WTF/FUNNY Gifs, Pics, & Videos: Volume 3

Mello_SixtyNine · Jan 27, 2017

http://i.imgur.com/6z6b3Cr.jpg

domroger · Jan 27, 2017

Answer to Zipmans post '
Wonder how he managed to escape from the asylum .

Mello_SixtyNine · Jan 27, 2017

oggbashan · Jan 27, 2017

Mello_SixtyNine said:
http://i.imgur.com/6z6b3Cr.jpg

The joke might work for American pilots but in the UK during WW2 many women were flying all types of military aircraft from production factories to airfields, and some died doing it. In the USSR women were flying fighters and bombers in combat.

Colonel Hogan · Jan 27, 2017

Mello_SixtyNine said:
Jack Garman was a 24-year-old NASA employee
while the Apollo 11 mission was occurring. Part of
his job was to write down every computer alarm
code that could go wrong along with the solutions
to those problems. There was in fact a computer
error during the Apollo 11’s attempted landing, and
the mission would have been aborted if Garman
hadn’t saved the day with his memorization of all
of the codes and solutions.

https://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/have-an-interstellar-day-with-30-awesome-nasa-facts-30-photos-220.jpg?quality=85&strip=info&w=600

Jack Garman was, indeed, one of the computer whiz-kids in the Apollo program and was one of the back room controllers directly linked in to Lunar Module guidance controller Steve Bales during the Apollo 11 descent. But, like most things in the manned space program, he doesn't deserve full credit for saving the Apollo 11 landing.

Here is the more detailed story of the LEM computer alarms from he and some other critical players at that moment in history. It is one of my favorite American history tales:

Garman: There was a team of flight controllers whose duty it was to come up with simulation profiles that train the flight controllers and astronauts together to survive and fix things. At one point, they had asked me to come up with a failure that was totally software-related. I did that months earlier, and they stuck that in during one of the simulations.

* Liebergot: There was usually a pretty adversarial relationship between the simulation-training guys and us flight controllers because they were trying to see if they could outfox us. But they were pretty important. They trained us to respond to most of the problems we would ever see.

* Kranz: Dick Koos, our simulation supervisor, gave us the 1201 and 1202 alarms. Steve [Bales] had never seen this before. During the simulation, they had an abort, which was his call.

* Bales: There's a general rule in flight control: If you don't know what to do, don't do anything. The problem is, in the middle of a lunar landing, not doing anything is not an option.

* Garman: Gene Kranz sat us all down and said, "I want you to figure out every possible alarm code that can happen in flight so that we're prepared." In those days, there was no such thing as desktop computers. So I wrote down all the alarm codes on a sheet of grid paper, with crib notes on what they meant and what our response should be. And I stuck it under the plexiglass of the console I was to sit at. And, lo and behold, one of them--well, a couple of them--popped up during the actual landing.

* Eyles: What led to [the alarms] was an obscure mismatch deep in the electronics--two signals that should have been locked together in phase were only locked together in frequency. That hardware glitch involved the rendezvous radar, which really wasn't needed during the descent to the moon.

* Aldrin: I left it on. That turned out to be the main cause, and maybe the cause, of the program alarms.

* Eyles: Based on a random-phase relationship between those two signals, the rendezvous radar electronics were sending pulses to the computer at a very high rate.

* Ward: The computer was simply saying, "Hey, I've got more than I can handle, but I'm gonna do the important things, so don't worry about it."

* Eyles: Under the software control, it did a software restart. Five times during the landing, the whole software was flushed and reconstructed in terms of what was being executed. And that load shedding was what allowed us to complete the landing without any appreciable glitches in the way the guidance system worked. Without quite knowing it, we had built a fault-tolerant computer.

* Garman: The problem is that those program alarms set off what is called the "master caution and warning," which is red lights and very large klaxon sounds--if you've seen submarine movies, kind of like the klaxon that goes off when they say, "Dive! Dive!" And as I gathered from after-flight readings, the heart rates for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went up just a bit.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a4248/4318170/

Given everything Garman and the MIT guys who wrote the software knew, there was no reason to believe that a 1201 or 1202 program alarm would ever occur in flight. And as Eyles notes, ONLY a bizarre glitch AND the concurrent decision of Aldrin to leave the radar rendezvous switch in the "auto" position (which he had no reason to believe would cause a problem) DID, in fact, cause the problem.

But because of the mere possibility of the alarms being displayed on the LEM's computer readout, the simulation team jumped on that fact and ran a simulation to see how the controllers would respond. There was a fair amount of bitching about it at the time since it the actual landing attempt was only a few weeks away. But Gene Kranz probably made the decision that truly saved the mission by insisting that ALL computer alarms and the appropriate responses be documented and distributed among relevant controllers and the Apollo 11 crew.

Which takes nothing away from the talent and service of Jack Garman, but merely illustrates the broader genius of the entire mission control team.

doowdniw · Jan 27, 2017

oggbashan said:
The joke might work for American pilots but in the UK during WW2 many women were flying all types of military aircraft from production factories to airfields, and some died doing it. In the USSR women were flying fighters and bombers in combat.

We had WASPs and WAFS doing the same thing over here in the US. Not combat, but the other stuff.