Gadgetory

great news everyone we're here at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama and I brought myself a friend was a it's Destin from smarter every day and he is going to be dropping some knowledge bombs today because behind me is the actual guidance computer from the Saturn 5 rocket this is one of the engines and maybe you can enlighten us what's the significance of the Saturn 5 Oh everybody knows that's what we use to go to the moon this is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing and so it's a really big deal right now so yeah what you're going to talk about the Davy instrument unit that's what got the rocket on course to go to the moon and then the Apollo computer took over but you're talking about the rocket steering Wow mark your calendar ladies and gentlemen windows 7 end of life is around the corner so smartdeploy can help you migrate to Windows 10 and manage those pesky updates claim your free licenses worth over $700 at smartdeploy comm slash Linus we'll have that linked below so what we're looking at right now is the instrument unit for the Saturn 5 rocket why is it in the shape of a ring well to answer this and many other dumb questions we've got some amazing resources today so some of you probably don't know this but Destin from smarter every day is literally a rocket scientist by training and he actually arranged someone no offense to him quite a bit more special as well so the person I'm talking to right now is Luc Tali who actually worked on the flight evaluation team for this rocket when he worked at IBM back in the 60s and he was kind enough to stick around for literally hours to educate my Canadian self let's start by breaking down what we're looking at here there are three main parts navigation guidance and control is from about the bottom of the ring up to a little over halfway up the left side the telemetry section is up at the top and the other side is environmental control the umbilical plate and our power sources so let's start with that section it includes our main power source now some flights we get three of these batteries and some of them we get four but it's always the same silver zinc 5300 and power 125 pound batteries now the technology to build lighter weights batteries didn't really exist at the time and in fact these aren't even rechargeable you just pour the goop in about 28 hours before lunch and let er rip now these gave the scientists about 11 hours of life time depending on which of the four buses was pulling power and that was all they needed so the crew separates at about four hours and then they only really need about another hour or two of tinkering to either send the rocket around the Sun or smash it into the moon if they want to get some seismic data readings it really depended on the purpose of the mission now we've got the rest of the environmental control panel or triple point device so-called because it's got liquid solid and vapor all in one spot the main pieces are as follows you've got your cooling duct which runs around the entire outside of the ring this circulates conditioned air pre-launch because it's pretty hot down at the Cape then right before fueling it switches over to nitrogen because oxygen and rocket fuel is a pretty bad time then you've got coolant pumps that pump a liquid coolant to be clear not water around to the anodized aluminum cold plates that are distributed around the ring and then pull this one really got my inner cooling geek all sorts of hot and bothered these two plates here are part of what they call the sublimator now if you've got up to 400 watts of heat per cooling plate and we've got 15 of them around the ring you've got to dissipate that somehow but the keen-witted among you have probably already figured out that in the vacuum of space conventional radiators don't work there's no air to exchange the heat with so the way the sublimator works is it has a piece of sintered metal that's exposed directly to space this reservoir down here then is full of water and pressurized nitrogen gas with a flexible membrane in between that forces the water through the micro pores in our sintered metal now because these channels are so small the water freezes nearly immediately then because that ice gets exposed to such a low pressure environment it sublimates going directly from solid to vapour allowing it to dissipate about 9,000 watts so this is kind of like conventional phase change cooling but space-age literally this system allows our coolant to stay between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the entire mission with only the volume of water in the reservoir to fuel it next up power comes in from the batteries to our power distributors these are the high current ones here that break out to sub power distributors one at the top of the Ring and the other one over on the other side those ones go directly to components or to further lower current power distributors and the whole thing runs at 28 volts we'll get back to those a little bit later now all this distribution is actually done with relays no semiconductor switching or anything like that the cold hard truth is that semiconductors just weren't reliable enough yet so the way that that worked was they got a signal from the black box called a switch selector so it's the one that's right to the right of our tic-tac-toe box here and that was tied to the computer so when it's time to fire a retrorocket or start an engine or turn on the cooling system the switch flicks now we're getting into navigation guidance and control down here on the bottom of the ring so this sphere right here in front of me is full of pressurized nitrogen gas and it feeds the gas bearing remember we want as little friction as possible to reduce drift for what they call the guidance platform now it looks similar to the nitrogen ball but the insides are absolutely nothing alike we've actually got a breakaway here that we can look at to see the main components three accelerometers and three gyroscopes now the fixed thing in the middle is called the stable table and before launch they release it and then courtesy of our X Y and z-axis gyros it actually maintains a fixed position so it's always in the exact same orientation it was left in no matter how the rocket is oriented or traveling around the Earth now I said exact but that wasn't quite what I meant because for short missions this kind of system is fine but for longer ones it needs to get a little more advanced because no matter what you do even if you've got a nitrogen bearing a gyro is going to drift a little bit so if you're doing a multi-month mission you need to build in systems to allow you to recalibrate it now the accelerometers which are just gyros with a weight hanging off them that torque them causing them to precess use the degree of precession as a measure of the acceleration that gets sent to the computer which uses that data to calculate velocity which I guess brings us pretty nicely to our computer so this small box here is the lvdc or launch vehicle digital computer this is a truly remarkable machine the processing modules had transistors that are actually big enough to see with the naked eye and were soldered to the compute chips built into these boards using a predecessor to ball grid array soldering and the memory well the nine hundred and seventeen thousand five hundred and four bits of working system memory was actually hand-woven from copper wire and iron rings that whole system was double redundant for memory and triple redundant for the compute destined and I actually go into a little bit more depth on this in the video on his channel so don't miss it we're gonna have it linked below the second box here is the LV da or a launch vehicle data adapter this contains a whole bunch of stuff it's got power supplies for itself and the LV DC and a bunch of interfaces to other electronic components as well as digital to analog converters and analog to digital converters because thing is not everything about this system was digital so this cylinder right here contains the analog computer from the saturn v this is the one that actually issues the commands to move the engines and steer the rocket so the whole computer here digital and analog has no operating system but the thing is you wouldn't want to run Windows or Android on something like this anyway consumer operating systems work by queuing up inputs and processing tasks and then executing them whenever it's most convenient it basically processes them in batches well this is a real-time system and it operates on a fixed two-second loop with interrupts so if an input comes in that must be executed within a given amount of time where people could die it needs to be able to handle that now let's come back to these two black boxes again remember these are our switch selectors we've got a hundred and twelve lines going out of them that carry commands from the computer directly to components or distributors telling them to power on or power off so again for example let's say the cooling vent if we go over our temperature threshold it sends out a command that says hey open it up we need to sublimate some ice now each stage of the rocket needs these and that's actually what the wiring up on the top of the Ring is for it's to link our computer here two more of these in the other stages although obviously they're not attached right now while we're up here this last quarter or so of the Ring is for the telemetry package so we've got our transmitters measuring rax multiplexers and apparently the VHF systems on here are pretty close to what Apollo 12 would have looked like so this is not an R&D thing that might have had more telemetry stuff this is pretty darn close to the real deal which I guess is a pretty appropriate way for us to celebrate the Apollo 11 missions 50th anniversary yes my friends it has been that long since humans first walked on the moon if you 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you can check it out and buy today at Amazon at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys and a massive extra shadow for Destin from smarter every day again go check out his channel and to the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama for making this entire thing possible they really did keep the thing open late for us to finish this video so they're super awesome people here and if you're ever in the area make sure check it out if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy and the stuff we featured ok I mean if you want to buy a rocket like it's a pretty big endeavor but power to you I guess also linked in the video description is our merch store which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing and our community forum which you should totally join that's our standard outro because normally we feature a product that you can buy yeah