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‘MATHEMATICS OF SPACE – RENDEZVOUS (LIFTOFF TO LEARNING SERIES) Educational video on the mathematics used for spacecraft rendezvous, intended for middle school grade level audiences. STS-84 crewmembers Precourt, Collins, Lu, Clervoy, Kondakova and Noriega present orbital mechanics math problems associated with a Shuttle rendezvous with Mir Space Station. Also includes staged classroom scenes.’
NASA film JSC-1801
Space Shuttle Missions playlist:
Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
STS-84 was a manned spaceflight mission by Space Shuttle Atlantis to the Mir space station…
Mission highlights
The STS-84 mission was the sixth Shuttle/Mir docking mission and is part of the NASA/Mir program which consisted of nine Shuttle-Mir dockings and seven long duration flights of U.S. astronauts aboard the Russian space station. The prior Shuttle-Mir missions were STS-71, STS-74, STS-76, STS-79 and STS-81. The U.S. astronauts launched and landed on a Shuttle and servd as Mir crew members while the Russian Mir crewmembers used their Soyuz vehicle for launch and landing. This series of missions expanded U.S. research on Mir by providing resupply materials for experiments to be performed aboard the station as well as returning experiment samples and data to Earth…
A space rendezvous is an orbital maneuver during which two spacecraft, one of which is often a space station, arrive at the same orbit and approach to a very close distance (e.g. within visual contact). Rendezvous requires a precise match of the orbital velocities and position vectors of the two spacecraft, allowing them to remain at a constant distance through orbital station-keeping. Rendezvous may or may not be followed by docking or berthing, procedures which bring the spacecraft into physical contact and create a link between them.
The same rendezvous technique can be used for spacecraft “landing” on natural objects with a weak gravitational field, e.g. landing on one of the Martian moons would require the same matching of orbital velocities, followed by a “descent” that shares some similarities with docking…
First attempt failed
The first attempt at rendezvous was made on June 3, 1965, when US astronaut Jim McDivitt tried to maneuver his Gemini 4 craft to meet back up with its spent Titan II launch vehicle’s upper stage. McDivitt was unable to get close enough to achieve station-keeping, due to depth-perception problems, and stage propellant venting which kept moving it around. However, the Gemini 4 attempts at rendezvous were unsuccessful largely because NASA engineers had yet to learn the orbital mechanics involved in the process. Simply pointing the active vehicle’s nose at the target and thrusting won’t do. If the target is ahead in the orbit and the tracking vehicle increases speed, its altitude also increases, actually moving it away from the target. The higher altitude then decreases velocity, putting the tracker above and behind the target. The proper technique requires changing the tracking vehicle’s orbit to allow the rendezvous target to either catch up or be caught up with, and then at the correct moment change to the same orbit as the target with no relative motion between the vehicles…
