Mercury Atlas 8

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Mission emblem
Mission emblem Mercury Atlas 8
Mission dates
Mission: Mercury Atlas 8 (MA-8)
COSPAR-ID : 1962-052A
Spacecraft: Sigma 7
serial number 16
Launcher: Atlas D 113-D
Crew: 1
Begin: October 3, 1962, 12:15:12 UTC
Starting place: LC-14 , Cape Canaveral
Landing: October 3, 1962, 21:28:23 UTC
Landing place: Pacific
32 ° 6 ′  N , 174 ° 28 ′  W
Flight duration: 9h 13min 11s
Earth orbits: 6th
Recovery ship: USS Kearsarge
Orbit inclination : 32.5 °
Apogee : 285 km
Perigee : 153 km
Covered track: 231,718 km
Maximum speed: 28,257 km / h
Maximum acceleration: 8.1 g
Team photo
Walter Schirra
Walter Schirra
◄ Before / After ►
Mercury Atlas 7
(manned) 		Mercury Atlas 9
(manned)

The Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8) mission was a manned space flight as part of the US Mercury program .

crew

On June 27, 1962 , about a month after the Mercury Atlas 7 flight , NASA announced that Walter Schirra would be performing the next Mercury flight. With six orbits of the earth, the flight time should be doubled compared to Mercury-Atlas 6 and Mercury-Atlas 7. Gordon Cooper was assigned as a replacement pilot .

preparation

When the Mercury spacecraft was designed, it was not planned to fly six times around the earth, so some systems, such as the power supply and the oxygen tanks, had to be revised.

If you wanted to be able to abort the mission at any time with an emergency landing , the number of rescue teams had to be increased. 19 ships in the Atlantic and nine in the Pacific were ready for communication and rescue. For a seventh orbit around the earth, which was considered first, an even higher effort would have been necessary, so that the flight was designed for six orbits. Five Luftwaffe aircraft were to orbit over regions that were not covered by the ground stations.

After the flight of MA-7, astronaut Scott Carpenter had complained that he had received the flight plan too late and that changes had been made to the very last. From this experience it was learned that the flight plan for MA-8 was available two months before take-off and no major changes were made.

The tests on the Mercury spacecraft with the serial number 16, which was delivered to Cape Canaveral on January 16, 1962 , dragged on and the hoped-for launch date in August could not be kept. The Atlas missile , made available by the US Air Force , was not delivered until August 8 and required further testing.

Schirra named the spaceship Sigma 7 . In mathematics, sigma is a symbol for the sum, and the spaceship was the sum of all technical achievements. The number 7 stood for the seven Mercury astronauts, like every Mercury spaceship after Shepards Freedom 7 .

Flight history

The Atlas rocket with Sigma 7 at the top took off on October 3, 1962. A few seconds after take-off, the rocket unexpectedly rotated around its longitudinal axis and almost aborted the start, but the situation stabilized again.

Sigma 7 reached an apogee orbit of 283 km in five minutes, higher than previous Mercury flights. Only the first space flight ever, Vostok 1 , had reached a greater altitude. With 7850 m / s Sigma 7 also set a new speed record.

Schirra performed several steering maneuvers with Sigma 7, both on the day and night side of the earth. For a large part of the flight, however, the spaceship was held in the correct position by the autopilot or drifted rudderlessly in order to save fuel.

During this flight, the first television broadcast took place live from space, but it only lasted a few minutes. The television signals were transmitted by the Telstar 1 TV satellite .

The splashdown took place with a much higher precision than in the previous Mercury flights. Sigma 7 landed just 9000 meters from the recovery ship, the aircraft carrier USS Kearsarge . It was the first time that a manned lander went down in the Pacific .

Significance to the Mercury program

Schirra knew how to steer the spaceship carefully and in an energy-saving manner. In addition, there were no major mishaps, so that the flight of Sigma 7 went down in NASA history as "space flight from the textbook".

Even if the flight of Sigma 7 was technically successful and meant an improvement over Mercury-Atlas 7, it was obvious that the USA was still behind the Soviet Union . With the launches of Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 it had been shown that they could launch two rockets within 24 hours. In addition, it was far ahead of the nine hours from Schirra in terms of flight duration with just under four days. The next and last planned Mercury flight should last a full day to shorten this lead.

Web links

Commons : Mercury Atlas 8  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files