Say the explosion on Apollo 13 had been slightly worse, and instead of being able to eke out a few days of life support, the astronauts had run out of air in a few hours.
Could mission control have brought the capsule back to earth without astronaut intervention? And if not, what were the odds of recovering the bodies? What would have been the final fate of the spacecraft?
I’m pretty sure the spacecraft would have missed the Moon and gone into orbit around the Sun. Someday, it might have hit either the Earth or the Moon, but not anytime soon.
Mission Control would have no way of controlling Odyssey without the astronauts.
Actually, IIRC when the incident happened the space craft was already on a course for a moon orbit, so I doubt it would have gone into orbit around the sun. My guess is that without corrective burns the orbit wouldn’t have been optimal for a sustained orbit, and probably eventually would have crashed into the moon, but I think that initially at least the trajectory would have been good enough to put it into orbit around the moon.
I’d guess (WAG) that there wouldn’t have been any effort to recover anything, I don’t believe that without the astronauts that NASA or Mission Control could have brought the space craft back, and that the eventual fate would have been simply to have the thing smash into the moon and that would have been the astronauts graves.
-XT
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will come along soon, but I’m pretty sure they were going to need to fire the engine to achieve lunar orbit. I guess it’s possible their trajectory at the point of the ‘problem’ would have allowed them to swing around the Moon somewhat, but I don’t think the final path would have led around the Moon or back toward Earth.
Read the following link, and view the video.
Had the astronauts not been able to adjust their trajectory after the explosion, the ship would have passed around the moon, come very close to the earth on the return pass, then swung way out into an elliptical orbit. It would have swung back around the earth again, then on the next swing out would have passed close enough to the moon for the moon to kill most of its orbital velocity. It would have then fallen straight back to the earth and burned up on reentry.
Interesting…I wouldn’t have guessed it would crash back into the Earth like that. I guess I can see why it wouldn’t go into orbit around the moon (once I thought about it…it would have required a burn to slow it for orbit), but that was a really cool simulation. Thanks for the post and the ignorance fought!
-XT
Fascinating. An unexpected answer to my question!