![]() ![]() To make a mistake was to chance a horrible death by asphyxiation: their lungs would collapse as the air in their hearts bubbled and their blood vessels ruptured, all within a minute or so. ![]() Specially cooled and ventilated, their space suits were bulky and cumbersome to put on, and this took much more time than expected. To survive during their Moon walk, they had to turn themselves into what amounted to small self-contained spacecraft, capable of maintaining Earth-like conditions around their bodies and ongoing communications with Mission Control. But knowing that his team would be less than impressed by the prospect of such an interruption, he hadn’t forewarned them.Īs the prime minister toured the operations building for almost an hour, some of the trackers cursed under their breath as they suddenly became aware of Gorton and his entourage hovering behind them.ĪLL THE WHILE, THE astronauts were suiting up in the Lunar Module. ![]() Just before 9am, as the Honeysuckle team scrambled to adjust to this demanding new timetable, prime minister John Gorton turned up for a station tour.īelieving he had little choice in the matter, Tom had reluctantly agreed to this VIP visit the previous evening. The moonrise over the Parkes dish, however, would still be more than two hours away. NASA’s new best estimate was that Armstrong would take his first step at about 11am.Īt that time Goldstone would still be receiving a good signal, while the Lunar Module would just be coming into view of Honeysuckle. Just after 8am, they convinced Mission Control to let them conduct an early Moon walk, to commence as soon as they had completed their post-landing checks, eaten something, and suited up. Honeysuckle would track the Lunar Module and, when the two vehicles were operating separately, Tidbinbilla would be responsible for the Command Module. Two days after the Apollo 11 launch, however, a fire at Tidbinbilla resulted in a switch of duty. On 16 July 1969, the day Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA, NASA’s Australian dishes included: Carnarvon, in Western Australia, which was used to track the first and last hours of the mission Honeysuckle Creek, which tracked the Command Module when it was in separate flight a deep space tracking station at Tidbinbilla, just north of Honeysuckle, which was used to track the Lunar Module and Parkes, which provided a downlink backup.Īll but Carnarvon were rigged up to receive the Lunar Module’s downlink TV signal. But the Honeysuckle equipment, being a special Apollo dish, could be angled down to zero degrees to the horizon.Īlthough Canberra and Parkes were on roughly the same longitude and the Moon rose over them at about the same time, this difference in the minimum angulation of the dishes meant the Moon rose over the Honeysuckle dish two hours before it rose over the Parkes dish. ![]() In the weeks leading up to the launch of Apollo 11, the radio telescope at Parkes, located in central NSW about 300km north of Honeysuckle, was added to NASA’s array of Australian dishes for extra backup.Īlthough it couldn’t transmit anything, Parkes’s 64m-diameter dish made it an excellent receiver compared with Honeysuckle and its 26m-diameter dish.Īt that size, however, the Parkes dish could only be angled down to 30 degrees above the horizon. But with space aboard the Lunar Module at a premium, this equipment was mounted in a way that it began filming from an upside-down position.īecause of this, a special reversing switch was fitted on each of the Apollo tracking stations’ TV scan converters, to allow a technician to flip the upside-down TV image the right way up. The development of super lightweight cameras sways decisionįollowing the development of a super lightweight camera, advocates for televising the event won the day. ![]()
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