Near the end of the movie Apollo 13, which depicts the harrowing journey of the three astronauts aboard the aborted 1970 lunar mission, the tension mounts in textbook fashion. As the spacecraft hurdles into Earth's atmosphere it is encircled by hot ionized air that cuts off communications with NASA Mission Control in Houston. Each second that the flight controllers' calls for contact remain unanswered is torturously stretched.
This was not just creative license taken by a Hollywood production team. Apollo 13's communication blackout was more than a minute longer than expected, which added to the suspense, but even routine communications blackouts can create moments of anxiety, as there is no way to know or control the location and state of the spacecraft from the ground.
"When a re-entry vehicle is unable to be connected, the only thing you can do is pray for it," said Xiaotian Gao, a physicist at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.
Gao and his colleague Binhao Jiang have proposed a new way to maintain communication with spacecraft as they re-enter the atmosphere. The approach might also be applied to other hypersonic vehicles such as futuristic military planes and ballistic missiles. They discuss their approach in this week's Journal of Applied Physics.
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