Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Panoramic Preservation

Published by Jordan Ferraro on July 29, 2010 in Archives, Behind The Scenes and Highlights from the Collection.
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The Archives Division at the National Air and Space Museum has lots of really neat items.  Most things come to us in good condition and need very little preservation before being made available to the public.  Occasionally however, we get an item that needs to be stabilized before it can be made accessible.  That is where I come in.  I am the preservation archivist and it is my job to identify objects that may be unstable or in need of conservation.  So far I have identified 47 items in our collection that are in need of some level of preservation.

I recently had the opportunity to preserve one of these items, a panoramic photograph of five De Havilland DH-4 mail planes that were modified by Bellanca.  The black and white photo is 10 x 66 inches and depicts five planes which flew the Reno to Elko, Nevada mail route.  Standing around the planes are their pilots and crews.

At some time in the past a well meaning person “framed” the photograph by placing it on a backing board and covering with a flexible transparent plastic.  The two sides were stuck together using a vinyl self-adhesive wallpaper.  The photo came to us loosely rolled in a cardboard shipping box.

rolled photo

Panoramic Photo rolled into a cardboard box for shipping

In order to preserve this photograph and make it available to the public, it needed to be removed from the frame and stored flat.  The condition of the photograph was difficult to determine while in the frame. Nora Lockshin, the paper conservator from Smithsonian Archives, along with her two interns Shereen Choudhury and Rachel Midura, loaned us their time and expertise.  The four of us worked as a team to remove the photograph from its frame and determine a safe storage concept.  To learn more about the process of preserving this photograph please read Nora’s blog.

distortion

Nora Lockshin examines distortion of panoramic photograph while Mark Kahn and Jordan Ferraro look on (National Air and Space Museum Archives).

Once the photograph was removed from the frame we discovered some wonderful historical evidence.  The names of some of the men in the picture are written in the lower margin.  These names revealed that the same people are on both ends of the photograph.  This happened quite often when taking early panoramic photographs using a 360˚ rotation camera.  The camera and film rotate along the vertical axis, once the camera has past a location the people in that position run around behind the camera and stand at the opposite end of the photograph.  Because the camera rotates slower then they run, they end up in the photograph twice.  In this photograph this appears to be intentional, perhaps they did not have enough people to stand in front of all five planes?

The final, and I think most thought-provoking, thing we uncovered was an inscription on the back of the photograph.

photo

Releasing photograph from poor enclosure at center break, minimizing physical stress and allowing staff to work on the two fragments at once. Once released, annotation could be observed on the back of the photograph. (Lockshin pictured). Stabilizing intervention on panoramic photograph at the National Air and Space Museum Archives.

It reads,

“The __(missing due to a tear in the photograph)___ half of Feb I left Reno by plane for Elko NV for a ride in the mail pit.  Round trip from Reno to Elko is 600 miles.  We made it in 5 hours 120 miles per hour at 1000 ft alt.  Pilots make this same trip every day, but Sunday.  Snow, Rain, Hail or Fog they are supposed to get the mail there.  We have had lots of smash ups but only one pilot killed that was Pilot Lewis at Elko he was going to be married on his return trip.

We have made a good record up to May 1st 1921″

This heartrending inscription shows just what these men endured to get the mail through.  It reminds us that, at one time, we were so reliant upon the mail system for information that men risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to make sure the information got through.

Jordan Ferraro is an Archivist in the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division.

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on July 26, 2010 in Astronomy, Behind The Scenes, Planetary Science and space.
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July 15-24 marked the 35th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), the famous “Handshake in Space.” ASTP was the first American-Soviet space flight, docking the last American Apollo spacecraft with the then-Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. This joint effort between the two major world players was based on an agreement signed in 1972, and it set a precedent for future joint efforts, such as the Shuttle-Mir Program and the International Space Station.

Handshake

Astronaut Stafford (foreground) shakes hands with cosmonaut Leonov on July 17, 1975. The historic handshake kicked off approximately 47 hours of docked operations in orbit. The picture is reproduced from a frame of 16mm motion picture film. (Credit: NASA)

ASTP also provided an opportunity for American astronauts to systematically observe and photograph the Earth from outer space, thus providing scientists with new data for exploring and studying the Earth from orbit. What most people don’t know is that the National Air and Space Museum played an important role in this aspect of the mission.

Dr. Farouk El-Baz was the founding Chairman of the Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and he was the principal investigator for the Earth Observations and Photography Experiment on ASTP.  He was instrumental in getting this photogeology experiment included on the mission. Dr. El-Baz had previously trained Apollo astronauts to make visual observations while orbiting the Moon (you may have seen him portrayed in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon), and now the target was Earth.  He worked with Research Assistants Delia Mitchell Warner and Sue McLafferty to plan flyovers that the astronauts performed in their T-38 aircraft so they could practice observing and photographing geologic features from above. While in space, the astronauts took some 2,000 pictures, about 750 of which were of good quality (e.g., not cloud-obscured).

Observations and Photography Experiment

A characteristic photograph from the Earth Observations and Photography Experiment: a view of part of southwest Africa in Angola, where unique drainage patterns are controlled by broad, partially vegetated dune fields. (Credit: NASA)

Dr. El-Baz gathered a team of scientists to analyze the images in the areas of geology, oceanography, hydrology, meteorology, and more. Orbital photographs, with their large aerial coverage, permit direct study of large structures, broad distributions, and remote and inaccessible parts of the globe where size makes conventional field surveys impractical. The applications of these photographs are widespread, including updating and correcting maps, monitoring Earth resources, studying dynamic geologic processes, and surveying ocean features. The Regional Planetary Image Facility (RPIF) in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Museum houses an archive of hard copy ASTP images.

In the Museum’s Space Race gallery you can see the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft in the docked configuration.  The Apollo command and service modules on display are test vehicles.  The docking module that joins the two spacecraft is back-up flight hardware, and the Soyuz spacecraft is a full-scale model built by Energia Design Bureau, the organization that originally built the Soyuz.

Apollo-Soyuz

A recreation of the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous on display in the Space Race gallery at the National Air and Space Museum.

Meghan Cassidy is an intern in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

Wiley Post

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on July 22, 2010 in Aviation and History.
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July 22, 2010, marks the 77th anniversary of Wiley Post’s 1933 solo flight around the world in the Lockheed 5C Vega Winnie Mae. This record-breaking flight demonstrated several significant aviation technologies. It used two relatively new aeronautical devices—an autopilot and a radio direction finder. The autopilot corrected for errors in aeronautical bearing, keeping the aircraft on course. The radio direction finder helped Post navigate the aircraft toward specific radio transmitters along the route.

Wiley Post

Wiley Post standing in front of his Winnie Mae.

Winnie Mae

Lockheed 5C Vega Winnie Mae at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center

Although the flight was interrupted because Post had to repair the gyroscope and a bent propeller, he set a record of seven days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, bettering his previous around-the-world record of eight days, also set in the Winnie Mae in 1931, with navigator Harold Gatty. That flight had begun on June 23 and ended on July 1; it covered 15,474 miles. It broke the record previously held by the airship Graf Zeppelin of twenty days, four hours set in 1929. That same year Rand McNally published an account of the flight, Around the World in Eight Days, authored by Post and Gatty. For both flights Post was honored by a ticker tape parade in New York City.

The significance of Post’s 1933 flight is inestimable. In July 1938, Howard Hughes and his crew successfully circled the globe in a Lockheed Super Electra fitted with the most advanced radio and navigation gear. When asked how his flight compared to Post’s, Hughes responded “Wiley Post’s flight remains the most remarkable flight in history. It can never be duplicated. He did it alone! … It’s like pulling a rabbit out of a hat or sawing a woman in half.”

In 1934, Post began to probe the possibilities of high-altitude, long-distance flying. The cabin of the Winnie Mae was not pressurized, however. That meant that Post, with the help of the B.F. Goodrich Company, would have to develop the world’s first pressured flight suit. Post attempted numerous times in 1935 to set solo high-altitude transcontinental speed records, but none was successful. One particular attempt on March 15, however, was noteworthy. Wearing the pressurized suit and flying at an altitude of more than 30,000 feet, Post flew the Winnie Mae, now equipped with a supercharger and jettisonable landing gear, from Burbank, California to Cleveland, a distance of 2,035 miles in seven hours and 19 minutes; at times the aircraft reached a ground speed of 340 mph. This flight showed that significant speed increases could be achieved by flying at high altitudes.

Wiley Post

Wiley Post's pressure suit, created for him by the B.F. Goodrich Company

In August 1935, Post and his friend and fellow Oklahoman, the humorist Will Rogers, set out on an aerial tour of Alaska and Siberia. Post was flying a hybrid aircraft made up of a Lockheed Orion and a Lockheed Explorer, powered by a 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine, and fitted with floats that were reportedly ill-suited for the already makeshift aircraft. The plane was overly heavy with fuel plus hunting and fishing gear. On August 15, they left Fairbanks, Alaska, bound for Point Barrow. Flying in fog Post got lost and was forced to land in a lagoon and get his bearings. When they took off again, the engine failed and the aircraft plunged to the ground. Both men were killed instantly.

The deaths of Post and Rogers brought about an international outpouring of grief. Post’s body lay in state in the rotunda of the Oklahoma state capitol building. Among the distinguished mourners were famous American aviators like Amelia Earhart and high-ranking political figures.

The Winnie Mae, one of the most significant pioneering aircraft of the 1930s, has been in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum since 1936 and is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. Post’s pressurized flight suit is also in the Museum’s collection, and is undergoing extensive restoration at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute in Suitland, Maryland.

Dominick A. Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum

Mars Day!

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on July 14, 2010 in Education, News & Events, Planetary Science and space.
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The staff at the National Air and Space Museum are gearing up for the annual Mars Day!, a celebration of the Red Planet. On July 16 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., visitors at the Museum can partake of a variety of educational and family fun activities throughout the galleries.

Zimbleman

Dr. Jim Zimbleman of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies shows a visitor a piece of Mars – a real meteorite that came from Mars! (Credit: Jennifer Griffes)

On Mars Day! visitors can interact one-on-one with Smithsonian and NASA scientists active in Mars research and mission planning, see a real meteorite that came from Mars, learn about Mars missions, explore the Museum’s new Mars exhibit with a curator, see amazingly detailed images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, view the surface of Mars in 3-D, learn about the geology of Mars, and more.

Mars

Left: Global view of Mars (Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)); Right: Surface and atmosphere of Mars taken from low orbit (Credit: NASA Viking Orbiter Raw Image Archive)

Why is Mars so special that hundreds of scientists study it every day and it gets its very own day at the National Air and Space Museum? Here are just a few reasons:

  • Mars shows evidence that water may have once flowed on its surface, and water is a key ingredient for life.
  • Mars could have or still does support microbial life.
  • Mars has deserts, ice caps, valleys, and volcanoes like those on the Earth and impact craters like those on the Moon
  • Mars is tied to understanding the processes of habitability and global climate change.
Victoria Crater

Victoria Crater and its dunes on the surface of Mars taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Check out the website for a full schedule of Mars Day! events. And don’t forget to turn your eyes to the sky—Mars itself can be seen in the evening western sky.

Mars Day! is made possible by the generous support of KRAFT Macaroni and Cheese.

Meghan Cassidy is an intern in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

Ike and the First Presidential Helicopters

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on July 12, 2010 in Aviation, Highlights from the Collection and History.
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On July 12, 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first president to employ a helicopter while in office. Though helicopters had been in operational use by the American military since 1944, concerns over their safety caused the Secret Service to bar their use for the nation’s chief executive except in case of emergency. However, by 1956, the nuclear capability of the Soviet Union had reached the point where any evacuation of the president by roads could not be guaranteed and the head of President Eisenhower’s flight section, Air Force Col. William Draper, began shopping for helicopters.

Bell H-13J

Major Barrett departs the White House with President Eisenhower on July 12, 1957 for Camp David. White House Photo.

The Secret Service insisted on safety as the deciding factor in the selection process and much more capable models were bypassed in favor of Bell’s Ranger (military designation H-13J). It could accommodate only two passengers with any real degree of comfort, had an effective range of a mere 150 miles and was somewhat slow, with a top speed of around 100 miles per hour. It was also a single pilot aircraft, unlike the larger military models, which must have generated some concerns over the potential incapacitation of the pilot. Essentially a civilian off-the-shelf model that was an evolution of the bubble-topped Model 47s of Korean War fame, Bell marketed the Ranger principally for VIP travel.

Bell H-13J

Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first U.S. president to fly aboard a helicopter in this U.S. Air Force H-13J on July 12, 1957.

The Ranger did have some significant advantages. Its base purchase price of $40,000 and low operating costs made it one of the most economical helicopters in its class, but most importantly, it had an outstanding safety record and was the most reliable design available. As part of the Model 47 series (the first civil certificated helicopter in the world), it had a decade of operational use behind its design. Bell’s trademark “teetering” rotor system accounted for much of its sterling safety record. The much larger and more capable Sikorsky and Vertol designs employed complex articulated rotor systems incorporating hinges and other components with additional points of failure and increased maintenance concerns. They also utilized WWII-era radial engines that were more prone to fires and other failures.

The H-13J’s interior featured upgraded upholstery, but was nonetheless plain by presidential standards. The most obvious upgrade was the addition of a dark blue tinted Plexiglas bubble in place of the standard transparent installation to reduce its tendency to act like a magnifying glass in the sun. Otherwise, the only substantive improvements over standard models were military radios and a rotor-brake to reduce the shutdown time and allowing the president a more rapid exit (a helicopter rotor is most dangerous to pedestrians as it slows).

Heli Cockpit

Though not as comfortable as succeeding presidential helicopters, the president never had a better view.

On May 31, Maj. Joseph E. Barrett (perhaps the most accomplished helicopter pilot in the Air Force) landed a helicopter for the first time on the South Lawn of the White House, though this was not the first time a rotary wing aircraft had landed there. Twenty-six years earlier, James Ray touched down on the grounds in a Pitcairn-Cierva PCA-2 autogiro as part of an award ceremony. In 1911, Harry Atwood had landed there in his Wright Model B airplane as part of a similar event.

At 2:08 p.m. on July 12, Major Barrett lifted off in H-13J serial number 57-2729 [now on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center] with Eisenhower sitting in the right rear and James Rowley, chief of the White House Secret Service detail sitting to his left. Cummings flew 57-2828 in trail with Maj. Gen. Howard Snyder, Ike’s personal physician and a second Secret Service agent. Barrett then proceeded to their undisclosed evacuation site (Camp David) at an altitude of 500-700 feet above the terrain.

In addition to the H-13Js, six larger helicopters descended on the Ellipse to airlift twenty key staffers and pool reporters. These included tandem-rotor Vertol H-21s of the Air Force and Army, as well as a Marine Corps HUS-1 and an obsolescent Air Force H-19. Naval personnel created an ad-hoc air traffic control center on the South Lawn to marshal the arriving whirlybirds. Virgil Olson, who later became the first official Marine Corps presidential helicopter pilot, recalled that the other larger and faster helicopters supporting Operation Alert, which had departed after the H-13J, “arrived several minutes before the small [and slower] Bell. When the president arrived, he was sweating from an uncomfortable ride and annoyed to find us on the ground, with the engines of our helicopter already off and cooled down.” After spending the night at Camp David, Eisenhower drove with family members to Gettysburg, but flew back to Washington in the H-13J on Monday morning with another stopover at the Camp David “command post.”

Army H-34C and Marine HUS-1

Army H-34C of the Executive Flight Detachment and Marine HUS-1 of HMX-1 awaiting departure with the president, summer, 1958.

Eisenhower’s next helicopter flight occurred on September 6, 1957 when he hitched a ride on a Marine HUS-1, which he found to be a vast improvement over the H-13J. Between the lackluster performance of the diminutive Ranger relative to the larger military transport helicopter and getting baked under the Bell’s bubble, Eisenhower ordered Draper to switch to the new model, which was not operated by the Air Force, previously the sole aerial purveyor of the president. Not wanting to show preference for either the Marine Corps or Army who did operate it, Ike alternated flights between the two services’ special flight detachments, a tradition that continued to the Ford administration, which eliminated the Army’s Executive Flight Detachment as a cost-cutting measure. Eisenhower’s embrace of air transport, including helicopters, forever changed how America’s chief executive conducts the nation’s business.

Roger Connor is a curator in the Aeronautics Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

A Blue Igloo at the Udvar-Hazy Center?

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on July 9, 2010 in On View at the Museum and space.
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If you’ve been to the Udvar-Hazy Center lately, perhaps you’ve seen what looks like a giant blue igloo and wondered what it could be. Believe it or not, it’s a planetarium.

This portable, inflatable planetarium is the latest tool in the arsenal of the Museum’s Education Division, and will help students understand astronomical concepts and make science enjoyable.

Portable Planetarium

The Portable Planetarium is shown in the Udvar-Hazy Center with an overlay of the constellations as they are seen by audience members inside the dome.

The portable dome is made of opaque fabric, navy blue on the outside and dark gray inside. It folds up and operates much like an inflatable mattress, only inflation is done with a fan and the fan stays on low during the show.

Once inflated, which takes only five minutes, entry is through a six-foot tall zippered door, like a tent. There is no bottom or seats–the audience sits on the floor. The dome holds 35 to 40 people at a time.

The planetarium’s projector is a state-of-the-art digital system that displays the night sky, outlines the constellations, simulates celestial phenomena such as eclipses, shows the orbits of the planets, and performs other planetarium demonstrations. It even allows Museum educators to project their own images and videos, thus creating their own shows.

The planetarium was purchased in part thanks to a grant from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee. Soon, when the Museum has a team of presenters trained to use the new system, we will offer astronomy programs to the public, school groups, and guests at special events.

Kathleen Hanser is a writer-editor in the National Air and Space Museum’s Office of Communications.

The Mystery of the Massively Parallel Processor

Published by Paul Ceruzzi on July 2, 2010 in History and space.
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Several months ago, according to statistics that measure the public’s access to the museum’s collections via our web site, the one artifact on exhibit at the Udvar-Hazy Center that our online users visited the most was….the Massively Parallel Processor.

Massively Parallel Processor

Massively Parallel Processor

The what? The Massively Parallel Processor, or MPP, is a pair of large blue boxes crammed full of circuit boards, tucked away in the northwest corner of the McDonnell Space hangar at the Udvar-Hazy Center. It is admittedly not much to look at, compared to, say, the Enola Gay, which is currently the most queried artifact online. While the web and new media people try to figure out if the MPP’s exalted online status was an anomaly or not, let me explain what the MPP is. Perhaps after I describe it, you may feel that it deserves more recognition.

We all know how fast computer technology has advanced in the past few decades—many of us carry hand-held devices that have more computer power in them than the supercomputers of an early era, never mind the computer power of the Apollo Guidance Computer that took astronauts to the Moon between 1968 and 1972. But in spite of those advances, the basic design of computers has not changed that much. Nearly all of them follow a design first sketched by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, in a report he wrote for the U.S. Army in 1945. In that report, he argued that an optimal computer would have a single processor, which performed basic operations on a single piece of data at a time, which it transferred to and from a high-speed memory. He argued that such a design was the only way that human beings could manage the complexity of computer design, especially the complexity of programming them. Over the succeeding decades, computer circuits have gotten much faster, and memories have gotten much larger. And of course computers have gotten much smaller and use far less power. But the basic “von Neumann architecture,” with its single instruction stream and single channel to memory, has remained.

John von Neumann

John von Neumann Credit: United States Department of Energy

The Massively Parallel Processor was an experimental machine intended to break what has been called the “von Neumann bottleneck,” by having a program manipulate not one but thousands of pieces of data at a time—in this case, over 16,000 memory locations, each with its own associated processor. That was especially important for computers that processed images, which consist of thousands of picture elements, or “pixels,” each of which needs to be manipulated, but each of which also bears a close relationship to its immediate neighbors.

The MPP was built for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, by the Goodyear Aerospace Corporation of Akron, Ohio—a division of Goodyear well-known for its lighter-than-air craft, but a company that also was a pioneer in supplying advanced computers to military and aerospace customers. It was designed in the late 1970s, delivered to Goddard in 1983, and operated into the 1990s.

Was the MPP a success? It worked well, and it demonstrated that a parallel architecture was feasible, and that it was indeed possible to program it. It did not lead to a line of “non-von-Neumann” computers. The laptops and hand-held devices we use employ advanced versions of the classic architecture. But in many current high-performance computer installations, such as those used by Google to search the Internet, parallel architectures are heavily used. Perhaps the large number of Internet queries are coming from Google’s server farms, who are going to the National Air and Space Museum’s website to check up on their grandfather.

Paul Ceruzzi is a curator specializing in aerospace computing and electronics in the Division of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum.