SCIENCE FLIGHT

When Carpenter was named to pilot MA-7 in March 1962, he decided on the moniker ‘Aurora 7’ for his capsule. “I think of Project Mercury and the open manner in which we are conducting it for the benefit of all as a light in the sky,’’ he wrote later. ‘‘Aurora also means ‘dawn’ – and, in this case, the dawn of a new age. The Seven, of course, stands for the original seven astronauts.” By now, the suffix had become commonplace and, coincidentally, ‘Aurora’ also happened to be the name of one of two streets bordering Carpenter’s boyhood home in Boulder. The capsule which bore this name was Spacecraft No. 18 off the McDonnell production line and arrived at Cape Canaveral on 15 November 1961, followed by its Atlas booster just two weeks after John Glenn’s mission.

Owing to the ‘experimental’ nature of Friendship 7 – ‘‘for all its first-time danger,’’ wrote Carpenter and Stoever, ‘‘MA-6 had been designed to answer the simple question: Could it be done?’’ – the next mission was intended to encompass far more engineering and scientific tasks, including observations, photography and extensive manoeuvres. Deke Slayton, when the flight was still his to fly, had expressed consternation at the sheer volume of tests and experiments. ‘‘Everybody and his brother came out of the woodwork,’’ Slayton wrote. ‘‘One guy wanted me to

release a balloon to measure air drag. Another guy had some ground observations I was supposed to make. One damn thing after another. I had my hands full trying to resist it.” From 16 March 1962, with barely ten weeks to go, Scott Carpenter found that the scientific demands of MA-7 were his to handle: they included combined yaw-roll manoeuvres to study orbital sunrises, using terrestrial landmarks and stars for navigational reference and flying in an inverted attitude to determine the effect of ‘Earth-up/sky-down’ orientation on the pilot’s abilities.

Furthermore, Homer Newell, head of NASA’s Office of Space Sciences, had established a formal panel to outline experiments and objectives for future flights. Astronomer Jocelyn Gill of NASA Headquarters was appointed to run this ‘Ad-Hoc Committee on Scientific Tasks and Training for Man-in-Space’ and her enthusiasm for Carpenter, who had an impressive background in navigational astronomy following his experience aboard the P2V with Patrol Squadron Six, was evident. Gill’s committee considered a number of possible experiments and Kenny Kleinknecht, now in charge of the Mercury Projects Office, appointed Lewis Fisher to lead a newly-established Mercury Scientific Experiments Panel. With the Fisher group overseeing the Gill committee ‘‘from an engineering feasibility standpoint’’ and on the basis of their ‘‘scientific value, relative priority and suitability for orbital flight’’, a consensus was reached on 24 April to propose five major experiments for Aurora 7. In his autobiography, Carpenter wrote that he ‘‘liked and admired scientists’’ and ‘‘liked being a champion of embattled groups with high purpose . . . And in 1962, the scientists at NASA were already a beleaguered group’’.

Deke Slayton’s perspective had always been that scientific tasks should be kept to a minimum, particularly in light of John Glenn’s problems with the flight controls. ‘‘Scott had a different perspective,’’ Slayton wrote. ‘‘He was always at home with the doctors and scientists – I think he was genuinely curious about the things that interested them. But it bit him in the ass during his flight.’’ Within NASA, added Carpenter, scientific experiments were viewed ‘‘with a mixture of suspicion and ridicule, the butt of jokes when the reporters weren’t around’’ and the astronaut found himself at loggerheads with Flight Director Chris Kraft. Although their relationship would never turn antagonistic, many observers have commented over the years that Carpenter’s performance during Aurora 7 would lead Kraft to declare openly that he would never fly in space again.

The five experiments recommended by the Fisher panel required Carpenter to observe, measure, analyse and photograph (1) a tethered, multi-coloured balloon, (2) the behaviour of liquids inside a sealed flask, (3) different visual phenomena – both celestial and terrestrial – using a modified photometer, built by psychologist Bob Voas and nicknamed ‘The Voasmeter’, (4) weather patterns and land masses and (5) the ‘airglow’ layer of the upper atmosphere. Of these, the balloon was the most visible. Measuring 76.2 cm in diameter and weighing 900 g, it was an inflatable Mylar sphere, divided into five equal sections painted an uncoloured aluminium, Day-Glo yellow, Day-Glo orange, white and a phosphorescent coating which appeared ‘white’ by day and ‘blue’ by night. The intention was for it to be inflated with a small nitrogen bottle immediately after release from Aurora 7’s antenna canister at the end of the first orbit. Carpenter would then observe and photograph the effects of space and sunlight on the different colours at different times, perhaps aiding in the design of future lunar spacecraft and their docking systems, which would require exceptionally good visibility. To better understand atmospheric density at orbital altitudes, it would be fitted with a ‘tensiometer’ – a strain gauge – to measure tension on the 30 m tether. Carpenter would add his own observations, monitoring the amount of atmospheric drag and turbulence in the balloon’s slipstream by carefully watching its oscillations and general behaviour as it trailed behind Aurora 7. During launch, the balloon would be folded, packaged and housed with its nitrogen bottle in the antenna canister on the spacecraft’s nose.

Meanwhile, the fluid flask – just behind Carpenter’s right ear in the cabin – was designed to build on theoretical and experimental work at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where it was already known that liquids behave differently under microgravity conditions. Its inclusion was intended to provide preliminary answers to questions of how fuels and other spacecraft fluids could be transferred from one storage tank to another during the long-duration Gemini and Moon-bound Apollo missions. Terrestrial aircraft flights and drop-tower tests conducted at Holloman Air Force Base and the service’s School of Aviation Medicine in Texas had been too short. One of the leading suggestions was that surface tension could be used to pump fluids, using capillary action, between tanks. The flask on Carpenter’s mission contained a small capillary, or meniscus, tube and by observing the behaviour of the fluid it would be possible to determine how effectively surface tension translated into pumping action, simply by measuring how far the liquid was drawn up into the tube. It was 20-per cent-filled with some 60 ml of a mixture of distilled water, green dye, an aerosol solution and silicone.

Observations of the constellations were also planned and considered important for future navigational purposes. Moreover, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had requested photographs of the ‘daylight’ horizon through blue and red filters to define more precisely the Earth’s limb as seen from above the atmosphere. John O’Keefe of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sought a distance measurement of the airglow above the atmosphere, together with its angular width and a description of its characteristics. For this study, Carpenter would use the Voasmeter. (It was lucky that Voas lent his name to the device, for its formal title was the ‘extinctospectrophotopolariscopeoculogyrogra – vokinetometer’; a name requiring 20 syllables!) The astronaut would also have a German-made 35 mm SLR camera, called a ‘robot recorder’, capable of exposing two frames per second from a 250-frame magazine, which would provide images of the daylit horizon, considered valuable for the design of Apollo’s navigation system. Another Goddard scientist, Paul Lowman, requested images of North America and Africa.

In addition to analysing events beyond his spacecraft, Carpenter was also charged with monitoring himself: by performing numerous exercises at specified intervals, followed by blood pressure readings. Aurora 7 would be the most science-heavy Mercury mission so far and the numerous problems encountered by Carpenter would be at least partly attributed to an overloaded work schedule.