The nearly forgotten story of how a radio amateur successfully detected transmissions from the first men to land on the Moon. On July 21, after just 21 hours and 36 minutes on the Moon, the ascent engine fired, bringing the Eagle back to dock with Columbia, and returning astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong to the Command and Service Module with astronaut Collins. All of the Apollo spacecraft included onboard voice recorders, activated during much of each mission to record the crew's conversations. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a press conference NASA will go to the Moon as soon as possible. [23] However, equipment that could read the tapes was maintained. This NASA picture taken on April 17, 1970, shows, the Service Module (codenamed Odyssey) from the Apollo 13 mission. ]]> As the real-time broadcast worked and was widely recorded, preservation of the backup video was not deemed a priority in the years immediately following the mission. The item consists of three metal reels of Ampex 148 High Band 2-inch Quadruplex videotape, each between 45 and 50 minutes in length. Heres the story youve never heard. 2I was intrigued due to my interest in astronomys history (this being an interesting story of radio astronomy). He independently detected radio transmissions from the Apollo 11 astronauts on the lunar surface. (Image credit: NASA) NASA's Apollo 11 mission comes to life in 19,000 hours of newly available audio. Thankfully, the flaw in the jettison controller had been fixed, and the Service Module posed no risk to the astronaut-carrying Command Module from Apollo 13 onwards. "It's a 1202.". On July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon. (AFP/Getty Images), View of the Apollo 11 capsule floating on the, water after splashing down upon its return to Earth on July 24, 1969. In the attached database, the recordings that are virtually inaudible are highlighted, but they are available on the web to ensure a complete release of the recordings made during the mission. The Apollo 11 Onboard Audio Tape Database cross references the tape numbers to the Mission Elapsed Time (MET) that was on each tape. Landing on the Moon wasn't just Neil Armstrong. This prompted Rutherford to mention Baysingers work and the attention he got from the Collins Company as another example of interesting, homegrown, small-operation science in Louisville. That is the disintegrating Service Module. The agency dismissed claims that it had lost footage of the first moonwalk. 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Shown here, Apollo 14 is about to splash down in the oceans, similar to the prior missions such as Apollo 11. Even from our perspective in 2019, 50 years later, humanitys achievements from July, 1969, still mark the pinnacle of crewed spaceflight. New York, There was a fault in how the Service Module was configured to jettison its remaining fuel: a problem that was later discovered to have occurred aboard the prior Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 missions as well. Notice that the top one is almost unchanged while the bottom one is shattering into pieces. [10] The conversion process started when the signal was sent to a high-quality 10-inch (25cm) video monitor, where a conventional RCA TK-22 television camerausing the NTSC broadcast standard of 525 scanned lines interlaced at 30 fpsmerely re-photographed its screen. That final step alone, which returned the astronauts from their presence around to Moon after journeying back to Earth was one of the most crucial. In mission control, astronauts Charles Duke Jr., James Lovell Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. keep in contact with the Apollo 11 astronauts during their lunar landing mission on July 20, 1969. Three days after leaving the Moon, on July 24, 1969, they splashed down in Earths oceans, successfully completing their return trip. His interest and talents in radio eventually led him to career with WHAS 840 AM radio in Louisville. . By the late 1960s Baysinger was working professionally for WHAS and experimenting on the side with radio astronomy and satellite tracking. Atkinsons book, Eight Years to the Moon, comes highly recommended by me if youre interested in the behind-the-scenes details and rarely-told stories from the Apollo era. George had learned about these "government surplus" auctions while an intern at the Johnson Space Center. Providence brought Lunar Eavesdropping back to light this summer. Going bonkers might be the biggest. NASAs Apollo 11 crew blasted off from Earth on July 16, 1969, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Fortunately for everyone, none of the debris resulting from the Service Modules re-entry impacted the Command Module, and the astronauts all arrived safely back on Earth. Canadian software engineer Ben Feist is helping bring the sounds of NASA's Mission Control back to life. Only limited radio bandwidth was available to transmit the video signal from the lunar landings, which needed to be multiplexed with other communication and telemetry channels beamed from the Lunar Module Eagle, back to Earth. Those projects and their stories might be sitting in a drawer somewhere, waiting for a QST reader to bring them to light. [1][2] It was confirmed that these tapes were shipped to Johns Hopkins University, but they could not be found by the search team. After Apollo 11 he moved on to other projects. [13] They concluded that the data tapeswith the SSTV signalwere shipped from Australia to Goddard and then routinely erased and reused a few years later. 'The Eagle has landed': Remembering Apollo 11 moon mission, descended toward the moons rocky surface on July 20, 1969, 160 heartbeats per minute: The final, frantic moments before the historic moon landing, Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, uploaded all of the audio to the Internet Archive, The human factor: What it will take to build the perfect team for traveling to Mars. The Apollo 11 Onboard Audio Tape Database cross references the tape numbers to the Mission Elapsed Time (MET) that was on each tape. The world heard communications between the crew and Mission Control live as they happened. One such researcher is book author David Childress, who said communiques of parked UFOs on the Moon were intercepted during this gap and withheld from the public. The astronauts apparently talked about seeing extraterrestrial objects on the Moon. Now Hear This! The equipment onboard the Apollo Command Module that was used to make the recordings was called the Data Storage Equipment (DSE). Other, less dramatic portions of the tapes spotlight the camaraderie and lighthearted banter that are such essential ingredients for team-building. Shortly after the Apollo 11 Lunar Module eagle touched down on the Moon with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, radio communications were cut short. Alien shock claim: UFO hunter says he has spotted 'god-like' beings, Apollo 15 astronaut's Moon landing confession: 'Can't do anything now', Alien UFO found in Antarctica is 100 percent proof of ET - claim, UFO sighting: Mysterious 'man-made' crafts in Siberia stun scientists. Show more. from Apollo 11 followed the same re-entry trajectory, which could have proved fatal to the astronauts aboard the Command Module if a collision of any type had occurred. Gary George, a 65-year-old mechanical engineer who was a young college student at the time of his internship at NASA, bought the tapes at a government surplus auction in 1976 for a little over $200, according to the description of the auctioned item on Sotheby's. Mr Childress said: The astronauts apparently talked about seeing extraterrestrial objects on the Moon, including flying saucers parked along the edge of a crater within their view.. 225 Main Street According to our records, the flight plan of Apollo 11 went off without a hitch. One is the Command Module; the other is the Service Module. Lunar Eavesdropping was moved on to microfilm. He said no absolutely everything was transmitted to the public on TV. (WHAS and the Courier-Journal were both owned by the Bingham family of Louisville and it was through this connection that Rutherford met Baysinger and became aware of his work.) The revelation was made by a secret medical channel of communication between Apollo 11 and NASAs mission control on Earth. center-left of the image, consists of two types of thrusters that control both acceleration and orientation. [8], When the Apollo TV camera radioed its images, the ground stations received its raw unconverted SSTV signal and split it into two branches. [13] The converted signal was sent by satellite from the three receiving ground stations to Houston. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. Ed. When I got back to Rutherford about how I was interested in the story and had found it in the July 23, 1969 Courier-Journal, he mentioned that Baysinger actually still lived in Louisville retired from a radio career but still active in ham radio. [9] The other raw SSTV signal branch was sent to the RCA scan converter, where it was processed into an NTSC broadcast television signal. That meant it would have been necessary to play back each tape 30 times a process that would have taken years. The Service Module was jettisoned from the Command Module early, and the damage is clearly visible on the right side. This was incorrect, as NASA stated that the footage on the tapes was already preserved by the agency. Mr Bara, who also appeared on the History Channel, said both of NASAs astronauts were evidently upset by something they saw on the Moon within 30 minutes of landing. The combined original and copied fields created the first full 525-line interlaced frame and the signal was then sent to Houston. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on 20 July 1969, Nasa used two film cameramen at mission control in Houston to capture the moment back on Earth. . This time when we go to the Moon, were actually going to stay. NTSC actually runs at 60/1.001 59.94 fields per second, and 30/1.001 29.97 frames per second. Of the three Apollo 11 astronauts, Command Module pilot Michael Collins was the only one who did not set foot on the Moon. NASA's mission control center was, and still is, located in the nondescript Building 30 on the campus of Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. [12] When Armstrong first came down the Lunar Module's ladder, he was barely visible because the contrast and the vertical phase were not set correctly by the scan converter operator. [citation needed], Some other footage from Australian ground-station feeds showing SSTV video of Armstrong's descent and first steps surfaced through John Sarkissian's efforts. (CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images), similar to the demise of the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the USA was taking the conclusive steps of the Space Race, already had a presidential address drafted for such a purpose, On July 16, 1969,the Saturn V rocket responsible for propelling Apollo 11 to the Moon successfully launched from Cape Kennedy. [7] The camera's video format was incompatible with existing NTSC, PAL, and SECAM broadcast television standards. It sounds so routine. FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM. [8], This live conversion was crude compared to early-21st-century electronic digital conversion techniques. We have a tape of the air/ground [communication] during the launch phase. ", John Hansen, a speech researcher at the university and principal investigator for the project, has a simple explanation for the missions success: One of the things that comes across is that each of the people working for NASA is proud of what they do. (Modern-day Cape Canaveral.). "So, just in case anyone thinks there is video out there that hasnt been seen, that is not the case.". Rutherford moved on to other stories. Chosen as the mission to fulfill then-President Kennedysgoal of performing a crewed lunar landing and successful return to Earth, the timeline appeared to go exactly as planned. How did they send everybody to the moon? The ground stations also recorded the data on special 1-inch, 14-track tapes, one track of which was for video. If the Service Module had collided with the Command Module, a re-entry disaster similar to Space Shuttle Columbia could have occurred just as the USA was taking the conclusive steps of the Space Race. Baysingers wife and daughter watched the Apollo 11 landing on TV while Baysinger and Rutherford listened via Baysingers equipment. On July 16, 1969, the world watches as the three Apollo 11 astronauts attempt the impossible: to ride a controlled explosion off Planet Earth, land on another celestial body and return home. (NASA/Newsmakers), This artists concept shows the Command Module, undergoing re-entry in 5000 F heat. Since the real-time broadcast conversion worked, and was widely recorded on both videotape and film, the backup video was not deemed important at the time. 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