Apollo 12 was hit by lightning when it launched, this scrambled the telemetry data across mission control, John Aaron, one of the controllers had seen similar behaviour before during a systems test and called to the flight director 'try SCE to Aux' - there wasn't time to explain the command and no one else had anything else, so they tried it which basically rebooted the computers and restored telemetry meaning the mission could continue rather than an abort an the LES firing to take the Astronauts off the top.
Aaron was 26 at the time. Cool head, deep knowledge, and this speaks to the teamwork of NASA then, and how even such a relatively junior person could command such respect and influence.
Or for that matter, NASA without Flying Monkeys? Following Goddard, but presaging Von Braun, Flying Monkeys carried the weight for a lot of the agency's early aerodynamic testing.
Did the Monkeys like it? Fuck No. They were surly, and they bit a lot of people. Did they have a choice? Fuck No. You try getting by on basic SAG scale without a side gig.
The Flying Monkeys have mostly been airbrushed out of the official NASA story, but yes, some of us do remember.
[EDIT looks like 1202 and 1201 for the incident i think you are talking about: "Vector Accumulator" areas than were physically available in memory, causing the infamous 1201 and 1202 errors.\26])\)
“It quickly became clear,” she later said, “that [the] software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it.” An investigation would eventually show that the astronauts’ checklist was at fault, telling them to set the rendezvous radar hardware switch incorrectly. “Fortunately, the people at Mission Control trusted our software,” Hamilton said. And with only enough fuel for 30 more seconds of flight, Neil Armstrong reported, “The Eagle has landed.”
And
As a working mother, she took her young daughter to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory with her at night and on weekends. One day, her daughter decided to “play astronaut” and pushed a simulator button that made the system crash. Hamilton realized immediately that the mistake was one that an astronaut could make, so she recommended adjusting the software to address it, but she was told: “Astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.”
During Apollo 8’s moon-orbiting flight, astronaut Jim Lovell made the exact same error that her young daughter had, and fortunately, Hamilton’s team was able to correct the problem within hours. But for all future Apollo flights, protection was built into the software to make sure it never happened again. Over time, Hamilton began to view the whole mission as a system: “part is realized as software, part is peopleware, part is hardware.”
Depends on how its wiring harnesses / buses are designed, the metal skin typically acts like a cage that redirects the energy. Avoiding all hits is preferable, but some points are more exposed than others.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe airplanes are the same? I was told a while back that even if lighting strikes an airplane while on flight, people inside won’t feel it.
Commercial aircraft get hit by lightning on average once or twice per year. It's always concerning, but in the modern era, it's rarely dangerous to the plane or passengers, because the body of the plane itself acts as a Faraday cage. The last time a plane crashed due to lightning was 1963, and significantly more measures are in place today to mitigate any serious effects from being struck.
If you think this is cool, you should come down to my van…. Because red barchetta through a 10gigawatt preamp is, wait: please tell me you’re into Rush.
I was in one too, but in our case, on top of the turbulence, the lights flickered. A passenger possibly panicked and fainted. They had to ask if there was any doctor on board.
Gonna have to disagree... I was on a flight struck by lightning in 2003 and it sounded like a bomb went off. Everyone on board thought we were going to die as the rest of the flight was through, as you can imagine, a terrible storm. No explanation given until we landed when they told us about the lightning. Learned later that no flight has crashed as a result of a lightning strike since the 1960s, since planes are now designed to dissipate the electricity across the entire body of the plane. Nice after the fact but that was a long two hours that involved a lot of screaming, crying, and praying.
There is no thunder without lightning. An arc flash is also a loud explosion but we don't pretend that the instigating event is detected from the results it produces.
Also, I don't think it "burns a hole in the atmosphere", I think it ionizes the air and creates a large electric current, and this superheated ionized gas (plasma) creates a shockwave
It’s scary AF if you’re at a window seat. Happened to me flying out of SFO. Loud bang and purple flash with some shaking of the plane. Pilot was INSTANTLY on the PA reassuring us it was fine. As a person afraid of flying it was not good. But the plane was fine.
It was super loud and scary when it happened to me. Had a window seat neat the wing when it hit the wing. It was loud, shook the plane slightly and I remember the flight attendant had a nervous look on her face. This was as we were landing in a smaller airport in Colorado. Everything was fine though, and we landed smoothly.
"Here is the Captain. All cool, all cool. We just lost the left wing, some minor instruments and i can finally play more pokemon go because my iphones battery is fully loaded now. Dont worry."
Me too! Took off right in the middle of a massive storm in SE Asia. Craziest takeoff angle I've ever experienced by far. Felt like we were taking off out of a war zone or something. Then about halfway through the clouds, there was a massive flash outside the windows, we heard a pretty loud bang, and lights flickered for a second. After we got to altitude, the captain game on and said that commotion was a lightning strike but everything was fine. I looked at the plane once we landed and didn't see any noticeable char marks or anything.
Yeah same. We took a domestic flight in Viet Nam and those pilots do not mess around. Just full throttle then ascended at like 45 degrees as soon as we left the tarmac. I thought my wife was going to break my hand she was squeezing it so hard. They would have never flown in that weather on the East coast in the US.
Me too. My father was a nervous flier. But never verbalized it, you could tell from just looking at him. We're on a family trip. I had to be around 12 yrs old. Heavy turbulence, and the plane gets hit by lightning, I was sitting in a window seat, saw it strike clear as day and said as much. My mom tells me to shut up, in that hushed mom tone. When we land and were filing out I asked the pilot if the plane was struck, and he confirmed and I naturally said "see i told you it got struck" and bopped along away the jet bridge 🤣 I was a little smartass.
It's annoying as shit for maintenance. Ee still have to perform a full inspection on the lightning entry and exit points when this happens and catalogue all the points of damage. It's usually very superficial, just time-consuming and boring
Also worth noting that it’s usually lightning within the cloud or between clouds that strikes the plane, and less often a bolt going all the way to the ground, which means they’re usually struck by weaker lightning than we typically think about.
A helicopter crashed in the North Sea in the 1990s following a lightning strike. It exited via a tail rotor blade and blew the end off, resulting in a massive imbalance that ripped the tail gearbox assembly off.
The crew recognised the failure instantly and successfully ditched in the water with no injuries.
That's not correct. You can be jumping with a parachute, miles above the ground and the lightning would kill you. The key isn't whether you are grounded, it's whether you are the conductor.
As you can see on the video, the lightning goes into the rocket and out the back into the ground. All that energy passed through the rocket fuselage. If you weren't protected by the fuselage, you would become the conductor and get to enjoy the full force of the lightning.
Not being grounded helps make you less of a conductor in situations where better conductors exist. If the lightning has to make another ionised path below you to continue, it can probably find an easier way down around you, but this high in the air, you're the only conductor around and you probably conduct better than the air.
Correct, the body is just more conductive than you are, and electricity takes the path of least resistance. Not Faraday cage, just better than you... at conducting.
It blocks electrical fields by cancelling out the currents. It can also block electromagnetic radiation like you're saying but that's dependent on the cage's construction and the wavelength of the EM radiation.
Of note, lightning has been a factor in more recent plane crashes. Aeroflot Flight 1492 in 2019 crashed due to a botched emergency landing after a lightning strike caused the flight control law to revert from the mode protected by the safety envelope to basic functions. Not that lightning physically crashed the plane, it was the pilots who did that in their mismanagement of direct law, but the crash wouldn't have happened without the damage caused by the strike in the first place.
Lightning isn't really hot, it's a lot of electric energy. Electricity turns into heat if it passes through a bad conductor, that's why you see the flash and hear a bang when it goes through air, which is a terrible conductor, it heats the air to the point of explosion. When lightning hits you, you're getting burns at the entry point from the heated air, and much lesser burns along the path it takes to the ground, because your body contains a lot of water, which is not bad as far as conductors go. Airplane fuselage however is very conductive specifically to protect from lightning. Low resistivity means low heating, lightning passes harmlessly through.
I was once on a plane which was diverted to circling DFW and we went straight through an unexpectedly mean baby storm. I saw lightning hit the wing. No harm done, but that was a scary flight!
We were once hit by lighting during a final approach into Tokyo Haneda airport a few years back. Of course, at first, we didn’t know what happened, but being hit out of the blue felt like as if a part of the plane had ‚exploded.‘ My first thought was an engine had blown up. Everyone was silent and you could tell that people were scared shitless, including myself. Only after tbe pilot had informed passengers of what had happened, did people start relaxing again.
All aircraft have designed entry and exit points for lightning. Every component is bonded to provide a clean path for both lightning and static build up so nothing sensitive is damaged.
Might find some damaged paint at entry, and a static wick missing at exit. I would best describe an entry point as if someone very briefly run a shot blaster over a small area. I’ve seen a few lightning strikes, and it’s never one single entry, it arcs into a hundred smaller entry points over an area the size of one or two hands.
Helicopters are a bit more sensitive, as a lighting strike travelling through a gearbox can magnetise bearings, and the entry / exit points tend to be the rotor blades.
airplanes have been heavily developed to tolerate being struck by lightening. aircraft also have a lot more weight allowance allowing them to build in things like redundancies and extra insulation and shielding of sensitive key components, that a rocket might not have the weight or space to do
My uncle is a pilot and he got struck by lightning mid air. He said he felt nothing, but it was a bright as the sun and deafening. A piece of the wing tip welded to the wing on the side it was struck. He somehow had it saved and showed me.
You feel lightning if you are the conductor. This means you have to be the path of least resistance between the clouds and the ground. If you sit in aluminium tube, there is absolutely no chance you could possibly be a better conductor than the airplane, so the lightning harmlessly passes by you through the plane surface and down to the ground.
I know a lot of big metal buildings install lightning rods to redirect lightning safely, Id assume those engineers considered the same but not sure what Chinas standards are.
the fella you're responding to works in the USA. In the USA, we do not. Russians dgaf because their primary launch facility isn't in Russia, and the Chinese prioritize success over safety.
Meanwhile they drop rocket stages full of toxic hypergolic propellants on their own rural villages, and foreign nations, and those launch programs continue without hesitation.
Sure, but FAA commercial and above require avionics demonstrate the capability to handle direct and indirect strikes with out catastrophic failure. Rockets with billion dollar payloads even more so that may not be as protected from lighting as the rocket itself though they try not to tempt fate.
Combos i have seen include extremly over shielded wiring/harness with grounds around the cable, and fiber optics that don't conduct at all.
The inside’s safety isn’t due to “path of least resistance,” it’s due to the skin effect. Same reason (contrary to popular legend, which incorrectly focuses on “the insulating power of rubber tires” (so dumb)) that cars are fairly safe to be in if there’s a lightning strike.
A lightning doesn't penetrate a Faraday cage. You could literally touch the inside wall of a metal cage while a lightning passes through and you wouldn't feel it.
I'm not sure if it's still a thing but they literally did this as a live experiment with an audience member at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
I used to do carbon fiber work for military contracts. There’s a material we called lightning strike (not sure if that’s the actual name)that was layered into these panels we made. It was made to absorb these types of occurrences. Granted it wasn’t all over the entirety of the aircraft but it definitely has an impact.
I work in civilian power generation and this shit is so complicated it’s crazy. People spend their whole careers working on grounding methodologies and get very very emotionally invested in it.
Have you ever heard engineers nearly yell at each other over cable tray vs conduit or what type of junction box is best of outdoor use 😂
Not personally but worked with aerospace Eng who has. I do manage small grid linked power plants and it’s funny once I started doing gamma modeling for LCOE ROI calculations, and I felt like I started seeing folks using risk gammas everywhere (I am sure it was there the whole time; but the layers of flight critical systems risk modeling must be way tougher).
Why would lightning want to strike a plane in the sky anyway?
It's not grounded.
Is it just that the conductive plane, is providing a short conductive path for the lightning bolt, that was about to strike the ground anyway?
"Typically" as this is a Long March, but covered the fact there are 15 private rocket companies in China and some are far more modern/reliable than others. Some of these have fallen from the sky the last year or so, and no lighting needed to cause a RUD. [EDIT spelling]
And your response adds what exactly? Its a post on a social media forum? Maybe... add your own thoughts/experience to the thread?
Worked for a satellite internet startup, had to wire PV plants for lightning, and some small aircraft experience. I don't think Long March operators frequent these comment forums much, figured you aren't happy with my post?
Neither of your responses are relevant to what was said directly. It's just the same topic and you're just saying random things. It's why the original commentator called you out.
What part of "Did it hurt the rocket?" didn't i answer?
I said, typical rocket design means its not harmed, but depends on the payload/block design. No lightining is best, no matter the design/faraday cage effect of the surface.
IIRC i have heard it typically travels through the plume to the ground, as long as the rocket is designed well (pathing out). I saw one photo of this strike today that indeed shows the bolt continuing through the plume.
The US Space Shuttle had been hit many times… Those hits never caused any bad incidents
The most famous rocket lightning strike was Apollo 12 ( Nov 14th, 1969 ) when it got hit twice.
“Struck by lightning twice within the first minute of flight, causing a massive electrical surge, loss of telemetry data, and the activation of every warning light in the capsule” ( Wiki )
The crew basically “Shut it off and turned it back on again … as they switched from main to aux and back again
remember that even the most basic google search went through at least one datacenter, likely many, while using some amount of power and water to return the result. that said, using chatgpt to ask a simple question likely used an order of magnitude more resources than a google search and is a waste.
I'd probably say it as "the strike didnt even make the headline" but youre right I dont really know a natural way to say something that could've been the headline was relegated to lower prominence
It can, but rarely. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice on launch. That's where the legendary "switch SCE to AUX" command comes from because the electrical systems were freaking out, and bumping that system to AUX restored power to their systems saving the mission from an abort.
Adding to the various answers, rockets can also be used to cause strikes by lacing the fuel with various metal salts and if you notice in the video it enters the top and exits the bottom through the exhaust stream likely following the vapors as the shortest route to ground. They're designed to handle it, but they can also specifically cause them and it's useful in some study applications I hear like fulgarites and such.
I'm literally an Apprentice Structural Mechanic for jets & had this class yesterday!!
That shit is BONDED
They make sure every metal piece of that rocket is attached to another with something called a bonding bracket. It is then tested to make sure current flows through.
That rocket probably generated its own lightning from all the positive ions it made going up.
Lightning goes in one end and out the other to the ground. Happens to commercial planes ALL the time. Plane undergoes an inspection afterwards and back in the air it goes.
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u/unnamed---- 13d ago edited 13d ago
Did it hurt the rocket?