Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft (2013)

afspacemuseum.org

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I first heard about this from the YouTube channel EEVdiscover:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Dy5_unLa74

It puts into perspective that they’d thought this out early enough to develop and commission aircraft to support this.

Makes me think what other large projects NASA had to set up to make things work.

> Water (thrust augmentation) 5,600 lbs.

Does anyone know what this is referring to?

Looks like spraying water into the engines increases thrust. See: https://www.aircraftnerds.com/2018/08/thrust-augmentation.ht...

Edit: big oversimplification on my part, but I’m not an expert.

Sounds like it works like an intercooler on a turbocharged car engine. It cools the intake charge to increase its density to cram more air into the combustion chamber.

The B-52 had this as well. It was used to augment thrust for takeoff, especially on hot days.

It was as simple as pumping water into the compressor stage, cooling the air after the compressor had heated it. This allowed more fuel to be burned without melting the turbine stage. I think the extra mass of the water (steam) may have helped as well.

This is where the terms "Dry Thrust" and "Wet Thrust" came from.

> The Timing Subsystem is a central timing facility for the ARIA electronic system. Its primary function is to generate time codes and precision pulse repetition rates which are recorded with the data to allow for time correlation in interpreting spacecraft events when the tapes are processed. In addition, the subsystem provides each equipment operator with displays of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

Oh wow, crazy: in 1969, the UTC time would have been a negative number!

No, you're thinking of the UNIX epoch. UTC began in the early 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

The IRIG standards for time codes also date to around this time.

UTC != Unix time. UTC is a standard by which time is measured, independent of any particular representation. Unix time is one way of representing or encoding a given point in time.

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