Gimbal Lock.docxVIP

[Early in the alignment process, a check is made of the middle gimbal angle the new orientation wold yield. If this angle exceeds 70°, the computer shows an error code, 401, which means that at their current attitude, if Jim were to realign the platform to the new REFSMMAT, he would make the gimbals line up in such a way that a condition called gimbal lock may ensue.][The MIT lab who designed the Apollo GN system borrowed heavily from their previous work on Polaris missiles which had used three gimbals to mount the guidance platform. This saved weight by excluding a fourth gimbal and it could be shown that a 3-gimbal arrangement could do everything required of the mission, as long as care was taken in its operation to avoid a nuiscance called gimbal lock.Gimbal Lock is a notoriously difficult concept to describe verbally, and it benefits from some pictures to help the reader visualise what is going on. Stripped to its essentials, the IMU consists of a stabilised platform (grey with yellow dot in our diagram) mounted within three freely-rotating gimbals; the outer (red), middle (green) and inner (blue) gimbals. Each is connected to the other by bearings which are at right angles to each other.Figure 1 shows the arrangement. The spacecraft structure is represented by the square frame and the three axes are labelled 1, 2 and 3. In figure 2, we imagine that the spacecraft rotates around axis 1.We can see that the bearings at axis 1 take the rotation while the platform maintains its orientation. Return to the arrangement in figure 1 and instead, imagine a rotation around axis 3, as shown in Figure 3.Once again, the bearings on a single axis take up the rotation, keeping the platform correctly oriented. Again, starting from figure 1, we will now rotate the spacecraft around axis 2. This is shown in figure 4.As the rotation is taken up by axis 2, notice that the two other axes have lined up. For the moment, the platform can maintain its orientation but there is no axis to