Forty seconds had passed since the sixty-second warning, but they were down. The animation was produced by ALSJ contributor John Lloyd. The NASA guys in the MOCR knew - because MIT had extensively tested the restart capability - that the mission could go forward. The trajectory looked good but the "1202" message - like a later "1201" - wasn't one that the crew recognized and there were a few tense seconds until Houston radioed "We're GO on that alarm." Cosmos Possible Worlds National Geographic. Note, also, that, in the interest of reducing uncertainty, the fuel gauging system was improved for Apollo 12.). The Journal is intended as a resource for anyone wanting to know what happened during the missions and why. But they were close now and it was just a matter of easing themselves down. (LPD) was designed for fine tuning and what Armstrong needed was a big change. Another was the simple fact that, on this first landing, it was unlikely that NASA management would have approved an EVA long enough to allow the astronauts to deploy a complete ALSEP. However, it came as no surprise when they suggested to Houston that, after a scheduled hour-long meal, they prepare for what was called, in the NASA jargon, an EVA - a period of Extravehicular Activity. To learn more, visit the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal's Apollo 11 page. Then it was time to wake up, have a quick breakfast, and get ready for the launch, the rendezvous with Collins, and the heroes' welcome awaiting them at home. Thus, a location whose contents might be altitude-over-the-lunar-surface during the landing stage might have contained the results of a sextant sighting of a navigational star from the alignment program. Down to 50,000 feet above the Moon, Apollo 11 was little different from 10. Nowhere on the Moon are craters of that size more than a few kilometers apart and, for this first landing, the NASA flight engineers were not yet ready to fine-tune the approach trajectory to much better than about eight kilometers east or west of the target point and about two kilometers north or south. It was equipped with a big jet engine which provided enough thrust to counteract 5/6th of the pull of Earth's gravity and that big engine - firing more or less straight down - made the trainer more unstable than the LM. Science Experiments - Lunar Surface Magnetometer The magnetic field of the Moon was measured at four Apollo landing sites. The event itself was exciting enough. In general, the crew of Apollo 11 went about their work with appropriate caution. Personal Blog. From the footpad, he had only a couple of inches to step down to the surface itself. Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander. ', "There was lots of discussion about it. Each of the astronauts had a small, double-paned, triangular window in front of him. And, of course, no carrier landing had ever had quite the historic overtones of Apollo 11; nor had any carrier landing ever been performed before so large an audience. You can imagine the testing we had to do to ensure that the same memory location was not being used by more than one program at the same time. At pitchover, Armstrong positioned himself so that the vertical scales were aligned; and Aldrin read a computer output to him that indicated just where he should look on the scale to find the computer's intended landing point. Whoo! e Lunar Module Eagle (LM-5) is the spacecraft that served as the crewed lunar lander of Apollo 11, which was the first mission to land humans on the Moon. The most conspicuous of the Moon’s surfacefeatures—those that can be seen with the unaided eye and that make up the feature often called “the man in the Moon”—are vast splotches of darker lava flows. Don was responsible for the LM P60's (Lunar Descent), while I was responsible for the LM P40's (which were) all other LM powered flight except for P12, which was the Lunar Ascent program; we didn't concentrate on getting up from the Moon until a little later. Another copy of... Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. In principle, if he didn't like the spot, he could pulse the pistol-grip handcontroller forward or back or to either side and, thereby tell the computer to move the target a small amount in the indicated direction. We didn't know how nervous, but it didn't seem like a good idea to us and, by retargeting to the next site, you ended up with a post-sunrise splashdown in the Pacific. So what NASA did was assign two astronauts to each of three phases of the mission: launch to Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), LOI to TEI (Trans Earth Insertion), and then the trip home.