Titan IMU drawings

Titan IMU drawings

Acquired from Don Willis-Lunar Legacies

Date acquired 1^st June 2019

Collection # -TSM 21

Here are three original blueprint copies of drawings relating to the manufacture of the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) for the Titan missile. The first Titan II guidance system was built by AC Spark Plug. It used an IMU (inertial measurement unit, a gyroscopic sensor) made by AC Spark Plug derived from original designs from MIT Draper Labs. The drawings are dated 1960 & 1961.They appear to be drawings of components for assembly or testing jigs and fixtures.

Taking an educated guess i would say that these parts are for frames and fixtures to hold components into place whilst a newly manufactured IMU was being tested and calibrated prior to installation

As pointed out in the introduction note the collection in the main is Apollo related, with a few exceptions. This is one of these and was included because of the prominence of the Titan as a launch vehicle in the US space program. The quote below was taken from Wikipedia.

Titan was a family of United States expendable rockets used between 1959 and 2005. Titan I and Titan II were part of the US Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile fleet until 1987. The space launch vehicle versions contributed the majority of the 368 Titan launches, including all the Project Gemini crewed flights of the mid-1960s. Titan vehicles were also used to lift US military payloads as well as civilian agency intelligence-gathering satellites and to send highly successful interplanetary scientific probes throughout the Solar System.

No1 Drawing full image

Closeup of No2 Drawing title box, Drawn on the 27th December, a heat exchanger fixture.

No2 Drawing full image

Closeup of No3 Drawing title box, Drawn of the 25th April 1961, titled Heat exchanger calibration

No3 Drawing full image