Today I took a ride on the impressive 18-meter-arm Star City centrifuge.
As a preparation for the upcoming manual reentry exam, I had a dry-run today in which we went through a typical exam session: three reentry scenarios with the running centrifuge with two static scenarios to rest in between.
I’ve talked a little bit here about how manual reentry works.
The goal is to land within 10 km from the nominal touchdown point – the one that the computer-controlled reentry would fly us to, if it worked. But it’s also important to keep the Gs under control. Especially if we’re trying to compensate an overshoot in the time we made contact with the atmosphere (i.e. we made contact later than planned), the temptation is to give inputs that will lead to huge G-loads in an attempt to correct back. In an exam setting that will affect the score, but in real life, as well as in the centrifuge, it also affects one’s level of discomfort and pain. Let’s say it’s a self-punishing mistake!
Under heavy G-loads it is quite difficult to move at all. Luckily, to fly the reentry we only need to press two buttons, the ones under my thumbs in the picture. Those inputs change the roll angle of the descent module in discrete increments of 15°, roll being the rotation around the axis of symmetry. It’s not very intuitive, but the roll affects the lift, so that we can control how steep or shallow we want to fly. (For those we want to try to figure it out, here’s a hint: the center of mass of the vehicle is displaced with respect to the axis of symmetry).
If you want to know more about riding the centrifuge, here’s an older blog post about it:
https://blogs.esa.int/astronauts/2013/07/22/a-ride-in-the-worlds-biggest-centrifuge/
(Trad IT) Traduzione in italiano a cura di +AstronautiNEWS qui:
https://www.astronautinews.it/tag/logbook/
(Trad ES) Tradducción en español aquí:
https://www.intervidia.com/category/bitacora/
(Trad FR) Traduction en français par +Anne Cpamoa ici:
https://spacetux.org/cpamoa/category/traductions/logbook-samantha/
15/04/2014