that they
should be able to determine why the composition of the planets differ so much
from each other. It left its post last April and will return to Earth this fall.
The First State R/C Club - http://www.firststaterc.org - located in New Castle Delaware will be holding its annual multi-club picnic on Saturday, September 18, 2004 at their Flying Site on Route 9 in New Castle, DE. Event flyer is posted at: http://www.delcorc.org/images/picnic2004.jpg
The next day is the Delaware RC Club Picnic at Lum’s Pond. Event organizer, Jim Schlapfer, says: ”We’ll take care of the meat and drinks, you bring some goodies to share and we’ll all have a good time”
Right now it looks like we’ll have bratwurst and kielbasa, hamburgers and dogs.
Long-time Delaware RC member Bob Veazey has been busy.
working at All-American Engineering to develop a recovery method for the Genesis
Spacecraft, returning from a million miles sunward of Earth. It’s been out there
for over two years gathering particles from the solar wind. NASA believes that
with samples taken so far from earth,
that they
should be able to determine why the composition of the planets differ so much
from each other. It left its post last April and will return to Earth this fall.
Now, this is a pretty fragile package that can’t be contaminated, so the plan is to catch it with one of a pair of helicopters, after its parafoil ‘chute deploys. The ‘foil will be snagged on an 18 foot pole, whose hook will then separate and dangle the payload on the end of a 60 foot Kevlar line, attached to a winch which pays out the line to stop the descent gently. Bob used a similar technique in WWII to scoop up downed fliers and secret agents. They were even able to recover troop carrying gliders with C-47s by this method.
From “Air & Space :Aug/Sept 2004