Tarini panda
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WHY TORTOISES ARE TOOK TO MOON?
WHY TORTOISES TOOK TO THE MOON? Three months before a single human was launched toward the Moon, two tortoises had already come back. Sure, they didn’t get to make one giant leap for tortoise-kind on the surface. They just swung around the Moon. But along with some much smaller critters, they were the first citizens of Earth to get that far away from home! This was the USSR’s Zond 5 mission, and it was carried into space by a funky-looking rocket. It’s called the Proton, and it was so successful that its descendents were used for over half a century! If you take a look at a Proton rocket, you might think that it looks a little funny near the bottom. Especially in comparison to other rockets of the era. The first stage of the rocket, meaning the part that holds the first set of engines, has one big central tube surrounded by a bunch of smaller ones. And you might think that those outer tubes would be smaller boosters… separate rockets all coming together to add more oomph. But no. Those tubes are holding the Proton’s fuel. Meanwhile, the center tube holds the second ingredient in making the rocket go up… or in worse cases blow up… the oxidizer that makes the fuel combust. This arrangement was necessary because Proton had to be shipped by train, lying on its side. So the central tube could only be so big. And interestingly, what was in those fuel tanks actually made the rocket pretty controversial, especially during its development. All iterations of the Proton rocket, including the ones that sent missions around the Moon, relied on a fuel called Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, or UDMH. And it’s incredibly toxic. It’s so toxic that one of the USSR’s chief rocket scientists didn’t want to use it. But it did have some perks. For example, UDMH, as well as the oxidizer in the Proton’s central tank, are hypergolic propellants,. That means that when you put them together, they’ll spontaneously ignite.
By Tarini panda8 months ago in Education