sxn%bbncc-washington@sri-unix.UUCP (02/06/84)
From: Stephen X. Nahm <sxn@bbncc-washington> There's a lengthy article on the manned maneuvering unit in last week's Aviation and Space Technology Week (January 23, 1984). It covers in detail how the astronauts trained for the mission, and there are some photos of the training aparatus. They showed a mockup of the Solar Max satellite - I was surprised to see how large it is. For some reason I had the idea that it was about the size of a breadbox (rather than an elephant). Steve
lmc@denelcor.UUCP (Lyle McElhaney) (02/15/84)
One of the trainers for the MMU is at Martin Marietta Aerospace near Denver, Colorado (I don't know whether it is the one referenced in AW, but its the one I'm familiar with). It is a six-degree-of-freedom tower controlled by a hybrid (yup, there's real analog thingees in there) computer. The moving head on the tower is man-rated. The astronaut gets buckled into the harness, his hand controller's signals are fed into the computer along with the environmental model of his surroundings, and the computer commands the harness to roll, pitch, yaw and slide. Not only is it a good trainer, but its really good for doing human-facters (would velocity or acceleration controls be easier to use? Proportional? How about different weightings on the offset? Just program them into the closed loop system and give it a try.) It make a tv-game to end all tv-games. By the way, the same facility was used to train for the Teleoperator Retrieval System (see previous note, ~ 2 days ago.) The Skylab docking ring was done in 1/4 scale on the wall; The harness was replaced with a TV camera, and the controllers were removed to a mockup of the aft flight deck. During the Viking Landing studies (circa 1974), the hybrid computers were used to simulate the Martian atmospheric effects, while some other digital computers simulated flight dynamics and the actual lander flight computer. All in all, its one well used computer suite. -- Lyle McElhaney (hao,brl-bmd,nbires,csu-cs,scgvaxd)!denelcor!lmc