak’s conversational…

What led to your research on the criminal use of drones? One of my longstanding academic research interests is the relationship between technological change and the vulnerabilities it creates. Phone cameras, fast processors, compact batteries, and live-streaming have given birth to a technology that gives a bird’seye view of the world, but the same technology can also violate the security provided by walls and fences. Criminals and terrorists have also spotted these opportunities—and drone use for criminal and malign purposes has followed. What are some of the ways in which drones could be used for illegal activities? Drone-mounted cameras allow reconnaissance of homes and shops from behind security fences: to see if lights are on, windows are shut, and doors are secure. Burglars then choose the most vulnerable target. Drones…

You could say that astronaut Hall-of-Famer Tom Jones had a pretty good career at NASA—four space shuttle flights, three spacewalks, and the satisfaction of helping to build the International Space Station. One thing he didn’t do: Go to the moon. So when we invited Jones to interview two Apollo astronauts, Charlie Duke and Al Worden, in March 2019, he jumped at the chance. The following are abridged versions of his conversations. (Read the complete interviews at airspacemag.com/jones.) • CHARLIE DUKE • Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke landed on the moon on April 21, 1972, and spent three days exploring the Descartes Highlands. Three years earlier, Duke had been the CapCom for Apollo 11—the astronaut speaking with Armstrong and Aldrin from Mission Control as they made the first…

SEVENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, Lieutenant Constant S. Owen was flying his Lockheed P-38 through the Front Range mountains just outside Denver, Colorado. The single-seat fighter had two engines housed in twin booms, making it one of the heaviest and most distinctive fighters of World War II. This one was an F-4 reconnaissance variant, with cameras in its nose in place of the guns other P-38s were using in dogfights over Germany and Japan. But Owen would never bring his back home. Because on May 17, 1942, he found himself facing a steep Rocky Mountain slope. Unable to summon enough power from the twin engines to climb above it, Owen and his craft hit the hillside, tail first. The landowners witnessed the crash, from their house miles away. One of them rode…

THIS D-DAY VETERAN EARNED ITS STRIPES. Christopher Moore is a museum specialist in the National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department and a member of the Flak-Bait preservation team. Museum conservator Lauren Horelick and former staff member Dana Bell assisted with this article. ASTRONAUT TO ASTRONAUT. Tom Jones, on a family camping trip when the Eagle landed, successfully cajoled his parents into renting a motel room (and its TV) to view history’s first moonwalk. Apollo zeroed his sights on a career in spaceflight. WHY THE SOVIETS LOST. Asif Siddiqi is a professor in the department of history at Fordham University in New York. He has written several books on space exploration. MY OTHER RIDE IS A SPACESHIP. Cory Graff is the military aviation curator at the Flying Heritage & Combat…