Apollo 13 - the Ken Mattingly story

Ken Mattingly did not fly with Apollo 13.  Write about his NASA career after this mission.

After the mission, Ken Mattingly flew on the Apollo 16 as Command Module Pilot from April 16 to 27, 1972.  Apollo 16 was assigned to collect samples from the lunar highlands near the crater Descartes.  Ken carried out an extravehicular activity to retrieve film and data packages from the science bay on the side of the service module.  Apollo 16 accomplished all major objectives although the mission was terminated one day early due to concern over several spacecraft malfunctions.

After the turn to Earth, Ken worked as head of astronaut office support to the STS (Shuttle Transportations System) program and technical assistant for flight test to the Manager of the Orbital Flight Test Program.  He flew on the STS-4 (the fourth and final orbital test flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia) as the pilot from June 27 to July 4, 1982 and completed 112 orbits of the Earth.  He saluted President Ronald Reagan after the landing.  Then he also flew on the STS-51-C (the first Space Shuttle Department of Defense) to deploy a modified Inertial Upper Stage vehicle from the Space Shuttle Discovery from January 24 to 27, 1985.

After those missions, he retired from NASA in 1985.  He logged 7,200 hours of flight time.  In his career at NASA, he received twelve awards like the NASA Distinguished Service Medal which was the highest award.

Twinkle Twinkle little Space Shuttle

The second last flight of the Space Shuttle is now in orbit. Where is it? Can I see it? Yes, and almost your last to chance to ever see one in orbit. Wake your kids up and show them!


You bet you can see it, best chance on May 25th at about 3.45am. Check out this link for better info
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html

You can also see the International Space Station regularly - I use this app from NASA to find it & tell me where to look. Night time is obviously best!Wednesday (May 18th) in my part of Japan, look 10 degrees above south at 03:46. You will see ISS cross the sky to 17 degrees above east (it will take three minutes, and get to 22 degrees above the horizon).
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html

Florida - postcard from Keigo

Hi Jim-sensei,

I'm in Florida on business trip.It's sunny & warm.

I'm jealous that a lot of people (especially young people) are coming here on vacation, beacuse it's spring break now.

I wish I had free time to go to the beach. By the way, there was a lucky thing. I saw space shuttle launching. It was 130 miles away, but clearly.

Keigo

Space - The Final Frontier

I have a relatively new class on Fridays with two very smart young people, and recently we have been talking about space exploration. We have talked about the space race of the 1960s - from Sputnik's first beeps in orbit to Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon. This week we talked about Skylab and Mir, and did some work with David Bowie's famous song 'Space Oddity' ("Here, am I floating in my tin can, far above the earth...")

The International Space Station (ISS) is in the news this week because the astronauts from the Shuttle Discovery have had to fix the toilet way up there. We wondered if they were wearing pink rubber gloves - and what would happen if they didn't fix it properly (after all, they can't open a window, can they?!) I asked my students if they'd like to see ISS & Discovery? Rather excited "Yes!!!"

We went to http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/ and first of all discussed the map. Why was half of it dark? Why was the sun seeming to move? That meant we needed to remember that the earth was actually moving around the sun, and that we are spinning as we go too - once every 24 hours we agreed.

We knew from our book that ISS was probably about 300km "up". We wanted to know how fast it was moving - faster then their mums' cars on the expressway perhaps? A great time to practice big numbers, as the information showed us that ISS was moving at 27,760 km/h. Very surprised looks all round! At that kind of speed, no police car would ever catch you!

Also no way in the world you can see this thing, either, right? Wrong! The ISS is now one of the brightest objects in the night sky. We tapped in our location (nearest one was Tokyo) and realised that at 8.08pm tonight (about 40 minutes after class finished) we should be able to see it for 3 minutes, if we looked ENE (East North-East). How's that for interactive learning?!

So my class scampered off home eagerly awaiting for their homework to arrive, hurtling across the night sky with the space shuttle hanging on to it! R-chan called me later to say thank you - so sweet! - she'd managed to find ISS & Discovery in the sky, exactly where we decided it would be, exactly when we thought it should be there. Now, ends of the week don't get much cooler than that! But if you click here, you can watch ISS on YouTube

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