Free public lectures - Apollo TV from the Moon

[PeterB]

For those of you who might be interested. I'll be going to the Canberra talk.

Peter B

= = = =

Free Public Lecture:

Apollo TV from the Moon

See the TV camera which brought us "one giant leap for Mankind."

In order to bring the world live television from the Moon, a team of Westinghouse engineers worked for 5 years to reduce a 180kg studio camera down to a 3kg handheld camera that could operate in the extreme conditions on the lunar surface. In doing so, they started the revolution of small handheld TV cameras we know today.

Hear Stan Lebar, Program Manager for the Westinghouse Apollo TV Camera, speak on the development of the Apollo 11 camera and its successors (the TV camera developed for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 will also be on display at the Canberra lecture). This is a rare opportunity to learn first-hand how the most remembered TV broadcast of the 20th Century was made possible.

Sydney
7:30pm, Tuesday March 14th 2006
At the Monthly Meeting of the Sydney Space Frontier Society in the Schools Briefing Room - Level 3 at the Powerhouse Museum, 500 Harris Street, Ultimo.

Free, no need to book.

On Street Parking available.

Entrance is via the Security Gatehouse to the car park in Macarthur Street.


Canberra
7:00pm, Thursday March 16th 2006
In the Visions Theatre at the National Museum of Australia Lawson Crescent, Acton Peninsula.

Free, no need to book.

Doors open at 6:30pm.

Also learn about the key role of Australia in the first Moon landing, and view never-before released footage of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk as it was seen at the Honeysuckle Creek Apollo Tracking Station in the ACT. A number of the Honeysuckle Creek Apollo veterans who received the TV from the Moon will also be on hand at the Canberra lecture. Don't forget to bring your camera!

[Al Johnston]

Enjoy ;D

[Count Zero]

peterb said:

Also learn about the key role of Australia in the first Moon landing, and view never-before released footage of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk as it was seen at the Honeysuckle Creek Apollo Tracking Station in the ACT.

I wonder if the video quality is significantly better, since it comes from the original downlink?

[ajv]

I'll be going to the Canberra talk.
I'm going to the Canberra talk too.

See you there.

[PeterB]

Wackadoo!

How will I recognise you? Carnation in the lapel? :-)

[ajv]

How will I recognise you?
I'll be the one ranting that Apollo was a hoax!

Er, black tee-shirt, black baseball cap.

[PhantomWolf]

Wearing that getup he'll mistake you for a Kiwi

[PeterB]

Well, I went to the talk last night, and what a wonderful experience it was.

Stan Lebar, the speaker, was highly knowledgeable about his topic, and said he could have chatted on for a couple of hours. Not only that, he was able to tell his story in a thoroughly entertaining way, whether it was joking that he could remember obscure technical details from 30 years ago but couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast that morning, or the story of how his staff were allowed to use a previously top-secret vidicon tube in the camera, but couldn’t photograph it. I can only hope to be as active as Stan Lebar when I’m 80.

Lebar described how his employer, Westinghouse, were approached by NASA to develop the TV camera, even though RCA at the time were synonymous with good quality TV gear. The difference was that RCA was skilled in the area of general television, while Westinghouse were experienced with TV products in a more military environment.

He also described the amazing constraints the camera had to operate under. For example, at a time when TV studio cameras normally weighed about 45 kilograms, NASA told them the camera had to weigh less than 4 kilograms. Not only that, it would have to be able to operate in a pure oxygen atmosphere or a vacuum, and in a temperature range of over 250 degrees. Finally, the image would have to be broadcast over a bandwidth about one-tenth of what would normally be used on Earth. This last restriction in turn limited the way the picture could be recorded. For example, instead of the American standard of 525 lines refreshed 30 times a second, the camera on Apollo recorded only 310 lines at 10 frames a second. On top of that, these restrictions were worked out on an assumption of how much technology would develop in the years between the start of the contract in 1964 and delivery in 1969.

The heart of the camera was a special low-light vidicon tube developed for the military, which Lebar’s team had a few problems obtaining – when they approached the team in Westinghouse which had developed this vidicon, his team was told to go fly a kite. A quick word to NASA, and miraculously the vidicons were made available, with the absurd condition I mentioned above of not photographing it.

The next problem with the development of the camera was a handle for the astronauts to hold it up and record manually. Lebar described how he filled a box with all sorts of handles, and took it to a session with an astronaut in a suit. His boss had looked at the handles, and helpfully suggested he also include a length of ordinary pipe. Well, one by one they worked through the handles, with the astronaut rejecting each. Then along came a man who identified himself as Mike Collins, someone Lebar had never heard of at the time (it was 1965). Looking at the small number of untried handles, Collins suggested they try the length of pipe. Somewhat skeptical, Lebar fitted it to the camera, and I’m sure you can guess the result – it was exactly what the astronaut wanted.

Lebar said that the original plan for Apollo 11 was that the camera would be held in the LM cabin, but added that the procedure for filming the first step was like Keystone Kops, with the camera passing between the astronauts several times. It got so bad that most of the astronauts’ time on the Moon would be spent fiddling around with the camera. That’s when it was decided to fit the camera to the MESA (Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly), a fold-down table attached to the outside of the LM.

Lebar then turned to the sad story of the Apollo 12 camera. Due to a lack of experience with the camera, astronaut Alan Bean pointed the camera towards the Sun, and burned out the vidicon. Or so it seemed. It turned out that when the camera was brought back to Earth, Lebar and his team were able to show that theoretically it could have been resurrected: too much light was entering the camera, causing it to automatically close its aperture, but cutting a wire would have disabled the automatic light sensor, and shown that the bottom half of the camera could still record a picture. As Kothos described, the loss of the TV camera destroyed media interest in Apollo 12, and brought home to NASA the importance of TV coverage to the project.

There was also a bit about the development of a colour TV camera, using only a single black-and-white vidicon tube. The trick to providing colour was to place a rotating colour wheel in the front of the camera. The colour wheel had red, green and blue windows on it, with each frame being recorded through one colour in the sequence. The last three frames, one recorded with each colour, would then be added together to provide a colour image. For the next image, the last red frame would be replaced by the next red one. The next image would drop the last blue frame and replace it with the next blue one, and so on. This is why objects moving at high speed appear to change colour as they cross the screen.

Getting the camera onto Apollo 10 (the last mission before the landing) was a bit of a trick. In order to make a zooming colour TV camera useful, the astronauts needed a little screen to show what it was the camera was recording. In the space a 24 hours, Lebar and his gang found a small TV with a screen the size of a credit card, and managed to retrofit it to the camera. The side of the box had writing describing it as a “Runar screen,” and also mentioned a “Parts rist.” This was their little joke – the screen was manufactured by a Japanese company. When he was first showed it, Apollo 10 commander Tom Stafford could barely believe a screen that small could be real. But when it worked, he was sold on it, and was insistent that a proper version be made for the mission.

But in developing a final product for the mission, Westinghouse ran into another problem. For safety reasons, the screen needed to be made of a safe material. The best suggestion they had was to make it out of the same material as the windows on the LM. But when they approached the people who made that material, they were again told to go fly a kite. Again, a quick word to NASA, and a box of the window material arrived soon afterwards.

During the talk, Lebar had one of his cameras sitting on a cradle, which he claimed still worked. At the end of the talk, we were allowed to pose for pictures holding the camera (wearing cotton gloves), although we were warned that dropping it would incur a cost of $1.5 million to $2 million.

Turning to the 700 boxes of missing material that Kothos mentioned, I asked Lebar to clarify what was supposed to be on those tapes. Apparently there’s not specifically lost footage. Rather, the tapes are of telemetry from the various spacecraft, among which is the TV image data. There is apparently little in the way of lost TV footage, although there’s a bit more to that.

This talk wasn’t all that night. Before Lebar’s talk, we were shown segments from a DVD produced by an Apollo fanatic named Colin McKellar. At Honeysuckle Creek, one of the employees had a Super 8 camera, and he often pointed it at the TV screen showing pictures from the Moon. The result was often of startlingly high clarity, and included one event which probably hasn’t been seen by anyone since Apollo 11 itself – when Armstrong and Aldrin dumped their spacesuit backpacks on the surface of the Moon prior to lift-off. McKellar has also used his computing skills to rotate the famous image of Armstrong stepping on the Moon to remove the tilt.

We were also shown the colour TV camera taken on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Flight mission in 1975. For a reason which no one can quite work out, this camera was sent to the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station, where it will soon be put on display. Like the Moon rock out there, it’s a rare piece of Apollo history, especially to be out here in Australia. Next time you’re in Canberra, you’ll have to drop out to Tid.

There’s one final thing I’d like to say about last night’s talk. The room we were in faced east, and throughout most of the talk, Lebar’s backdrop was a slowly rising full moon, its light reflecting off the waters of Lake Burley Griffin. It was just *so* fitting.

[PeterB]

Incidentally, I'd like any hoax believers to read this account and explain the efforts Westinghouse went to, especially when many of the restrictions imposed by NASA were arbitrary, and only made Westinghouse's bill to NASA higher.

[dwight]

Peterb you are a lucky B!!! I unfortunately booked my hols in Oz 5 weeks to soon, and had already paid for the tickets by the time I heard Stan was going to be there. Oh well, I hope you dont mind if I pick yourbrains about the talk. I'll PM you.

cheers
Dwight

[PeterB]

Okay, here are some other thoughts which come to mind.

Lebar shoed a photo from Apollo 11 which showed the camera cable wrapped around the camera’s stand. He said he couldn’t understand what was going on, as the cable had never got that wound up in simulations. The problem, as Neil Armstrong explained, was that in the low gravity, the cable wouldn’t lie flat on the ground, and as a result the astronauts occasionally tripped themselves up on it. While taking a 360-degree panorama with the TV camera, Armstrong wound himself into the cable, and the only solution as he unwound himself was to wrap the cord around the stand.

He also commented on how the astronauts wasted time kicking soil over the cable between the stand and the LM so that they didn’t trip on it. On Apollo 12, the astronauts immediately got to work tamping soil over the camera cable. But Lebar was concerned that they were wasting time doing that, and put his mind to cable-less cameras. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, he didn’t get a chance to discuss that any further.

The launch of Apollo 13 was covered by a colour TV camera placed high up in the Launch Umbilical Tower which was situated inside an insulated box. We watched the footage of the launch, which was quite spectacular. It lasted from 2 minutes before launch, until the base of the rocket had just passed the camera. Then the image failed. Lebar said that the cable had been severed by a piece of metal dislodged from the tower during launch. He claimed that if it hadn’t struck the cable, it could easily have hit the side of the Saturn V, which he was sure would have led to an explosion.

Now this last claim is interesting, as I’ve never heard anyone make it before. I’d therefore be curious to know what others think or know about this claim.

[dwight]

Did Stan mention the colour tests they were hoping for on an Apollo 11 surface camera?

Also, did he go into the RCA-Westinghouse contract bidding wars at all?

[PeterB]

dwight said:

Did Stan mention the colour tests they were hoping for on an Apollo 11 surface camera?

Not specifically. As I mentioned in the OP, the camera could be operated at 0.625 frames per second, providing near photographic quality pictures. IIRC, he mentioned that a colour wheel in combination with this would have provided colour photos. But as the A-11 camera had no colour wheel, that wouldn't have been possible. And in any case, NASA decided at some stage to drop the use of the 0.625 frames per second option.

Also, did he go into the RCA-Westinghouse contract bidding wars at all?

Again, I think all he said about this was what was in the OP. IIRC, he said that NASA directly approached Westinghouse directly, rather than opening up a bidding process, due to the relevance of their experience, and that he had a lot of respect for RCA products, but that they weren't that relevant to the needs of NASA.

[PeterB]

Just for a laugh, I posted my summary of the talk (same as reply #7) on Dave Cosnette's board. Dave's initial response was that he had no problem with the development of the TV camera, just the proof it was used on the Moon.

So I responded with the line about how a tracking station could tell it was getting a signal from the Moon, and the impossibility of the Apollo rocks being from anywhere but the Moon. Dave came back with his other usual problems - quoting Sibrel about the TV being used in Earth orbit, and saying that the rocks could be collected, and anyway, what was von Braun doing in Antarctica.

My latest response has been to say that 30 minute long TV shows of weightless astronauts can't be done on simulators on Earth, nor in Earth orbit due to the lack of ground stations around the Earth in the 1960s.

So far, no reply from Dave.

[dwight]

So basically, the HB stance is that they really have no idea what they are talking about. I would expect people who claim LEVA TV was actually Earth Orbit TV would also offer credible explanations as to how continuous TV could be made in such a situation. I noticed how Dave tends to avoid discussion about Doppler shift and how it allows a very precise fixing of the TV signal. Again, the HB discussion avoids any type of information that could see it losing ground. Folk like Moon Man still have to explain how a radio antenna can point at point X in the sky and receive signal coming from point Y, which is ultimately the baisis of the EO claim. Which brings me to the old HB query, "but isn't it _possible_ that such signals could be faked?" to which the response is a clear and resounding "NO!". And anyone who bothers learning about signal transmission and reception would understand how robust that answer is.

At any rate thanks Peter for posting the info from Stan Lebar. It makes great reading for those of us interested in how the TV signal was realised during the Apollo missions.

Peter, just for a laugh, ask Dave how they would have dealt with the changing polarity with the EO TV signal over such an extended period of time. He should rattle that off in a jiffy if he really knows the answer, provided there really is an answer.