ELi5: What is gimbal lock and why is it bad? (Been watching Apollo 13)
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When you’re walking around or driving around it’s easy to know where you are because you have eyes and can see things like street signs and landmarks. When you’re in something like a submarine or a spaceship, it’s much harder. So how do you ever know where you are if you can’t look out a window?
You use a series of rings called gimbals which spin around and they can basically tell you which direct you’re pointing in. If you combine that knowledge with something like how hard your engines are firing, or elapsed time, you can do math to figure out where you must be from a starting point. Gimbals like this are also called a gyroscope (each gimbal is one ring, 3 rings make a gyroscope).
In the case of the Apollo missions they ran into issues with the gimbals they sent up on the space ships where they “locked”, for whatever reason they stopped accurately reporting what direct the ship was facing. This is obviously suuuuper bad because the tiniest miscalculation meant the spaceship would likely just fly off into space forever or crash into the Earth or Moon. So they were forced to use a sextant and plot their position via the stars just like old timey sailors.
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