Contributions needed for the AH main page

[chew]

I'd like to help if nobody has any objections to my horrendous writing style.

I've been reading a lot lately about the MSFN and Unified S Band system. Under radio tracking I could write about MSFN/DSN stations, ships, and aircraft and their capabilities (including the number of personnel needed to man a station), Doppler measurements, PRN ranging signals, Earth-based radar tracking, etc.

[Bob B.]

Jan 24, 2011 18:32:32 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

Here is what I was working on way back in August...

www.apollohoax.net/thetheory/

It'll give you an idea of what I'm thinking and could be the start of our outline.

The section titled "The Evidence For Apollo" could be considered the Top 10, and the section "Common Hoax Claims" could be the FAQ. As you can see, there can be multiple levels to each chapter if more depth is required.

I think that format works well. I envision the FAQ section working something like this:

Topic 1
...Question 1a
...Question 1b
...Question 1c
Topic 2
...Question 2a
...Question 2b
...Question 2c
Etc.

The “topics” would be things like Radiation, Moon Rocks, Communications, etc. The questions would then, of course, be related to the topic. I think for the outline we need to develop the list of topics only. A single writer could then be assigned an entire topic, and it would be the writer who decides what questions to include.

If it were I writing a section, I’d think about the message I’m trying to get across and then pick the questions that would allow me to deliver my message in small digestible pieces. In other words, rather than trying to generate a list of questions and then answering them, I’d start with the answer and work backwards to the questions. At least that’s how I’d go about it, but that’s just me.

[Bob B.]

I don’t know how much of the Top 10 I’m qualified to write, I guess it depends on what we decide to put in it, but I can envision writing significant parts of the FAQ. I think I’d specifically like write a section on the lunar module, where I’d tackle many of the myths and misconceptions about it. I’d cover how it’s built, how it works, how it was tested, why it looks the way it does, etc. I could also do something on the CSM and Saturn V if necessary, though it’s the LM that seems to be the favorite target of the HBs.

Although I’ll likely cover something about the guidance system in the LM section, I think that topic, specifically the guidance computer, should have a section of its own. Although I have some familiarity with it, the computer is something I don’t feel expert enough the write about, so I’ll leave that to somebody else.

I also feel I’m knowledgeable enough about the spacesuits to write something on that. However, if somebody else wants to tackle that subject, I’ll gladly give it up.

I don’t know it there’s a need to discuss the trajectories flown by the spacecraft, but I’m qualified to discuss that if necessary. I think the trajectory is important to the discussion about radiation mitigation, but that’s something for the radiation section, which I could help with if necessary. I suppose there could be a FAQ section that addresses free-return versus hybrid trajectories and how the trajectories were modified by mid-course corrections, etc. I see there being some cross-over between a trajectory discussion and the section on communications and tracking. I think there are people better than I to write the communications section.

In addition to talking about technology, I think the history part of Apollo is as equally important. To understand how Apollo came to be it is important to understand the step-by-step processes that built up to it. This is something that many HBs are really ignorant of. Although I’m fascinated by Apollo history, there many forum members that know as much or more about it than I. This is a place where I think the non-engineering types can make good contributions.

[gillianren]

Jan 24, 2011 23:56:02 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

No rush, Gillianren. This is completely voluntary (oh, and did I mention unpaid?) after all. And I've neglected the main site for years, so I can't really complain about anyone taking too long, can I?

My computer's supposed to be fixed, and I'm picking it up this afternoon. Which is none too soon so far as I'm concerned. There are a lot of things to which I'm accustomed which have been impossible the last couple of weeks without installing things on Graham's computer, and I'm loath to do that. I need to update my Oscar-nominated music file as of today, too!

[chew]

This website has been helpful in my reading about MSFN. Lots of history and photos of the MSFN stations.

www.honeysucklecreek.net/index.html

[chew]

For LO's new page under radio tracking I intend to include a Google Earth file for all the MSFN stations.

Damn that took forever. Some station's positions can only be approximated.

The only info I could find about Tananarive's position was from a personal page of a guy who worked there. "... about 30 km southwest of Tananarive..."

I included two of the ships and their roles and positions for Apollo 11.

Suggestions and feedback is encouraged.

ETA: I found a document that listed the station's lat and long to the nearest .01^o (all except Tananarive, which only had radar and omni). I have updated and re-uploaded the kmz file. Zoom in on ANG, click on one of the link pictures, and you can see the concrete remains of the stations.

[ka9q]

I think I found a set of coordinates in a NASA document somewhere; I can go look for it.

It depends on how accurate those coordinates need to be. Latitudes and longitudes can be expressed in any of several different coordinate systems. Nowadays WGS-84 (the native coordinate system of the GPS) is canonical, but Apollo was long before GPS and each country had its own coordinate system (or systems) that often weren't easily reconciled with the others.

I visited Antigua two years ago and was wondering where the NASA-era Apollo tracking station was located. I am pretty sure we were quite close to it but no one seemed to know for sure. There was often more than one US-sponsored tracking site in even a small country like Antigua, and some moved over the years.

[LunarOrbit]

Weren't some of the tracking stations aboard Navy ships?

[Obviousman]

Sorry people - as soon as I am fully mobile again I'll contribute.

[chew]

Jan 29, 2011 2:37:09 GMT -4 ka9q said:

I think I found a set of coordinates in a NASA document somewhere; I can go look for it.

It depends on how accurate those coordinates need to be. Latitudes and longitudes can be expressed in any of several different coordinate systems. Nowadays WGS-84 (the native coordinate system of the GPS) is canonical, but Apollo was long before GPS and each country had its own coordinate system (or systems) that often weren't easily reconciled with the others.

I visited Antigua two years ago and was wondering where the NASA-era Apollo tracking station was located. I am pretty sure we were quite close to it but no one seemed to know for sure. There was often more than one US-sponsored tracking site in even a small country like Antigua, and some moved over the years.

JPL reviewed GSFC's navigation plan for Apollo 8 and determined a 100 meter position error of a tracking station would translate to a 10 km error at the Moon. D'oh! The stations coordinates were updated in the MSC computers a few weeks before liftoff.

[chew]

Jan 29, 2011 3:01:38 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

Weren't some of the tracking stations aboard Navy ships?

Technically they belonged to the predecessor of the modern MSC (Military Sealift Command) and falls under the control of the government. They were designated "USNS" United States Naval Ships) and were manned by a mix of military and civilians.

I included RED (USNS Redstone) in the Pacific and VAN (USNS Vangaurd) in the Atlantic.

[Kiwi]

Jan 29, 2011 3:01:38 GMT -4 LunarOrbit said:

Weren't some of the tracking stations aboard Navy ships?

Navy ships and aircraft.

For Apollo 11, the tracking ships involved were Huntsville, Mercury and Redstone in the western Pacific and Vanguard in the central Atlantic.

From The Invasion of the Moon -- The Story of Apollo 11, Peter Ryan, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, England, 1969, pages 78-79 (emphasis added):

On Apollo missions all communication between the spacecraft and earth — the telemetry, tracking, automatic commands and voice circuits — are combined in a single radio carrier wave which involves the use of only one antenna. This is called the 'unified S-Band system' and involves a staff of 4,500 distributed among fifteen tracking stations and numerous switching centres around the globe.

While the spacecraft is in earth parking orbit and just before splashdown, communications are routed through thirty-foot dishes at eleven sites on land and aboard four tracking ships. In addition to these thirty-foot dishes, eight Apollo range instrumentation aircraft (ARIA) operate in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. These are modified Boeing jets which carry seven-foot antennae in their bulbous noses. Once the spacecraft has completed the translunar injection burn and is on its way out to the moon, three more powerful eighty-foot dishes — one at Goldstone in California, one near Madrid, and one at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra — come into action. These deep-space tracking stations are so placed that, while the earth revolves on its daily axis, one of them can always 'see' the moon. On the Apollo 11 mission two even more enormous 'electronic ears', the 210-foot Mars antenna at Goldstone and the 210-foot dish at Parkes in Australia, were used. The Mars antenna was brought in to assist communications with the lunar module once it had separated from the command module in lunar orbit, while the Parkes dish was used to receive the television transmissions from the surface of the moon.

Apart from handling the voice, telemetry and command circuits between the spacecraft and earth, the dishes are also used to track the craft in space. By measuring the round-trip time of a ranging signal, automatically re-transmitted by the spacecraft and measuring the Doppler shift (the re-transmitted signal's frequency change, like the change in note of the whistle of a passing railway train), it is possible to determine the range of the craft to within a few hundred feet and its range rate or speed to within a few inches per second.

Linking all the tracking dishes of the MSFN is NASA's staggering global communications network (NASCOM). Using a web of about two million miles of cable, microwave, radio and satellites link, it is centred at the Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC) in Maryland. Information originating from the Apollo 11 spacecraft ('down-link data') such as the heart and breathing rates of the astronauts, the command module cabin pressure and temperature, etc., was transmitted automatically, second by second ('real-time' telemetry), through the cluster of four small S-Band dishes deployed outside the service module at the rate of 51,200 bits per second. Picked up by a ground station, it was then processed by computer before being passed on to Houston at a modest 2,400 bits per second. These computers at the tracking sites are also used for relaying commands to the spacecraft's systems for passing information ('up-link data') to the spacecraft's own computers at the rate of 1,200 bits per second. Several times a second the computers at Houston 'talk' to the other computers in the network or in the spacecraft. The MCC computers compare everything they receive from other computers with their memories and then indicate problem areas and other relevant data to the flight controllers. Another important function of the Houston computers is time-keeping, and they deal in thousandths of rather than whole numbers of seconds. Between Houston and the centre of the NASCOM web at the Goddard Spaceflight Center there are two 50,000-bit-per-second circuits. The volume of traffic handled at Goddard during an Apollo mission is equivalent to a 500-page novel per second. The computers there would take less than a second to add a column of ten-digit numbers three-quarters of a mile high. To talk to their operators, the computers around the network are capable of slowing down to a more reasonable 100 human language words per minute.

[Kiwi]

LunarOrbit

I'd suggest keeping any rebuttals as short as possible, or perhaps starting with a bunch of brief ones and then following them with more detailed explanations. Many HBs have short attention spans and don't have the inclination to read a great deal, so short rebuttals are more likely to grab their attention and perhaps interest them in reading further.

Feel free to use any of my brief comments written in the wake of the Fox documentary (below). Comments and criticisms are welcome.

The one, "Stars need 30,000 times more exposure than a sunlit scene" (or even up to 100,000 times more) is good because it puts a very large figure on the difference.

****************************************************

The movie "Capricorn 1'' was filmed five years after the last moon-landing and was deliberately made using Apollo-style hardware, even though it would have been useless for landing on Mars.

In the late 50s and early 60s many Russian and American scientists doubted it was possible to land on the Moon, but rapid advances in computers and other technologies, the experience and knowledge gained from a lot of spectacular failures, plus heaps of money, soon overcame the problems.

Eight (not ten) astronauts died in accidents involving, cars, aircraft and untested spacecraft, but there was nothing mysterious about their deaths. Flying and space travel are dangerous businesses.

Gus Grissom was a very enthusiastic contributor to the space program. To illustrate his concern for safety he hung a lemon on an Apollo SIMULATOR (not the lunar module), which, early on, had some faults, but he was NOT dissatisfied with the entire Apollo program.

Stars didn't show in photos because they are far too faint to register in a photograph of a sunlit scene. To register on film they need at least 30,000 times more exposure than a sunlit object. (See explanatory note at the bottom which shows that 130,000 is actually a better figure.)

The flags appeared to wave only when the astronauts manipulated the main pole which had a horizontal bar at the top holding the flag up. The lightweight structure moved easily in one-sixth gravity and there was no atmosphere to impede the flapping of the nylon flag.

Blast craters didn't appear under the lunar module because the Moon's surface is quite firm and the rocket engine was throttled back. It did, however, blast away the top layer of dust immediately under its nozzle.

Not all shadows on the Moon were dark because the Moon itself reflected light into them, and different camera exposures could lighten them further. We see the Moon's reflectivity when it lights up the Earth at night.

Multiple light sources cast multiple shadows and large light sources cast fuzzy shadows. Objects in the lunar surface photos cast only fairly sharp, single shadows.

Shadows cast by the sun are only parallel if the viewer is perpendicular to them, and their lengths and directions varied on the Moon due to the uneven surface. A key term here is one that is familiar to most artists: VANISHING POINT.

Two video clips are claimed to be taken on the same hill a day apart, but in the original video they were in fact taken only about five minutes apart. Editors of documentary films often use "wrong" photos for illustrative purposes, but that does not mean that there is anything wrong with the original, unedited record.

The rocket noise could not be heard above Aldrin's voice because rockets do not make a roaring noise in a vacuum - the roar we hear on Earth is due to the turbulent reaction between the exhaust plume and the atmosphere. The gas exits at above the speed of sound, causing a sort of continuous 'sonic boom'. The only noise audible within the lunar module would have been the flow noise of the fuel and oxidizer through the system. Besides, Aldrin's microphone was sealed inside his helmet and was designed to exclude environmental noise.

The training machine that crashed when Neil Armstrong was flying it did so because it broke after a number of successful flights. It was a very different vehicle to the actual lunar module.

Different photos showed similar backgrounds because the tall mountains were distant, so the astronauts would have had to move many kilometres to exclude them.

The lunar module could not be thrown off balance by the astronauts moving because it had a feedback system which corrected for changes in the centre of gravity (whether by astronaut movement or fuel depletion) by swivelling the rocket nozzle.

No rocket flames were seen when the astronauts took off from the Moon because the special fuels used, hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide, do not produce highly visible flames or smoke in a vacuum.

It is claimed that all the pictures taken on the Moon were perfect, but the truth is, they weren't -- most publishers used only the best ones. There were plenty of bad photos which can be viewed on the internet.

Crosshairs were sometimes obliterated by bright objects due to a characteristic of film called emulsion bleed. It can often be seen in photographs of a sunlit scene taken from a shaded room through a window which has an open venetian blind.

Radiation in the Van Allen belt is made out to be much harsher than it was where the astronauts went through it at high speed, and they received less than 1% of a fatal dose.

Neither Earth-based telescopes nor the Hubble telescope can see the moon-landing sites because they are not powerful enough. The Hubble would have to be more than eight times more powerful to see the part of the lunar module that was left on the Moon.

****************************************************


Should anyone think the figure regarding stars requiring "at least 30,000 times more exposure…." sounds much too high, here's the maths. A typical down-sun exposure with 100 ISO film is 1/250 at f11. The shortest exposure that will register the brightest stars is about 8 seconds at f2.8, but because of film's reciprocity failure during long exposures, 20 to 30 seconds at f2.8 is a better exposure.

Each step below doubles the exposure and the increase over the sunlight exposure is shown.

1/250 @ f11
1/250 @ f8 ======= 2x
1/250 @ f5.6 ====== 4x
1/250 @ f4 ======= 8x
1/250 @ f2.8 ===== 16x
1/125 @ f2.8 ===== 32x
1/60 @ f2.8 ====== 64x
1/30 @ f2.8 ===== 128x
1/15 @ f2.8 ===== 256x
1/8 @ f2.8 ====== 512x
1/4 @ f2.8 ===== 1,024x
1/2 @ f2.8 ===== 2,048x
1 sec @ f2.8 === 4,096x
2 sec @ f2.8 === 8,192x
4 sec @ f2.8 == 16,384x
8 sec @ f2.8 == 32,768x
16 sec @ f2.8 = 65,536x
32 sec @ f2.8 = 131,072x

Another approach could be a brief rebuttal followed by: "Don't take our word for it -- check it yourself in three steps. (1.) Take a properly exposed photo of a typical sunlit scene. (2.) At the same ISO setting, take a properly exposed photo of many stars -- not just the brightest ones. (3.) Record the two exposure settings and work out the difference between them."

[LunarOrbit]

Jan 30, 2011 10:01:01 GMT -4 Kiwi said:

I'd suggest keeping any rebuttals as short as possible, or perhaps starting with a bunch of brief ones and then following them with more detailed explanations. Many HBs have short attention spans and don't have the inclination to read a great deal, so short rebuttals are more likely to grab their attention and perhaps interest them in reading further.

Yeah, I would like to keep the explanations short and easy to understand. Like you said, if the article is too long it's not likely to even be read, never mind understood.

For my article on the radiation I avoided talking about numbers because I didn't want to cause my readers eyes to glaze over (but also because I don't know enough about the subject).

Feel free to use any of my brief comments written in the wake of the Fox documentary (below).

Thanks! I'm sure I will.

[chew]

I found a document that listed the station's lat and long to the nearest .01^o (all except Tananarive, which only had radar and omni). I have updated and re-uploaded the kmz file. Zoom in on ANG, click on one of the link pictures, and you can see the concrete remains of the stations.

sites.google.com/site/chewtansy/msfn/MSFN.kmz?attredirects=0&d=1