Space Shuttle Discovery looks like a hooded falcon. She’s ready to ship to the Smithsonian on Tuesday, with low 1,500 ft. flight over Washington D.C.
(Click photo to enlarge – it’s 21 megapixels. More photos and video links below.)
some cool details…
Thrusters on the other side of the nose, showing signs of use:
Amazing texture. It has to be stored inside as it does not like the rain. Interesting exit plan…
The skid marks of reentry…
Beefy rear landing gear:
More photos and video of Discovery, and from crawling throughout Endeavour.
Stunning photos and video! It maybe many many decades before we see something this big take off for space and return to earth!
I still find it hard, like the loss of a loved one, to see the Shuttles in their grounded glory.
Still better when seen in original size. I would love to bring this one in Photoshop and enhance it and maybe try to tonemap it ???? And send it back to you Steve.
denis
Pretty amazing the small landing gear…
I guess the thing is built light,in relation to an airplane of the same size..
Great image.
thanks y’all.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeany7] – NASA HQ on flickr is posting some photos of the wonderfully named mate-demate
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/39581783@N08] – cool offer. Want me to send you the three RAW files (with +/- 2EV)? I did a Photomatix Tone Map to get this, but I’m not very experienced with that tool.
SOOOO cool. I would just love it but…..I truly wonder how you could send me a 100 meg file. Your raws are surely around thirty meg each ??? And I do not know how to send or receive these size mails. I can manage photoshop but as for internet…I need you. I have a zip program somewhere in my computer, does that help ?
denis
I find this tone map quite good. If I do it, I will get rid of the "aberrations chromatique" (in french) in the windows, take some noise out (probably due to the iso (400) and I will try to pop up the whole picture. One of my tricks with Photomatix is based on some patience. I sometimes produce between five and ten different results with different adjustments before bringing them in photoshop in ten different layers to use the best parts from each of them. From there, I sometimes work for up to five hours. Depending on different reasons (sometimes unknown to me), the end results are often quite surprising. I just love to work photos and I guess that you love photography to…besides rockets.
Have a wonderful weekend Steve.
denis
Wow! I would love that special treatment… I can send you large files for free with wetransfer.com if you send me your email (the files will download over ftp, not your email system). You can reach me at SteveJ@boxbe.com
And I just posted some VAB shots too:
And from before, some cool discoveries…
Thrusters on the other side of the nose, showing signs of use:Amazing texture. It has to be stored inside as it does not like the rain. Interesting exit plan…
The skid marks of reentry…
Beefy rear landing gear:
More photos and video of Discovery, and from crawling throughout Endeavour.
"Beefy landing gear…"
Obviously true. But from normal suburban-dweller experience it looks a little on the light side, so it is a tribute to advanced materials science, not to mention top notch engineering. Along those same lines, I was always amazed at the strength of the seemingly-thin struts that held the orbiter to the external tank/SRBs.
This just in from friends at KSC:
She is ready to fly away from NASA for the last time at daybreak tomorrow (Wash Post).
And regarding the landing gears, wikipedia summarizes:
"As a weight-saving measure, the gear could not be retracted once deployed. Since any premature extension of the landing gear would very likely have been catastrophic (as it opened through the heat shield layers), the landing gear could only be lowered by manual controls, and not by any automatic system. Similarly, since the Shuttle landed at high speed and could not abort its landing attempt, the gear had to deploy reliably on the first try every time. The gear were unlocked and deployed by triple redundant hydraulics, with the gear doors actuated by mechanical linkages to the gear strut. If all three hydraulic systems failed to release the landing gear uplocks within one second of the release command, pyrotechnic charges automatically cut the lock hooks and a set of springs deployed the gear."
Great! My first thought on seeing the above was that you had a scale model in your home 🙂 You should consider adding this picture to this group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/catching_sun/
Beth
They are fun to play with!
EveryScape has finished the stitching of my fisheye shots into a virtual tour. Before you start, remember to click the full screen button in the bottom right corner of the main image. Then you can click on the image and drag to look up down and all around. OK here is the VR version of this room.
And here’s a flickr post showing what the input images looked like for the flight deck and links to the other areas.
FYI. Your skid marks of rentry above, are actually liquid hydrogen stains from blow-by leakage from the attached fuel tanks to the orbiter. I saw the same marks on the Atlantis and Endeavor today with the Shuttle commanders that took me out for a private tour and some flight instruction in each of their vehicles, and I asked. When the orbiter launches, those two hatch doors are open, and the connection to the fuel tanks connect to the orbiter for LOx and LH2. The LH2 leaks quite a bit and causes those marks. There is not much rentry plasma in the flow field at this location of the orbiter, which is why the tiles are so think.
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