Apollo 13
- This article is about the Moon mission. There is also a movie by the name of Apollo 13.
The Apollo 13 logo featured three flying horses, and the motto Ex luna, scientia (out of the moon, science), and the name of the mission in Roman numerals
- Launched: April 11, 1970 from Pad 39A
- Returned: April 17, 1970
- Crew members: Jim Lovell, commander; Jack Swigert, command module pilot; Fred Haise, lunar module pilot.
- Command module: Odyssey
- Lunar module: Aquarius
- Intended lunar landing site: Fra Mauro highlands
The loss of both Service Module oxygen tanks and the oxygen required to create electrical power for much of the spacecraft, meant that the moon-landing mission had to be aborted; a single pass around the Moon was made and the spacecraft returned to Earth. Considerable ingenuity under extreme pressure was required from both the crew and the ground controllers to figure out how to jury-rig the craft for the crew's safe return, with much of the world watching the drama on television. Central to the survival of the crew was the use of the Lunar Module (still attached to the Command Module) as a "lifeboat". One of the major stumbling blocks in this was that the LM was equipped to sustain two people for two days, and it would now have to sustain three people for four days. The carbon dioxide filters in the LM could not handle the extra load and the CM's spare filters were the wrong shape for the LM's filter receptacle; an adapter had to be fabricated from materials in the spacecraft. The crew had to use the LM as a lifeboat because the explosion had damaged the craft's electrical systems, precluding the generation of enough power to keep the Command Module operational. The emergency batteries would only last about ten hours, and needed to be saved for reentry.
In order to accomplish a safe return to Earth, a significant course correction to place the spacecraft on a free return trajectory was required. This would normally be a simple procedure using the service module propulsion engine. However, this time it had to be performed by firing the lunar module's descent engine. After extensive thought and discussion, engineers on the ground found it was possible. The engine was fired again after passage around the Moon in order to accelerate the spacecraft's return to Earth.
Reentry in Earth's atmosphere required the unusual step of undocking and jettisoning the lunar module, which had been retained for the flight back to Earth, in addition to the separation of the damaged service module. The crew returned unharmed to Earth. When the crew saw the damaged service module, they reported that the access panel covering the O2 tanks and fuel cells was blown off.
Jim Lovell's book about the mission, Lost Moon, was later turned into a successful movie, Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks.
Mission notes:
- Swigert was a replacement for Ken Mattingly, who later flew to the Moon aboard Apollo 16. Mattingly was reportedly exposed to German measles prior to the mission, and NASA officials insisted upon removing him from the flight so as not to endanger the mission. He never contracted the sickness.
- As a result of following the free return trajectory, the altitude of Apollo 13 over the lunar far side was approximately 100 km greater than the corresponding orbital altitude on the remaining Apollo lunar missions. Though this difference is swamped by the variation in distance between Earth and the Moon owing to the eccentricity of the Moon's orbit about Earth, this fact has sometimes generated sentiment favoring the award of the world altitude record to the Apollo 13 crew.
Actual quote: "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here" [1], uttered by Swigert to ground. Lovell then uttered this similar phrase: "Houston, we've had a problem."
The command module is currently displayed at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, Kansas. It was formerly at the Musee de l'Air, Paris. The lunar module burned up in Earth's atmosphere 17 April, 1970.
| Preceded by: Apollo 12 |
Apollo program | Followed by: Apollo 14 |