Shooting a UFO, STS mission (video)

StelarX: "I will not even begin going down the list of the dozens ( easily proved) assasinations and many more extremely suspicious deaths in the UFO research community."

Why am I not surprised that you "won't" -- or "can't"??.

quote: I've been involved with 'conspiracy stories' far beyond the UFO subject -- ranging from the silly Soviet-sponsored notion that the CIA sent the Korean Airlines flight 007 into Soviet airspace deliberately, to provoke an atrocity and feel out radar facilities [turns out it was a stupid accident followed by trigger-happy Soviet brutality],


"The Soviet aircraft did everything they could to turn the plane around and released all but the CIA aircrew afterwards. They could have easily shot the planes to tiny bits but chose to bring it down with cannon fire killing the absolute minimum of people they could in this situation. Why did this aircraft fly strait into the most restricted piece of airspace in the USSR with the political maneuvering going on at the time?"

It's touching that even long after it has fallen, there are still eager apologists for Soviet tyranny and the crimes thereof.

I think you are confusing KAL 007 over Sakhalin in 1983 with the KAL flight (702, I recall?) over Kola some years earlier. Check your notes -- memory flukes are innocent and don't count in an argument.

Good question re RCS thrusters and ice -- and here's why your question's answer is, 'By no means'. Go to this link

www.space1.com...

...and note that the propellant injectors are at the thrust chamber (where the hypergolic reaction occurs), which is upstream of the nozzle. And it's the leaking from injectors that can accumulate ice that is then exprelled during firings. As you can note in the fine images you posted, you can't see the thrust chambers, only the engine bells.

Inside the thrust chamber is a temperature transducer, which detects leaks by measuring a drop in temperature caused by evaporative cooling. It is the only way to measure a small leak -- and it's been the technique implemented since the very first shuttle space flight in 1981, when I was on console in the MCC for launch, monitoring precisely these systems.

My use of the word "nozzle" -- in hindsight it looks sloppy. A rocket engine usually has a combustion chamber and an engine bell, and to tell the truth I'm not sure if the street word 'nozzle' refers to the whole engine or just the bell. If the latter, than my use of the word was confused and/or confusing.

Originally posted by Access Denied

Originally posted by lost_shaman
Doesn't that hurt your "Ice" theory when the Shuttle itself and specifically inside the RCS and Vernier Jet Nozzles are by all visual appearances "Ice Free"?

No. Ice would form (from leaking propellant valves) in the combustion chamber which you can't see from the outside... not the nozzle... any ice (frozen unburned propellants) formed past the combustion chamber would be expelled and tend to "hang around" the shuttle.

Here's a cut away view of an RCS thruster here that might help you visualize this a little better...

www.vgl.org...

Good question though.

You referred him to another of NASA's well appointed gatekeeper's? you must be joking.

Originally posted by Access Denied

He he... what's wrong with tailoring the message specifically for the receiver? If I sent LS to anything but a conspiracy site (like say NASAs) then he would have immediately discounted it because of their obvious “bias”.

I've been advised you conspiracy types need to be treated with kid gloves or else you won't be taken seriously so hey, I'm trying.

That's nothing less than an Ad Hominem attack and personal snipe. You don't know me well enough to say what I would or wouldn't do. I've often used NASA as a source for my information which just goes to show how baseless and unfounded your personal snipe against me actually is. So I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from the Ad Hominems.



[edit on 10-9-2006 by lost_shaman]

Originally posted by JimO
Good question re RCS thrusters and ice -- and here's why your question's answer is, 'By no means'. Go to this link

www.space1.com...

...and note that the propellant injectors are at the thrust chamber (where the hypergolic reaction occurs), which is upstream of the nozzle. And it's the leaking from injectors that can accumulate ice that is then exprelled during firings. As you can note in the fine images you posted, you can't see the thrust chambers, only the engine bells.

Good.

What I'm trying to establish is that there is no Ice being formed on the RCS "Nozzles" that can "flake off" directly into space and float freely at low velocity near the Shuttle.

Which is a big problem.

This means that any of the Ice that gets shaken loose during a RCS fire would be exposed to extreme heat and pressure inside the combustion chamber and would have to exit through the Nozzle with a ballistic trajectory away from the Shuttle less than or equal to the speed of the escaping gasses. If any Ice crystal of any significant size could survive that set of conditions , it would still be speeding away from the Shuttle at 1000's of f/p/s.


Just for visual reference.






[edit on 11-9-2006 by lost_shaman]

"That's nothing less than an Ad Hominem attack and personal snipe."

Oh, like the practice attacking people whose opinions you don't like as 'appointed NASA debunkers' and hired intellectual stooges? With no facts -- in fact, with demonstrably false allegations, but with the effect of biasing an argument.

Boo frigging hoo.

"What I'm trying to establish is that there is no Ice being formed on the RCS "Nozzles" that can "flake off" directly into space and float freely at low velocity near the Shuttle. "

It's marvelous how you are so confident that your limited knowledge, experience, and understanding can 'establish' some fact contrary to the visual evidence over a quarter century of downlink television views of the orbiter near-space environment and the regular appearance of dots from solo to blizzards, from flickering flat flakes to steady bits, shown live to the whole world.

Ice inside RCS thrusters comes off any number of ways, during changing thermal conditions as the orbiter faces towards or away from the sun, during gradual mass increase over an on-going leak, or hydraulic pressure under the ice from such a leak, or as heat -- or shock -- from firing adjacent thrusters jars the structure, or -- gosh, the real world is SO-O-O-O-O much more varied and creative than your own imagination, despite all the one-on-one tutorials you've been generously provided with.

Originally posted by JimO

It's marvelous how you are so confident that your limited knowledge, experience, and understanding can 'establish' some fact contrary to the visual evidence over a quarter century of downlink television views of the orbiter near-space environment and the regular appearance of dots from solo to blizzards, from flickering flat flakes to steady bits, shown live to the whole world.

I'm sorry JimO didn't realize this line of questions was hitting so close to home, but didn't you just say that the Ice would form inside the combustion chamber and not on the "Nozzles"?

That's what I'm trying to establish based on what you've said. The reason being ice "flaking off" inside the combustion chamber and ice "flaking off" the "Nozzles" into space are two different scenarios.

Originally posted by JimO
"That's nothing less than an Ad Hominem attack and personal snipe." - lost_shaman

Oh, like the practice attacking people whose opinions you don't like as 'appointed NASA debunkers' and hired intellectual stooges? With no facts -- in fact, with demonstrably false allegations, but with the effect of biasing an argument.

Boo frigging hoo.

I haven't made any false allegations , called anyone "hired intellectual stooges" or "appointed NASA debunkers" and I don't "practice attacking people whose opinions ( I ) don't like".

Thanks.

Of course, I leave a thread and something interesting happens... Proabably because I shut up and left.

Jim, its good to see you discussing this issue here. Your knowledge about the space shuttle is helping fill in the large gaps where my own rudimentary knowledge (I had a space shuttle architecture poster when I was a kid) leaves off.

It is my general opinion that the "discing" is a camera aperature effect, and that the tether incident footage shows significant saturation effects, not a 'tether shadow' demonstrating objects passing behind it. I agree with you on those two things.

For me, the question has always been about distance to the objects. Clearly, if the objects are close to the shuttle, they are certainly just little particles, as you write.

I saw no evidence to suggest anything other than near objects until someone pointed out that a few of the points of light in the tether incident have an apparent motion of a clockwise 'walk' of the lengthwise permiter of the tether. The traversal path is irregular but roughtly rectangular. The entire motion takes roughly a minute or two to complete, and is rather slow. Most people don't watch a particular particle for that length of time so this is not discussed.

If the objects are near field, I cannot come up with a reasonable prosaic answer for why they would happen to trace a somewhat rectangular path around the tether.

If the objects are junk around the tether, perhaps circling in a magnetic field, then they are not near field objects.

Are you familiar with this behavior? Do you have any insights into mechanisms that might cause this? If you want, I can identify one of the particles and demonstrate its path in the sts video feed.

Finally, woudn't a simple parallax equipped camera set provide an important point of view for the public? NASA does an excellent job of bringing the community into the program, through schools, HAM radio conversations, etc. Yet it seems that the public has difficultly interpreting events in the orbital frame of reference.

Rather than continuing to declare that people simply don't understand, would not a publically available stereo 3D view clarify some of this debate? I would think it would, at the very least, contribute to the public ability to 'be there' with the astronauts, and therefore contribute to the public's interest in the space program. More importantly, I think, it would educate the public on the frame of reference within which the space shuttle flies. With the common presence of computers in homes and classrooms, the venue for display seems perfect.

Again, Mr, Olberg, I very much appreciate your contributions to the discussion.

[edit on 11-9-2006 by Ectoterrestrial]

[edit on 11-9-2006 by Ectoterrestrial]

Leevi, I would be interested in hearing more about your personal experience where you witnessed what you did. You can send me a u2u to tell me more or point me to any thread in which you discussed what you witnessed.

Thanks, Ecto -- I had not observed such a 'walk' behavior, but will pull out my copy of the video and look at it. did you actually see the motion as described, or are you passing on somebody else's description?

As for parallax, there are four cameras in the corners of the payload bay and cameras on the robot arm, but for close-in objects how should they be aimed to both capture them? Also, the number of cameras that can be recorded and/or downlinked is limited.

I've tried for a long time to get the NASA History Office interested in responding to widespread internet stories with full explanations, but they have mostly laughed them off. The one time the NASA historian agreed to a small 'monograph' contract was in 2002 when he awarded me a $15,000 grant to write up a teacher's guide to explaining the 'Apollo Hoax' myth for students -- a contract that was cancelled in embarassment as soon as it was mocked on the ABC Evening News as a stupid waste of tax money. Don't expect any more NASA efforts along those lines!

OK, Lost Shaman, we are closing in on a clearer description. Ice forms where the surfaces are cold enough for the free molecules to stick. The combustion chambers are where the injectors are located and since they are deep inside the nozzle, and are well shaded, they are a likely location. If the engine bell, the wider area of the nozzle, is also pointed to deep space (and away from the sun), it can cool down enough to also capture propellant frost, either from gaseous form or as snowflakes that form near the injectors and drift outside, to stick to cold surfaces nearer the outer rim. Now, if there's sunlight reaching inside these thrusters, they will be warmed too much for ice to form or stick. If you look at a photo with the sunlit insides of nozzles, it is already too warm for ice. But if you look at a picture of nozzles on the cold side of the shuttle, you won't see anything because it's also dark. You just know there is ice there because it shows up spewing out of leaking thrusters, at a rate commensurate with the size of the leak. There was such a leaking thruster on STS-48, as one of the crewmen explained in a quotation I posted earlier on this thread.

Originally posted by JimO

You just know there is ice there because it shows up spewing out of leaking thrusters, at a rate commensurate with the size of the leak. There was such a leaking thruster on STS-48, as one of the crewmen explained in a quotation I posted earlier on this thread.

I assume you mean this quote.

STS-48 co-pilot Reightler, when asked, told me: “We saw a lot of this on STS-48 because we had a dump nozzle that was leaking.” This same nozzle leaked on the next ‘Discovery’ mission as well and “created the same shower of ice particles – but apparently this time no one misinterpreted them as UFOs.”

This is not a reference to a leaking thruster , but a reference to the Supply Water Dump Valve.

www.jsc.nasa.gov...

Title:Supply Water Dump Valve Leakage (ORB)

Summary: DISCUSSION: At approximately 259:11:04 G.m.t., as the supply water dump nozzle was cooling down from water dump five bakeout, a sudden temperature drop of approximately 25 ?F was noted. This sudden decrease was indicative of a slug of water passing through the nozzle, probably resulting from an intermittent leak in the supply water dump valve. A review of data from previous water dumps during the flight showed a similar occurrence after supply water dump four.

The crew purged the supply water dump line and valve using the free fluid disposal in-flight maintenance procedure, and closed the isolation valve and dump valve for the remainder of the mission. Excess supply water was managed through the flash evaporator system for the remainder of the mission. After the mission, KSC performed an overpressure test on the dump valve and no leakage was indicated. This verified that no ice build-up had ruptured any of the supply water plumbing. The supply dump line, valve, and nozzle were then removed and replaced to troubleshoot both this anomaly and the supply water dump nozzle temperature drop anomaly seen on STS-39(anomaly STS-39-V-08).

CONCLUSION: The cause of the supply water dump valve intermittent leakage is presently unknown. The removed unit will undergo testing in a JSC vacuum chamber in an attempt to recreate the phenomenon.

CORRECTIVE_ACTION: The OV-103 supply water dump line, valve, and nozzle have been removed and replaced. The removed unit will undergo testing and failure analysis at JSC. The replaced unit will be verified per OMRSD retest requirements prior to the next flight. Even if this phenomenon recurs, redundant methods of managing supply water are available.

EFFECTS_ON_SUBSEQUENT_MISSIONS: None.

This was later described as a "Burping".

www.jsc.nasa.gov...

The burping phenomenon has been noted on a number of OV-103 flights dating back to STS-29 (OV-103 flight 8). The phenomenon has also occurred sporadically on the OV-104 supply water dump system. No occurrences of burping have been noted on OV-102 or OV-105. Following STS-48 (OV-103 flight 13), in-flight anomaly STS-48-V-04 was written against this phenomenon. A pressure test of the dump valve indicated no leakage. The dump line, valve, and nozzle were then removed and replaced. The removed equipment was placed in a vacuum chamber to simulate on-orbit operation in an attempt to duplicate the burning phenomenon. Several water dumps were performed, but no burping was detected. However, it was noted that at the termination of a dump, the add-on temperature measurements in the line from the valve outlet to the dump nozzle decreased, and ice formation was detected. This condition may have indicated that the capacity of the line heater was inadequate. The valve was then returned to the vendor for failure analysis; however, no cause for the burping phenomenon was found.

[edit on 12-9-2006 by lost_shaman]

My curiosity is aroused. When you use this quote,

A bomb that refuses to explode is called a dud. In other words, a hoax. Does that make the Air Force believe less in bombs? Many hoaxes have been perpetrated in the name of flying saucers, but like the duds among bombs, that shouldn't lull people into believing there are no such things as bombs or flying saucers. - Frank Scully ( Behind the Flying Saucers 1950 )

...do you maintain it is an intellectually honest analogy with the UFO phenomenon?

Or, since Scully is widely regarded even within the 'UFO community' as a cynical hoaxer, does it reflect your own sense of the absurd?

Thanks for the clarification on the water dump port versus a leaking jet. I've seen videos of so many, from my console in Mission Control and over 'NASA TV' when off duty, I clearly mixed some of them up. My bad.

Back to the original question:

IMHO the video is of ice crystals (or other particulate debris) moving at different velocities, originating from multiple directions, and captured on film. Then, a not-so clever, but highly imaginative 'journalist' clippis the one segment that happens to show a coincident juxtaposition of some of the particles that make them appear to be in confluent trajectories.

Video showing such particles have been in the space-flight archives for decades. The particles travel at different rates because some are simple released (fall-off, get dislodged, float away), others are blasted out of any number of dozens of jets and nozzles on the craft, and some are merely the jetsam and flotsam that our activity is increasingly adding to our orbit junk.

If you could review hundreds, nay thousands, of hours of boring video in space, eventually you'd find a few zooming pieces of frozen pee or whatever to weave an interesting story around.

Disclaimer: Please don't jump on me for being 'one of those skeptics'! I'm very open-minded and curious - and, like Mulder, "I Want To Believe". It's that in this particular case I'm more apt to accept the plausible, scientific explanations - since they exist. There are PLENTY of other incidents that are worthy of our collective interest and scrutiny.

The debate is healthy and helpful, however - so keep up the good posts!

Originally posted by JimO

My curiosity is aroused. When you use this quote,

A bomb that refuses to explode is called a dud. In other words, a hoax. Does that make the Air Force believe less in bombs? Many hoaxes have been perpetrated in the name of flying saucers, but like the duds among bombs, that shouldn't lull people into believing there are no such things as bombs or flying saucers. - Frank Scully ( Behind the Flying Saucers 1950 )

...do you maintain it is an intellectually honest analogy with the UFO phenomenon?

I rotate quotes from interesting people dealing with UFOs in my sig. line. I just put this quote in my sig. this week.

I thought it was an interesting analogy as recently on ATS many discussions have focused on Hoaxes and many people can and have been turned off the subject of UFOs after falling for some Hoax or another. So I found it somewhat relevant and interesting and rotated it into my sig. line.

As for Frank Scully , after reading Behind the Flying Saucers myself I think he got a bad rap much worse than he actually deserved.


Since we're a tad off topic here JimO what do you make of Commander Pavel Vinogradov reporting an Unknown Object to Mission Control yesterday around 12:35 pm Central Time as the ISS/Shuttle Atlantis was passing over Africa?

He said in Russian and it was translated over the Air on NASA T.V. , " We have an unknown object. We don't know what it is ... If no one knows what it is ... then no one cares. Do you have any questions ? "

Mission Control answered , " No questions."



[edit on 12-9-2006 by lost_shaman]