During the Apollo 13 mission, the
Image: As depicted in the film Apollo 13, Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert, played by Kevin Bacon, re-activates the Command Module Odyssey after days of being powered down. By this time, the temperature in the spacecraft is about 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).
Thus, during the Apollo 13 mission when all the equipment was off and they couldn't spare power to run the heaters, they were left with a ship designed to radiate heat away relatively quickly, even when in sunlight, but nothing but their own bodies and sunlight generating heat.
Apollo 13's cold, miserable trip home
After they performed a crucial burn to point the spacecraft back towards Earth, the crew powered down every nonessential system in the spacecraft. Without a source of heat, cabin temperatures quickly dropped down close to freezing. Some food became inedible.
Attached to the bottom of the Command Module and made of an ablative material, the heat shield protected the craft from temperatures often exceeding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
* Further examination of Biomedical Results of Apollo reveals that actual cabin temperatures dropped to a low of 43°F. It is likely that the figure in the original text refers to the low cabin temperature while the Command Module was powered up.
(see our previous article , “Using the LM for Propulsion.”) But there was only one heat shield, and it had to work to enable the capsule and the crew to survive the fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere. Thankfully, as it turned out ,the heat shield wasn't damaged.
3.5 Apollo 13
During the second period, the Commander, Command Module Pilot, and Lunar Module Pilot slept 5, 6, and 9 hours, respectively. The third sleep period was scheduled for 61 hours, but the orygen tank incident at 56 hours precluded sleep by any of the crew until approximately 80 hours.
Update: A typical Apollo blackout lasted about 4 minutes. Due to a shallower re-entry path, Apollo 13's blackout was calculated to last about 4.5 minutes. Flight director Gene Kranz's logs show that it took about 6 minutes to re-establish contact with Apollo 13.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
Within the service module were two tanks of liquid oxygen. Oxygen from these tanks was used not only for the astronauts to breathe, but to help run three fuel cells that provided electrical power to run the command ship's many systems.
Haise came down with a kidney infection, but suffered no long-term ill effects from the ordeal. The mission, dubbed a successful failure, spawned a popular movie called "Apollo 13," which was based on Lovell's biography, "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
On March 14, 1968, NASA announced that Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission planned for October 1968, would use a mixed-gas atmosphere of 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen at a pressure of 16 psi during operations on the launch pad.
Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reaches of our galaxy—in the vast nothingness of space—the distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. Temperatures in these vacuous regions can plummet to about -455 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 kelvin). Are you shivering yet?
The highest temperature that scientists have created — and thus measured — is 2 trillion kelvins. That was in the “quark-gluon plasma” created in an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
All three astronauts were forced to pile into the lunar module (LM), which had enough oxygen to support the astronauts, but had been designed for only two. The carbon dioxide produced by all three astronauts exceeded the capacity of the onboard lithium hydroxide filters.
We passed up the PAD for this midcourse correction. The time 105 hours, 30 minutes elapsed. Delta velocity 7.8 feet per second. A burn time of 15 seconds with the notation to shut down the engine manually at 14 seconds.
As the Apollo 13 crew re-entered the Earth's atmosphere there was a blackout period where they couldn't communicate with mission control. The blackout period was supposed to last three minutes, but it lasted 90 seconds longer, leaving those at mission control unaware if the crew were going to make it home safely.
An curved arrow pointing right. There was no bathroom on the Apollo missions. Instead, NASA astronauts peed into a roll-on cuff, and pooped in bags that they kneaded, rolled up tight, and took back to Earth. NASA's first real space bathroom wasn't installed until the Skylab space station launched in the early 1970s.
On April 17, tragedy turned to triumph as the Apollo 13 astronauts touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean. This is a modal window. Something went wrong while setting up a Google DAI stream.
By the time Apollo 13 came around, the television networks didn't even bother covering the launch because they felt there wasn't enough interest. Apollo 13 was to be the most ambitious mission yet.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly.
One hour and 48 minutes after liftoff, Kerwin called up to Apollo 13, “And you are Go for TLI,” and at 2 hours and 35 minutes, the S-IVB's J-2 engine ignited for nearly 6 minutes to increase Apollo 13's velocity to 24,247 miles per hour, fast enough to escape Earth's gravity well and send the spacecraft and its crew ...
The radiation in this region is enough to threaten satellites, and would be dangerous for any human who chose to spend too long there. The solution is simple: Don't spend too long there. Apollo astronauts passed through the Van Allen belts in a few hours and received less exposure than a hospital CT scan.