Yeah! You got it.
it's your turn to ask a question.

Who were the two women to precede Sally Ride into space?

Svetlana Savitskaya, USSR cosmonaut in July 1984. She was the first woman cosmonaut to walk in space, incredible.

Kathryn Sullivan, American astronaut, in October 1984 aswell. This girl was the first American woman that walked in space.

You got one half of it....

2nd woman in space, would be Svetlana Savitskaya, her first mission was Soyuz T-7/T-5 (Aug. 19, 1982).
3rd woman in space, would be Sally Ride, her first mission was STS-7 (Jun. 18, 1983).
4th woman in space, would be Judith Resnik, her first mission was STS-41-D (Aug. 30, 1984).
5th woman in space, would be Kathryn D. Sullivan, her first mission was STS-41-G (Oct. 5, 1984).

First woman is Valentina Tereshkova, she was a USSR cosmonaut.



She was also the first american woman to walk in space. Sally did not participate in spacewalks.

yeah, but sally got ahead first in space.. ^^ let's wait for the answer.

2 Women beat Sally Ride into space.

Valentina Tereshkova (1963)
Svetlana Savitskaya (1982)
(both of Soviet origin)

Sally was the first AMERICAN woman into space.


Now, some one else ask a question, I'm not the best at this subject, lol.

Yes, there was a bit of confusion with this one.

The Question:

What is the fastest matter made object(s) found in The Universe?

neutrino = And if thats right (because I understand there is no proven right answer at this point in time) I pass my turn over to Waspie.

That's one of the objects

The (s) was a clue on my first post.

Believe it or not, there is something else that travels close to the speed of light. You got 50%.

Another clue: It's not a subatomic or elementary particle.



Why not just let anyone else have a go?

Is it the Accretion Disk found on most of the black holes?

Bingo.

Your turn.

Aboard which mission was the Hubble Space Telescope launched?

That's quite easy.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in STS-31 (35) on board the Discovery Space Shuttle, if I remember correctly, this was on the 24 April 1990, and if I'm not mistaken it was a morning launch?

Great! I want to keep this thread going.. Now it's your turn

How many rovers have been sent to Mars? And which are still operating?

I only know of four, Spirit Rover and Opportunity Rover is still currently operational.
the other two Mars 2 with termination date of 27 November 1971 ( crash landed on mars ) and Mars 3 with termination date of 2 December 1971 ( landed but had a technical problem with the transmission. )

There is another one which was operational for three months.

It was the Mars Pathfinder! ... Silly me.

Your turn.

Who were given the nickname Pinky and Ox?

Dr. G. D. "Pinky" Nelson and and Dr. J. D. A. "Ox" van Hoften, both NASA astronauts?

By God, you got it, Mekorig.
They actually had a secondary mission patch on STS-41C (STS-13) which featured everyone's nicknames, including OX and PINKY. It wasn't a publically announced or publicized thing, and it had this theme of defying bad luck (black cat, number 13, etc...).

It has a certain poignancy to me, since this flight was the Challenger mission that Dick Scobee flew as pilot under Bob Crippen.
Less than 2 years later, the bad luck they joked about with their alternative patch would claim Dick's life in the same orbiter...

Anyway...I believe it's your question!

Then lets begin with a easy one.

What is the name of the hypothetical group of asteroids that may orbit in a dynamically stable zone between 0.08 and 0.21 AU from the Sun?

That would be the Vulcanoids.

Before I ask my question a bit of background.

Three types of craft have made deliberate* manned sub-orbital flights (exceeding 100km altitude). All three were American. The first two do it were the Mercury-Redstone missions of Alan Shepherd (Freedom 7 - 5th May 1961) and Gus Grissom (Liberty Bell 7 21st July 1961).

The last to do it was Spaceship One with three flights exceeding this altitude between June 21st and October 4th 2004, the first two piloted by Mike Melville and the last by Brian Binnie.

* The "Soyuz anomaly" of 5th April 1975 was also a sub-orbital flight, although it was a launch abort of an orbital attempt.

So the question - What was the other American vehicle that made 2 suborbital flights and who was the pilot (astronaut)?

That would be flights 90 and 91 of the X-15 rocketplane piloted by Joe Walker.

The first flight took place on July 19, 1963 reaching an altitude of 106,010 meters, followed by a flight on August 22, 1963 that reached an altitude of 107,960 m.




Easy one: name the only spaceflight where female crew members outnumbered males aboard the craft, and what else was unusual about that flight?

Would that be Expedition 16, where commander Peggy Whitson, Yuri Malenchenko and So Yeon Yi (sp) flew home from the ISS? The unusual thing about the flight was that So Yeon Yi was the first Korean Astronaut.

Coreect, both flights being made by X-15 #3

You are correct in both replies, although the unusual event I had in mind was the second ballistic reentry in a row made by the Soyuz capsule.

Cool, thank you.
My question is; What is the more common name for Explorer 66 and what does the name mean?

That would be COBE, for Cosmic Background Explorer.

Launched in 1989 on board a Delta rocket, COBE (originally spelt CoBE) or the Cosmic Background Explorer has been credited with discovering cosmic background radiation (especially in the X-Ray band) that dates back almost to the Big Bang event itself. Along with IRAS (Infra Red Astronomical Satellite), it has been said that COBE has taken Cosmology to an entirely new level of undrestanding.
Congrats MID, your turn.

well you can thank our luckie souls Im not the one writeing code for lost pass words took four days to fix my puter. Hows Mid and everyone been? and whats the new question?

Ok, let's try this one...

We've all heard talk by some of how Apollo supposedly executed all of the lunar missions flawlessly.
Of course we all know this is not the case. Most everyone knows about Apollo1, and Apollo 11's program alarms, and of course, Apollo 13.

However, anomalies were present on every mission...in droves. Most of them were things that didn't have any major mission impact.


Nonetheless, three other Apollo missions had major, potentially mission threatening problems that came up. There were 4 such major anomalies that occurred on three of the lunar landing missions. All of them caused concern for the mission's successful completion, caused delays, and worried lots of folks...including the crews.

Anyone know what missions these were on?

Houston I have a problem. still lookin Mid about there Was it 17 ,12. 15. ?

That's what I'm askin' partner!


Anyone know what three missions we had some cliff hangers on (other than 11 and 13, which most people know about?)?


HINT: You got one of 'em right...The even numbered flight above...

Ok, it's 2 days since MID asked his question, so I'm going to have a crack at it. Here goes:

Apollo 12, struck by lightning around 37 seconds after launch causing a drop out of the instrumentation and a loss of telemetry for a few seconds.

Apollo 14: difficulty in docking the CM to the LM on the way out (no LM would sure have been a show stopper). Also The LM, Antares, needed a software upgrade after a faulty switch repeatedly gave the computer an abort command after separation from the CM. The software patch cause the LM radar to fail to lock on the lunar surface.

Apollo 16: Mission shortened by a day and Lunar landing attempt delayed and nearly cancelled as a result of a problem with the CSM main engine gimbal system.

How's that MID?

As I suspected, the ever-astute Waspie Dwarf has scored a 100% on the quiz!


Correct, absolutely.

Most people don't realize that these were all tense moments during these flights, and were mission threatening. These things were all chew-on-your-knuckles kind of problems.

Apollo 12's lightning strike actually had management and some controllers considering that perhaps the circuitry to deploy the parachutes might have been damaged by the lightning strike, which of course would mean death to Conrad, Bean, and Gordon. The notion was never mentioned to the crew, and when they were given a GO for TLI, it was done knowing that the possibility that they might die upon re-entry was present. However, the general consensus was, "What's the difference? We can't fix it, and if we re-enter now and they die...it's no different than if they re-enter after they execute their mission and die." Thus, they were given a GO. The flip side of that coin was that calling them out of Earth orbit because of a possibility that couldn't be verified, and having good chute deploy would've meant the waste of a 400 million dollar flight.

The unspoken worry of Apollo 12, which fortunately, resulted in the right call.

Apollo 14's docking difficulty was resolved by essentially ramming the LM with the CM. That was a show-stopper indeed if they couldn't get docked. And those abort commands in the LM PNGS would've triggered an abort during powered descent if the program was initiated. The software fix eliminated the possibilty of PNGS initiating an abort, and would require AGS to execute an abort. Again, it was mission control doing their jobs...and a tense potentially mission ending anomaly.

That Apollo 16 wait was a long, depressing thing. I actually thought there was a real possibility of having to scrap a perfectly good LM landing. It took a long time, but folks all over the country resolved it.




Some of the "perfection" of Apollo illustrated.



Anyway, Waspie: your question!

Thanks MID, although I wasn't quite as astute as you suspect. I think my memory is going (and it wasn't good to start with). I had to reach for the bookshelf to look up the Apollo 16 problem (Disasters and Accidents in Manned Spaceflight by David Shayler... A Waspie_Dwarf recommended read).

To my question, I think I'll move away from spaceflight for a while and go for an astronomy related question.

In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided, controversially, that Pluto should no longer be considered a planet. This is not the first time this has happened to a solar system object. So which object, discovered in 1801, was considered by many to be a planet for nearly 50 years?

*BUZZZ* What is the asteroid Ceres! One of the destinations of the Dawn probe, I can hardly wait!

Question: When people think "supernova" they generally think of a very large star that has reached the end of its life and and explodes after its core collapses. What is the other object which, given the right circumstances, can explode in a supernova that is actually brighter than a stellar-core-collapse supernova?

Would it be a Pulsar ?

That would be a Type Ia supernova, which is a white dwarf star that accretes enough mass to raise it above the chandrasekhar limit of 1.38 solar masses, either by accretion of material from another star or by direct stellar collision.

Name the first food consumed aboard a spacecraft that was not specially prepared to be eaten in space, who ate it, and on which flight it occurred.

.

That was food specifically packaged and planned to be eaten in space. Try again!


Bonus question: of this series of missions, this mission's spacecraft is the only one to have a name. What is it?

The fact it was in aluminium tube suggests to me that it was specially prepared for spaceflight.

I am not sure of the answer to this one but I think it could be the incident that, when I first read about it, helped make John Young my hero. John Young smuggled a sandwich (corned beef I believe) on board Gemini 3. He shared it with Gus Grissom. The story I have heard (possibly apocryphal but some one will correct me if I am wrong) is that Grissom, who unlike Young was certainly not a Navy man, was sea sick after the splash down and so the it was just the Astronauts who re-entered in Gemini 3.

I have just read Atomic Dogs latest post, convincing me I am correct. Gemini 3 was named Molly Brown, the only Gemini capsule to carry a nick name. It was named after the popular musical at the time, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (about a survivor of the Titanic) and was a jokey reference to the fact that Grissom's Mercury mission ended with the capsule sinking. NASA didn't see the joke and no NASA capsule would carry a name again until Apollo 9.

Correctimundo!

I'd better think of a question then.