The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel, located at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, California, USA, is a research facility used extensively to design and test new generations of aircraft, both commercial and military, as well as NASA space vehicles, including the Space Shuttle.
The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel is actually a system of 3 closed-loop wind tunnels, each with its own model test section, but all sharing the same powerful electric motor driving their compressors to propel the air within them. Because of this shared layout, only one UPWT test section can be utilized at a time.
The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel was created by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), parent agency of NASA, which also created the Variable Density Tunnel at Langley in 1921.
The Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985.
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Famous quotes containing the words plan, wind and/or tunnel:
“To choose one’s victims, to prepare one’s plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed ... there is nothing sweeter in the world.”
—Josef Stalin (1879–1953)
“There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”
—George Borrow (1803–1881)
“It is the light
At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen
By him looking out somberly at the shower,
The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from,
Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete
You can’t have.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)