Gyroscopes Were Used in What Space Projects?

The Early Years

• The V-2 rocket was a German World War II ballistic missile that soared into space on its way to London or some other unfortunate target. Our atmosphere ends, and space begins, about 60 miles up, and the V-2 could reach 100 miles in altitude. To guide the missile through the atmosphere, gyroscopes sent signals to move the rocket's fins. Once there was no more air for the V-2 to push against, the gyroscopes moved the vanes in the rocket's exhaust to steer the missile. After the war, gyroscopes were adapted for other high-tech messengers of death, but they also had peaceful scientific uses.

Einstein Was Right

• Albert Einstein predicted in 1916 that space and time will warp around a body, such as the Earth, which exerts a gravitational force. He also said that as the world turns, it pulls space and time along with it. Einstein's era had no spacecraft to look for those effects, which would be easier to spot out of this world. Decades later, the Gravity Probe B confirmed Einstein's predictions. Four ultra-precise gyroscopes aboard the satellite kept the probe in just the right orbit around the Earth, so the tiny wobbles in its orbit caused by Einsteinian space-time twisting and dragging could be found and measured.

Service Call

• The Hubble space telescope was getting wobbly. Its multiple gyroscopes must work together to keep Hubble pointing at the star, planet, galaxy or other astral phenomenon that astronomers wanted to study. NASA diagnosed the problem as faulty wiring in the devices that keep the gyroscopes spinning. In 2009, the agency sent up the space shuttle Atlantis with replacement gyroscopes. Mission accomplished. The telescope, now in orbit more than two decades, is still sending back pictures of the cosmos. Incidentally, the space shuttle itself also uses gyroscopes, to find its way to Earth orbit and back home.

Read the Map

• What's better than finding a satellite's location? A satellite that can find its own location, thank you very much. NASA and the Air Force launched TacSat-2 in 2006. It carries an inertial stellar compass. That's a tiny camera, which takes star pictures, plus a gyroscope. The camera tells the spacecraft where it's pointing. The gyroscope monitors the spacecraft's motion and tells the spacecraft how to keep pointing in the right direction. That's especially useful when the star that the camera is looking at is our Sun -- whose light can blind cameras.