Hello
Walter and list,
This
is a nice report by this Gemini astronaut. I have never heard about it
or any other report alike.
Interesting is the comparison of this meteoroid impact
with a baseball fastball. As a non-American, I am not at all an expert in
baseball but if I assume that
a
fastball has 200 miles per hour at its best and the mass of the meteoroid grain
was 10 mg, the energy of this object would be comparable to a baseball of 225
grams in weight!
m1*v1^2 = m2*v2^2
where
m1 = mass of meteoroid 0.01 grams,
m2=
weight of baeball (I don't know!!!),
v1 =
velocity of meteoroid (30,000 miles / hour),
v2 =
velocity of baseball (200 miles/hour),
thus
m2 =
0.01g * 30,000^2 / 200^2 = 225 grams
Considering this mass, it is not
so surprising that such tiny meteoroid particle caused so much sound
on impact.
Jörn
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Hello Everyone,
I am an enthusiast of the US space program and I
finally got around to reading Gordon Cooper's book Leap of Faith. Cooper
was the pilot of Faith 7, the last Mercury flight and the command pilot of
Gemini 5. On pages 125-126, he talks about being hit by "meteorites" on
his Gemini flight. I think his description is interesting (overlookling
innaccurate terminology). Does anyone else know of any more reports by
astronauts or cosmonauts of their spacecraft being hit by
meteoroids while in flight.
Here is the text:
We were told by astronomers to expect front-row
seats for a regular meteorite shower that occurs in the latter part of every
August. It would be the frist one to be observed by man from
space. The first night of the shower was a sight to behold - thousands
of meteorites passing under our spacecraft as they entered the Earth's
atmosphere and burned up like falling stars.
We knew there was a chance that a meteorite might
strike our spacecraft but there was nothing we could do to prevent it and
only hoped that if it happend it would be a small one. We carried a
patch kit with rubber plugs to repair any tiny puncture holes (tiny was
the operative word) to try to keep from losing our cabin pressure. But
we were not prepared for what it sounded like when one actually
hit.
A hard metallic BANG!
Pete and I both jumped.
It sounded like a major-league fastball hurled
against the side of our pacecraft, but we knew it was no bigger than a grain
of sand. If the meteorite had been anywhere near the size of a baseball,
it would have gone right through the side of the spacecraft - ending, in a
nanosecond, oor mission and our lives.
Over the course of the next couple of days, we
were struck four or five times. When the spacecraft was dismantled upon
it's return to the Cape - every returning spacecraft was taken apart piece by
piece as part of a total engineering report to assess how it handled the
stresses of flight - impresions were found on the outside wall, as if someone
had driven home an ice pick with a hammer. The meteorites had actually
reshaped the outer titanium wall of the spacecraft, pushnig in the toughest
metal known to man as much as a quarter -inch. (Titanium takes more heat
with less damage than any metal on Earth.) It seemed unbelievable that
such a mall particle had so much energy and caused so much sound, but
these cosmic fastballs were a bit faster than any Hall of Fame
pitcher's - a speed gun would have clocked them in the range of thirty
thousand miles per hour.
-Walter