NASA - Inspecting Friendship 7

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Inspecting Friendship 7

Astronaut John Glenn inspects artwork that will be painted on the outside of his Mercury spacecraft, which he nicknamed Friendship 7. On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn lifted off into space aboard his Mercury Atlas (MA-6) rocket to become the first American to orbit the Earth. After orbiting the Earth three times, Friendship 7 landed in the Atlantic Ocean, just East of Grand Turk Island in the Bahamas. Glenn and his capsule were recovered by the Navy Destroyer Noa, 21 minutes after splashdown.

Image Credit: NASA

 
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 STS-95 Shuttle Mission Imagery

 S98-06862 --- Portrait of U.S. Sen. John H. Glenn Jr. (D.-Ohio), payload specialist for STS-95. Glenn is wearing the orange, partial pressure launch and entry suit.

 John Herschel Glenn, Jr. (Colonel, USMC, Ret.)
NASA Astronaut (former)

PERSONAL DATA: Born July 18, 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio. Married to the former Anna Margaret Castor of New Concord, Ohio. They have two grown children and two grandchildren.

EDUCATION: Glenn attended primary and secondary schools in New Concord, Ohio. He attended Muskingum College in New Concord and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering. Muskingum College also awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in engineering. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from nine colleges or universities.

SPECIAL HONORS: Glenn has been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions, and holds the Air Medal with 18 Clusters for his service during World War II and Korea. Glenn also holds the Navy Unit Commendation for service in Korea, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the China Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the Korean Presidential Unit Citation, the Navy's Astronaut Wings, the Marine Corps' Astronaut Medal, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

EXPERIENCE: He entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in March 1942 and was graduated from this program and commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943. After advanced training, he joined Marine Fighter Squadron 155 and spent a year flying F-4U fighters in the Marshall Islands.

During his World War II service, he flew 59 combat missions. After the war, he was a member of Marine Fighter Squadron 218 on the North China patrol and served on Guam. From June 1948 to December 1950 Glenn was an instructor in advanced flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas. He then attended Amphibious Warfare Training at Quantico, Virginia. In Korea he flew 63 missions with Marine Fighter Squadron 311. As an exchange pilot with the Air Force Glenn flew 27 missions in the in F-86 Sabrejet. In the last nine days of fighting in Korea Glenn downed three MIG's in combat along the Yalu River.

After Korea, Glenn attended Test Pilot School at the Naval Air Test Center, Patuxent River, Maryland. After graduation, he was project officer on a number of aircraft. He was assigned to the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics (now Bureau of Naval Weapons) in Washington from November 1956 to April 1959, during which time he also attended the University of Maryland.

In July 1957, while project officer of the F8U Crusader, he set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York, spanning the country in 3 hours and 23 minutes. This was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed. Glenn has nearly 9,000 hours of flying time, with approximately 3,000 hours in jet aircraft.

NASA EXPERIENCE: Glenn was assigned to the NASA Space Task Group at Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, in April 1959 after his selection as a Project Mercury Astronaut. The Space Task Group was moved to Houston and became part of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in 1962. Glenn flew on Mercury-6 (February 20, 1962) and STS-95 (October 29 to November 7, 1998), and has logged over 218 hours in space. Prior to his first flight, Glenn had served as backup pilot for Astronauts Shepard and Grissom. When astronauts were given special assignments to ensure pilot input into the design and development of spacecraft, Glenn specialized in cockpit layout and control functioning, including some of the early designs for the Apollo Project. Glenn resigned from the Manned Spacecraft Center on January 16, 1964. He was promoted to the rank of Colonel in October 1964 and retired from the Marine Corps on January 1, 1965. He was a business executive from 1965 until his election to the United States Senate in November 1974. Glenn retired from the U.S. Senate in January 1999.

SPACE FLIGHT EXPERIENCE: On February 20, 1962, Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 "Friendship 7" spacecraft on the first manned orbital mission of the United States. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed a successful three-orbit mission around the earth, reaching a maximum altitude (apogee) of approximately 162 statute miles and an orbital velocity of approximately 17,500 miles per hour. Glenn's "Friendship 7" Mercury spacecraft landed approximately 800 miles southeast of KSC in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island. Mission duration from launch to impact was 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds.

STS-95 Discovery (October 29 to November 7, 1998) was a 9-day mission during which the crew supported a variety of research payloads including deployment of the Spartan solar-observing spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope Orbital Systems Test Platform, and investigations on space flight and the aging process. The mission was accomplished in 134 Earth orbits, traveling 3.6 million miles in 213 hours and 44 minutes.

JANUARY 1999

This is the only version available from NASA. Updates must be sought direct from the above named individual.

NASA Honors Legendary Astronaut John Glenn

NASA will honor John Glenn, one of the original seven NASA astronauts, with the presentation of the Ambassador of Exploration Award.

The award is being presented at 4:00 p.m. EST, Monday, Feb. 20 at the John Glenn Institute of Public Service and Public Policy, 300 Page Hall, Ohio State University, 1810 College Road, Columbus, Ohio. For information about the institute and media access to the event, contact: Jim Lynch, (614) 247-4110; email: lynch.270@osu.edu.

NASA is presenting the Ambassador of Exploration Award to the 38 astronauts who participated in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs for realizing America’s vision of space exploration from 1961 to 1972. The award is a small sample of lunar material encased in Lucite mounted for public display. The material is part of the 842 pounds of samples brought back to Earth during the six Apollo lunar expeditions from 1969 to 1972. Glenn's award will be displayed at the institute.

Glenn was born in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio. As a Marine aviator, he flew combat missions during WW II and the Korean War. He was selected as one of the original NASA Mercury astronauts in April 1959. On Feb. 20, 1962, he piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 "Friendship 7" spacecraft on the first U.S. orbital mission, circling Earth three times during the four hour, 55 minute flight. In 1998, he completed his last space flight on the Space Shuttle Discovery, completing 134 Earth orbits during the nine-day mission.

For Glenn's astronaut biography on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/bios/glennbio.html

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/home

 

Mercury Atlas 7

NSSDC ID: 1962-019A

Description

Mercury Atlas 7 (MA-7, also designated Aurora 7) was the second orbital flight of an American rocket with a human on board. The pilot was originally planned to be Donald K. Slayton but was changed to be M. Scott Carpenter after a medical examination of Slayton revealed an irregularity in his heartbeat. The objectives of MA-7 were similar to MA-6, i.e. to: (1) evaluate the performance of a man-spacecraft system in a three-orbit mission; (2) evaluate the effects of space flight on the astronaut; (3) obtain the astronaut's opinions on the operational suitability of the spacecraft systems; (4) evaluate the performance of spacecraft systems replaced or modified as a result of previous missions; and, (5) exercise and evaluate further the performance of the Mercury Worldwide Network.
Originally scheduled for launch in early May, the mission was thrice postponed, once (07 May) due to checkout problems with the Atlas launch vehicle, once (17 May) to perform modifications to the altitude-sensing instrumentation in the parachute-deployment system, and finally (19 May) due to detected irregularities in the temperature control device on a heater in the Atlas flight control system.
During the flight only one critical component malfunction was encountered. A random failure of the circuitry associated with the pitch horizon scanner, which provided a reference point to the attitude gyros, occurred. During the flight there was also concern about excessive fuel usage resulting from extensive use of the high-thrust controls and the inadvertant use of two control systems simultaneously. To compensate for this the spacecraft was allowed to drift in attitude for an additional 77 minutes beyond the time already built into the flight plan.
Two experiments were on-board MA-7. One was a balloon, deployed and inflated to measure drag and provide visibility data. The other was a device to study the behavior of liquid in a weightless state. The balloon experiment failed when it did not properly inflate on deployment, but the liquid experiment behaved as anticipated.
A curious event which occurred during Glenn's (MA-6) flight was his report of "fire flies" when he entered the sunrise portion of an orbit. Although this phenomenon was a mystery at the time, it was resolved during the flight of Mercury Atlas 7 when Scott Carpenter accidentally tapped the wall of the spacecraft with his hand, releasing many of the so-called "fire flies". The source was determined to be frost from the reaction control jets.
During the flight, the spacecraft attained a maximum velocity in excess of 28,000 km/hour and an altitude of about 267 km. The capsule reentered after completing three orbits, coming down in the Atlantic Ocean some 200 km northeast of Puerto Rico at 19 degrees 29 minutes N, 64 degrees 05 minutes W, about 400 km beyond the planned impact point. The overshoot was traced to a 25 degree yaw error at the time the retrograde rockets were fired. Retrofire was also about 3 s late, accounting for about 20 miles of the overshoot. The duration of the flight was 4 hours 56 minutes and 05 seconds during which Carpenter travelled over 121,600 km.
After the firing of the retrorockets, computers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center successfully predicted the area of splashdown and naval ships and aircraft were deployed to the new location. An Air Rescue Service SA-16 amphibian aircraft was the first to establish visual contact with the spacecraft some 39 minutes after splashdown with the USS Farragut being the first ship to reach the area. Carpenter was picked up after 2 hours and 59 minutes in the water and returned by helicopter to the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. He experienced no adverse physical or biomedical effects due to the flight. The Mercury capsule was not retrieved until about 6 hours later when special equipment on-board the USS John R. Pierce arrived to retrieve it.

 NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

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