Landing on the Moon - Inside NASA's Vertical Motion Simulator at the AMES Research Center
Landing on the Moon - Inside NASA's Vertical Motion Simulator at the AMES Research Center
For more information, visit:
https://www.airshaper.com
https://www.nasa.gov/ames/
https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/what-is-the-vertical-motion-simulator/
In this video, we got a personal tour at the NASA AMES Research Center. We sat inside the Vertical Motion Simulator, which was originally designed & build to train the pilots of the Space Shuttle for their landing.
It can move 40 ft horizontally and 60 ft vertically and accelerate at up to 0.8 G. All this to allow for the simulation of different flight phases - take-off, cruise and landing.
They have 5 different cabs, representing different types of aircraft & spacecraft. It is often used for Air Taxis and Urban Transportation Concepts these days, including eVTOLs (electric vertical take off and landing aircraft). They also have a cab to simulate landing on the moon and on Mars.
Other than that, we got to see world's largest wind tunnel (with a 120x80 ft test section) and Hangar One, where they built the US Macon, an airship from the 1930s.
A massive thanks to NASA for organizing this visit!
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The AirShaper videos cover the basics of aerodynamics (aerodynamic drag, drag & lift coefficients, boundary layer theory, flow separation, reynolds number...), simulation aspects (computational fluid dynamics, CFD meshing, ...) and aerodynamic testing (wind tunnel testing, flow visualization, ...).
We then use those basics to explain the aerodynamics of (race) cars (aerodynamic efficiency of electric vehicles, aerodynamic drag, downforce, aero maps, formula one aerodynamics, ...), drones and airplanes (propellers, airfoils, electric aviation, eVTOLS, ...), motorcycles (wind buffeting, motogp aerodynamics, ...) and more!
For more information, visit www.airshaper.com