Orbital Mechanics 102 -Rocket Launches are VERY VIOLENT!
Rocket Launches are critically dependent upon Rocket performance! Rockets are notoriously variable thrust devices, not always when required to deliver more or less boost!
Get the vertical and or orbital speed wrong and this can almost always be adjusted. Get the track wrong and you have to live with it!
The first few seconds after launch are time critical often to milli-second accuracy of Pitch and Roll maneuvers.
The most violent portion of the launch is when approaching and pushing through the ‘Speed of Sound’! The instruments aboard must be constructed in such a way as to cope with this violence. Separation delivers different sort of shocks when explosive bolts are set off!
It is a minor miracle that there were no Apollo failures at launch times.
Regarding those instruments aboard the NOAA-19 and NOAA-20 Satellites, as with all satellites with life times expressed in decades, moving parts are avoided like the plague!
The Near Polar Orbits require the solar collectors to move!
Redundant mechanisms are employed to orient them at the sun.
Instruments that require moving parts are limited to constantly rotational systems. The NOAA-19 has a stalled scanner motor, rendering a multi-million instrument useless with the failure of a ten cent item!
If specialized instruments have different swathes then those with less swathe see less of the ground, It may be possible to use Electronic side to side scanning, but this introduces significant errors as looking left and right has less time to see stuff than the straight down measurement.
From the famous NASA Albedo ‘photo’ is seems they did not attempt to do side to side scanning as the black hole over the pole indicates a ‘No Observation’ signature.
The strange appearance of Greenland with half having Albedo and the lower latitudes having none is probably because it was dark when that part of Greenland was overflown.
I am at a loss to explain why NASA claimed that that ‘Photo’ was the image of the Earths’ Albedo. When I went to school the suns energy was felt by 50%, plus a little bit, of the earth’s atmosphere all the time!
Not all that energy reached the surface because of Absorption and Albedo.
Michael Logician
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jerry krause
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Hi Michael,
Again, thank you very, very much for educating us about launch problems and bringing us these images of the Earth as observed from a near polar orbiting satellite.
But you wrote: “The strange appearance of Greenland with half having Albedo and the lower latitudes having none is probably because it was dark when that part of Greenland was overflown.”
I almost missed that you had written ‘lower latitudes’ when it was the higher latitudes that had no ‘albedo’.
You wrote: “From the famous NASA Albedo ‘photo’ is seems they did not attempt to do side to side scanning as the black hole over the pole indicates a ‘No Observation’ signature.” It seems you did not notice the ‘black swathe’ over Australia which appears and disappears. Or the fact of the lack of any other ‘black swathes’ over any other land surfaces. Did you notice that all the oceans had no albedos? Which also means that there could not have been any clouds over any of these oceans according to this ‘the famous NASA Albedo ‘photo’ whose purpose was to ‘measure’ the Earth’s surface’s, and its atmosphere’s albedo.
What other observational evidence does one need to establish that the earth’s quantitative albedo cannot be measured from a satellite because as you wrote: “If specialized instruments have different swathes then those with less swathe see less of the ground, It may be possible to use Electronic side to side scanning, but this introduces significant errors as looking left and right has less time to see stuff than the straight down measurement.
This statement of yours establishes the fact that the instrument when measures the upward radiance (about we have discussed in other comments) basically points straight down even if it mechanically swings a little bit from side to side.
Michael, you have brought unquestionable evidence of NASA’s, or NOAA’s, in ability to quantitatively measure the Earth-Atmosphere System’s albedo at the same time they qualitatively give us colored images of the Earth’s solid surfaces. No white clouds over them either.
Now, I question, are those question what NASA and NOAA have done, and argue and debate and argue and debate going come to your posting and praise you for what you have done for us?
Have a good day, Jerry
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