Yeah it was pretty insane, catching it mid flight. Really cool. You can't make that stuff up.
Imagine tracking and catching something falling from space using only 60s tracking tech. No GPS. Wow.
Imagine tracking and catching something falling from space using only 60s tracking tech. No GPS. Wow.
I was reading a scientific magazine article about the planed return of the Genesis spacecraft’s samples. They were writing about how the probe will float back to Earth under a parachute and a helicopter will catch it mid—air. That plan sounded absolutely bonkers crazy to me and I would have assumed they needed a long process of trial drops to practice this stunt, but the documented evidence shown that they were quite non-chalant about it. Almost as if they have done such things previously. But since there were no public evidence of prior art I assumed some classified spy stuff was what gave them the experience needed to be confident about the skill. (This was 7 years before the declassification of the existence of the KH-9 program)
(yes, I know it's not a real quote)
I only wrote about this because later it become clear that I was right.
I would never tell you about how much time I spent thinking about how a submarine could use laser back-scatter to track the slightly warmer wake of an enemy submarine. :P Not until they declassify that too.
This is where GPS+track prediction could help a lot. And why I think it's so impressive.