Maybe not the reason, but it certainly offered the opportunity for a detailed test objective (DTO) related to exploring when the hypersonic air flow on the underside of Discovery would go turbulent in the presence of a small experimental bump in the normally smooth tiles. Photography from the ground revealed the break to a turbulent flow at about Mach 18 -- that photography would have been a lot harder over the ocean! What I don't know is whether the DTO was added because of they were landing on a descending path anyway, or they selected the cross-US landing track in order to perform the DTO. On Apr 20, 2010, at 9:21 AM, Patrick Schmeer wrote: > STS-131 landed 13 minutes ago. > > Why had such a landing track across the USA been chosen? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20100420/6d027da0/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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