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Apollo Command Module primary guidance system components Apollo Lunar Module primary guidance system components Apollo Inertial Measurement Unit. The Apollo primary guidance, navigation, and control system (PGNCS, pronounced pings) was a self-contained inertial guidance system that allowed Apollo spacecraft to carry out their missions when communications with Earth were interrupted, either as ...
The ST-124-M3 inertial platform was a device for measuring acceleration and attitude of the Saturn V launch vehicle. It was carried by the Saturn V Instrument Unit, a 3-foot-high (0.91 m), 22-foot-diameter (6.7 m) section of the Saturn V that fit between the third stage (S-IVB) and the Apollo spacecraft. Its nomenclature means "stable table ...
Diagram of Saturn V instrument unit. The Saturn V instrument unit is a ring-shaped structure fitted to the top of the Saturn V rocket's third stage and the Saturn IB's second stage (also an S-IVB). It was immediately below the SLA (Spacecraft/Lunar Module Adapter) panels that contained the Apollo Lunar Module. The instrument unit contains the ...
An inertial navigation system (INS; also inertial guidance system, inertial instrument) is a navigation device that uses motion sensors (accelerometers), rotation sensors and a computer to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity (direction and speed of movement) of a moving object without the ...
Inertial navigation unit of French IRBM S3 IMUs work, in part, by detecting changes in pitch, roll, and yaw. An inertial measurement unit works by detecting linear acceleration using one or more accelerometers and rotational rate using one or more gyroscopes. [3] Some also include a magnetometer which is commonly used as a heading reference.
Charles Stark "Doc" Draper (October 2, 1901 – July 25, 1987) was an American scientist and engineer, known as the "father of inertial navigation". [2] He was the founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory, which was later spun out of MIT to become the non-profit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.
Astronauts manually flew Project Gemini with control sticks, but computers flew most of Project Apollo except briefly during lunar landings. [6] Each Moon flight carried two AGCs, one each in the command module and the Apollo Lunar Module, with the exception of Apollo 7 which was an Earth orbit mission and Apollo 8 which did not need a lunar module for its lunar orbit mission.
A well-known gimbal lock incident happened in the Apollo 11 Moon mission. On this spacecraft, a set of gimbals was used on an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The engineers were aware of the gimbal lock problem but had declined to use a fourth gimbal. [5] Some of the reasoning behind this decision is apparent from the following quote: