Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project
MA-5
From RixWiki
Description of Mission
From SP-45 Mercury project summary
The Mercury-Atlas 5 (MA-5) mission was successfully made on November 29, 1961, from the Cape Canaveral launch site. A chimpanzee was the passenger on this flight. The mission was planned for three orbital passes and was to be the last qualification flight of the Mercury spacecraft and launch vehicle prior to a manned mission. The orbit was about as planned with perigee at 86.5 nautical miles and apogee at 128.0 nautical miles. Further objectives of this flight were to evaluate the Mercury network and recovery operations. In general, the spacecraft, launch-vehicle, and network systems functioned well during the mission until midway through the second pass when abnormal performance of the spacecraft attitude control system was detected and verified. This malfunction precluded the probably successful completion of the third pass because of the high rate of control fuel consumption. Accordingly, a retrofire command was transmitted to the spacecraft which resulted in it landing in the selected area at the end of the second pass. Recovery was completed 1 hour and 15 minutes after landing. The chimpanzee performed his assigned tasks without experiencing any deleterious effects during the mission and was recovered in excellent condition.
The primary anomaly during the mission was the control-system trouble which gave rise to increased fuel consumption by the attitude control system and which precipitated the abort of the mission at the end of the second orbital pass. The trouble was found to be a stopped-up metering orifice in one of the low-roll thrusters. Corrective action applied to subsequent missions included closer examinations for contamination in this system.
The spacecraft used for this mission was production spacecraft 9; and since it was the last qualification vehicle prior to the first manned orbital flight, it was intentionally made as nearly like the spacecraft for the manned mission as possible. This spacecraft included the large viewing window over the astronaut's head position, the landing bag, a positive lock on the emergency-oxygen rate handle, an explosive-release type hatch, new provisions for cooling the inverters, and rate gyros modified to insure satisfactory operation in the vacuum condition. The launch vehicle. Atlas 93-D, was much like those launch vehicles used on the previous two Mercury-Atlas missions: however, some additional modifications were included on this vehicle. These modifications included a new lightweight telemetry system and a redundant path for the sustained engine cut-off signal.
