It is frustrating to me that so much of Space flight seems to be outsourced to ground operations, that nothing inside the spacecraft is immeditaely intuitive.
That is to say the mission control expects the astronauts to give them data, then they work with it for 15,000 additional man hours, then give you back the changes you need to make to correct your flight. The whole time the data is completely USELESS to you, because of an example below.....this one involving optics. The optics isn't set up to DETERMINE your actual relationship to your trajectory, the optics is set up to feed this back to a program to do the work for you, as is evidenced by the fact that 0,0 is not aligned to anything meaningful to an Astronaut.
This question is annoying for me, because I've google-fu'd and apparently my Fu is doo-doo, because I just can't find a simple answer to this.
I have determined by flight-experimentation that the optics in CSM is offset by some amount, because 0,0 orientation on the optics does not look at 90deg down. Obviously because the spacecraft hull isn't a cylinder but rather a cone.
0,0 must be looking perpendicular to the hull of the spacecraft at some angle and I confirmed it from an Apollo Guidance And Navigation Manual:
Notice the optical assembly is perpendicular to the hull.
This complicates looking perpendicular to the trajectory (prograde/retrograde...whatever it's called when you're lined up with it).
I can experiment with that I guess, assuming perigee and apogee will always be "tangent" to the surface of the orbited object. Therefore when prograde/retrograde at those points you will be able to discover the angle of the hull by aligning 0,0 optics to the dead center of the orbited object and see what your pitch is.
But....I'd also like to confirm these results?
So what's the freaking angle 0,0 is really looking out of? What's the freaking angle of the hull to the prograde/retrograde position.
That is to say the mission control expects the astronauts to give them data, then they work with it for 15,000 additional man hours, then give you back the changes you need to make to correct your flight. The whole time the data is completely USELESS to you, because of an example below.....this one involving optics. The optics isn't set up to DETERMINE your actual relationship to your trajectory, the optics is set up to feed this back to a program to do the work for you, as is evidenced by the fact that 0,0 is not aligned to anything meaningful to an Astronaut.
This question is annoying for me, because I've google-fu'd and apparently my Fu is doo-doo, because I just can't find a simple answer to this.
I have determined by flight-experimentation that the optics in CSM is offset by some amount, because 0,0 orientation on the optics does not look at 90deg down. Obviously because the spacecraft hull isn't a cylinder but rather a cone.
0,0 must be looking perpendicular to the hull of the spacecraft at some angle and I confirmed it from an Apollo Guidance And Navigation Manual:
Notice the optical assembly is perpendicular to the hull.
This complicates looking perpendicular to the trajectory (prograde/retrograde...whatever it's called when you're lined up with it).
I can experiment with that I guess, assuming perigee and apogee will always be "tangent" to the surface of the orbited object. Therefore when prograde/retrograde at those points you will be able to discover the angle of the hull by aligning 0,0 optics to the dead center of the orbited object and see what your pitch is.
But....I'd also like to confirm these results?
So what's the freaking angle 0,0 is really looking out of? What's the freaking angle of the hull to the prograde/retrograde position.