Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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41
down and coming to a null out there, it appeared to
st art moving somewhat at the same separation rate to
the south of us slightly towards a trail position very
slowly.
We tracked it f or a long t ime.
We were track­
ing it straight out and then all nf a sudden, it be­
gan to loop around slightly to the lef t .
Conrad
It di d something like I
1 d never seen before!
Cooper
I
1d never seen this happen in the simulator, and
it still doesn ' t seem quite f easi ble to us that this
could ever happen.
Conrad
One possible answer, and it ' s r elated to something
that we saw later in the flight , Gordo, where we
alined the platform and had -yaw error couple into
roll .
Might not this have given us bad steering in­
formation as far as our radar needles were concerned
if the scanner wasn ' t working properly? We didn ' t
have the platform alined right .
We went along
30 minutes, almost one- third of an orbit .
If we
di dn ' t have an alined platform, that would start
coupling up in some other axis like roll and we
woul d be off in yaw.
Then when we thought we were
pointing at the pole , we reall y weren't.
Maybe it
didn 1t reall y drift behind us , maybe it stayed out
on our wing.
We must have put it out fairly well