When was the Liberty Bell 7 retrieved from the ocean floor, and what did it prove?
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright Challenger expedition British oceanographic expedition under the direction of the Scottish professor Charles Wyville Thompson and the British naturalist Sir John Murray. Taking place from 1872 to 1876, it opened the era of descriptive oceanography . The team sailed in the converted 18-gun corvette Challenger, the first vessel specifically equipped for general oceanographic research. The expedition cruised almost 69,000 nautical mi (130,000 km) in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Antarctic oceans, gathering data on temperature, currents, water chemistry, marine organisms, and bottom deposits at 362 oceanographic stations scattered over 14 million sq mi (36 million sq km) of ocean floor. Its major contributions, covered in a 50-volume, 29,500-page report that took 23 years to compile, included the first systematic plot of c
The recovery failed to answer some of the questions surrounding the prematurely blown hatch. On July 20, 1999, the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing and one day shy of the 38th anniversary of Mercury 4’s suborbital flight, a team led by Curt Newport and financed by the Discovery Channel, Oceaneering International, Inc. lifted the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft off the floor of the Atlantic ocean and onto the deck of a recovery ship. The spacecraft was found after a 14-year effort by Newport and his team at a depth of nearly 15,000 ft (4.5 km), 300 nm (550 km) southeast of Cape Canaveral and was in surprisingly good condition. Some of the interior aluminum panels showed deterioration but some fabric pieces, including Grissom’s personal parachute, were perfectly intact. The recovery failed to answer some of the questions surrounding the prematurely blown hatch. The recovery team ran out of time and was not able to continue the search for the hatch itself. A camera that was runni
Whatever the cause, the hatch blew, the rescue helicopter couldn’t save the capsule and Liberty Bell 7 spent the next 38 years at the bottom of the Atlantic until it was found and recovered last summer during two expeditions led by diving expert Curt Newport. To detonate the ordnance, either Grissom would have to firmly bang his wrist on a plunger inside the capsule, or a diver greeting the spacecraft in the water could move a small panel on the outside and pull on a T-shaped handle. Later experience would show that if a Mercury astronaut were to detonate the hatch from the inside, the amount of force necessary to hit and activate the plunger would leave a nasty bruise, which Grissom didn’t have. Nevertheless, rumors began to circulate that Grissom was somehow at fault, leaving a blemish on his career that continued even after he perished in 1967 during the Apollo 1 fire along with Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Sources:
