Music On The Darkside Of The Moon

[sPinwheel]

Indeed not when they were behind the moon. The intriguing bit is how they managed to broadcast a video of the module lift off from the moon's surface.

They didn't land on the dark side.

[billybong]

They didn't land on the dark side.

Indeed they didn't. They landed on the side visible from earth.

It's still intriguing how they had the capacity to broadcast that video of the module lift off back to earth.

Technology and miniaturisation advances of course but when you see the size of some of the stuff battlefield wireless operators have to (apparently) carry around even these days and with shortish range - and according to the story weight reduction/efficiency was of the essence and they still needed capacity to communicate on the return journey.

Blimey back on earth in 2016 they still haven't really cracked the temporary aerials for TV reception problem.

[frozen_out]

Diamonds Are Forever was on the other night (seriously under-rated Bond film), it has the famous scene of the moon landings being shot in a desert in Nevada, including the classic Bond comedy bit of an astronaut trying to catch Bond in Moon style slo-mo.

I often wonder why the universe isn't awash with radio signals. Maybe it is and we just don't know what we're listening to.

[happy_renting]

They do indeed and apparently there's calculated to be a 2.5 second time lag back and forth to the moon (forth and back if you prefer) rather than almost instantaneous.

The Apollo missions comprised many remarkable achievements, but I don't think radio transmission with little delay is one of them. It was pretty well established technology by the 1960's.

The Moon-based transmitters didn't need to be that powerful, as long as you used a large antenna on the Earth to receive the signals. Once received, sending the audio anywhere on the Earth would be as mundane as a phone call. Video would have been a bit more difficult, but satellites capable of relaying video had been in place for several years by then.

BTW The cameras used on later missions to show the LEM taking off from the moon was controlled remotely from Earth.

[happy_renting]

I often wonder why the universe isn't awash with radio signals. Maybe it is and we just don't know what we're listening to.

Intelligent life may well be transmitting, but there is no particular reason why they would be routinely transmitting with enough power for easy reception on Earth. Why waste power for 'domestic' reception?

The Galaxy may well be awash with such signals, but too weak to discern from the noise.

[Riedquat]

Intelligent life may well be transmitting, but there is no particular reason why they would be routinely transmitting with enough power for easy reception on Earth. Why waste power for 'domestic' reception?

The Galaxy may well be awash with such signals, but too weak to discern from the noise.

Even though we're belting out more and more a lot of it now is relatively low power, and that trend's likely to increase, with a dense network of transmitters and receivers (e.g. mobile signals) rather than a few big powerful ones. I can see TV eventually disappearing from being transmitted by a relatively small number of powerful transmitters and mostly travelling along wires (radio less likely).

It was often suggested that perhaps civilisations would change away from radio which is why we might not be detecting it - I think that we're seeing the start of that in our own, after a fashion.

[The Masked Tulip]

The intriguing bit is how they managed to broadcast a video of the module lift off from the moon's surface.

The remote camera was operated by a chap back at mission control. As with all things NASA they had worked out the time lag re the video signal so knew at what point the chap had to tilt the camera up. He apparently was very chuffed that he basically nailed it on the head.

[Hail the Tripod]

The cosmonauts exhibition at the science museum at the moment is well worth it if you're interested in this kind of thing. They even have the crash test dummy the Soviets sent round the moon with embedded sensors to check what humans would be exposed to and Yuri Gagarin's face carved on it. Their spacecraft were tiny!

[happy_renting]

The far side of the Moon, this photograph from 57 years ago taken by the Russian Luna 3.

[happy_renting]

Because of a wobble called 'libration' (and a little parallax), about 59% of the Moon's surface is visible from Earth over time.

[ccc]

Quite right - I stand corrected.

Still something awesome to be on other side of the Moon - the furthest humans have ever travelled in space.

Re. Michael Collins experience as command module pilot of Apollo 11, Charles Lindbergh wrote, not long after his safe return, to tell him that his part of the mission was one of "greater profundity ... you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before".

Clearly never been married.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Indeed they didn't. They landed on the side visible from earth.

It's still intriguing how they had the capacity to broadcast that video of the module lift off back to earth.

Technology and miniaturisation advances of course but when you see the size of some of the stuff battlefield wireless operators have to (apparently) carry around even these days and with shortish range - and according to the story weight reduction/efficiency was of the essence and they still needed capacity to communicate on the return journey.

Blimey back on earth in 2016 they still haven't really cracked the temporary aerials for TV reception problem.

When you say that video of the module lift off, what is different about the communication challenges of that vs. any footage shot on the lunar surface ?

There were plenty of redundant comms systems. First of all I think they could communicate back to the LM and relay the signal from there. Or the lunar rover could communicate directly to earth. Or they could relay via the command module.

You can make up for lack of power by using the big (massive) receive dish. The lower the power of transmit, the bigger dish you need. That's how stuff like New Horizons and Voyager work, by the time the signal gets back here it is at the trillionths of a watt level, but the receive dish is massive and the signal processing good. Soldiers cannot hump around a big recieve dish the size of Jodrell bank on their backs.

[billybong]

When you say that video of the module lift off, what is different about the communication challenges of that vs. any footage shot on the lunar surface ?

There were plenty of redundant comms systems. First of all I think they could communicate back to the LM and relay the signal from there. Or the lunar rover could communicate directly to earth. Or they could relay via the command module.

You can make up for lack of power by using the big (massive) receive dish. The lower the power of transmit, the bigger dish you need. That's how stuff like New Horizons and Voyager work, by the time the signal gets back here it is at the trillionths of a watt level, but the receive dish is massive and the signal processing good. Soldiers cannot hump around a big recieve dish the size of Jodrell bank on their backs.

Thanks for the response GPS.

Any antenna dish for Appollo 11 (first moon landing) would be very small and there was no moon rover on that mission to stabilise the camera or to hold a dish/antenna, transmitter and batteries etc (later missions showed a small inverted brolly sized dish on the top of a short pole on the rover).

The difference is that assuming the technology is feasible to transmit video then one can imagine a sturdy dish plus equipment on the landing module before take off. For the take off presumably they used a small dish/antenna planted on the moon's surface at a distance well away from the take off blast wired to a power source wired to the video camera all wired to a transmitter. In itself quite a task to set up properly.

With the size of the dish one can only assume that they transmittted to the orbiting module and then that relayed it back to earth. There wouldn't be a big dish on the orbiting module either for weight efficiency reasons.

The difference in scale between the size of the transmitters/dishes on earth compared to what they were using on the moon's surface and on the orbiting module to transmit back to earth with 1969 technology.

They really emphasise how weight efficiency was paramount but they seem to have needed at least duplicate dishes and transmitters at the moon end. The detailed account of the successful implementation of all that including on the moon surface would be fascinating to know but I've never seen anything explaining it in any detail or at all for that matter.

I agree that soldiers don't need huge receive packs it's the transmission of messages from the field that seems to be the issue.

(Incidentally on later Appollo missions how they unpacked/got the rover in and out of the landing module must have been a bit of a task in itself. The normal door was relatively small but for the public the rover sort of just appeared almost out of nowhere. It would have been interesting to see how they did that as well - maybe they kept it in the garage down the road )

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Thanks for the response GPS.

Any antenna dish for Appollo 11 (first moon landing) would be very small and there was no moon rover on that mission to stabilise the camera or to hold a dish/antenna, transmitter and batteries etc (later missions showed a small inverted brolly sized dish on the top of a short pole on the rover).

The difference is that assuming the technology is feasible to transmit video then one can imagine a sturdy dish plus equipment on the landing module before take off. For the take off presumably they used a small dish/antenna planted on the moon's surface at a distance well away from the take off blast wired to a power source wired to the video camera all wired to a transmitter. In itself quite a task to set up properly.

With the size of the dish one can only assume that they transmittted to the orbiting module and then that relayed it back to earth. There wouldn't be a big dish on the orbiting module either for weight efficiency reasons.

The difference in scale between the size of the transmitters/dishes on earth compared to what they were using on the moon's surface and on the orbiting module to transmit back to earth with 1969 technology.

They really emphasise how weight efficiency was paramount but they seem to have needed at least duplicate dishes and transmitters at the moon end. The detailed account of the successful implementation of all that including on the moon surface would be fascinating to know but I've never seen anything explaining it in any detail or at all for that matter.

I agree that soldiers don't need huge receive packs it's the transmission of messages from the field that seems to be the issue.

(Incidentally on later Appollo missions how they unpacked/got the rover in and out of the landing module must have been a bit of a task in itself. The normal door was relatively small but for the public the rover sort of just appeared almost out of nowhere. It would have been interesting to see how they did that as well - maybe they kept it in the garage down the road )

I think the first mission they used the s band antenna on top of the LM to communicate directly with earth, but maybe they unfurled another one on the surface. There was a second s band antenna they used on the surface on later missions. There was a massive comms operation on earth set up to receive, with aircraft, ships and fixed dishes. The largest antennas were 210 foot antennas for the first TV pictures. The point is for radio comms only one end needs to be hugely sensitive/powerful. That was the earth based one in this case. The Apollo 11 takeoff was not filmed. The Apollo 17 was the only one successfully filmed, as TMT has already said. It was filmed from the lunar rover and they had to get the slew rate of the camera exactly right - they failed on Apollo 16 and maybe 15, and finally got it right on 17. The pictures would have been sent back via the dish on top of the lunar rover.

The weight savings on the LM were ridiculous. They shaved off individual nuts and bolts. The skin of the lunar module was equal to the thickness of three layers of aluminum foil. They ripped out the seats, and basically eliminated everything that wasn't needed. Of course for the ascent they chucked out everything that they didn't need, so backpacks, tools etc that were used on the lunar surface.

The rover was packed up into a triangle space about 5foot by 5 foot by 5 foot, lowered out on pulleys and then came together like a folding bike. There were other spaces in the LM that held other stuff such as surface science packages.

You can read all the stuff in Apollo 11 : Haynes Workshop Manual. It's incredibly detailed and got a load of interesting stuff in it, like how the suits worked (more complex than you might imagine) and how they knitted the first computer memory together.

Apollo technology is fascinating and often ingenious, but not particularly implausible once you analyse it, and in many ways some far more challenging tasks have been completed since then. For example the communication with the voyager and new horizons spacecraft presents orders of magnitude more difficulty than with Apollo, mainly due to the huge distances involved. What is amazing with Apollo is the sheer scale of the operation. For example mentioning the coms network, this alone was absolutely huge, with probably 20 earth based dishes, planes and ships. There was a network of satellites to send coms and telemetry data round the world. Yet most descriptions of the moon landing probably barely makes a mention of this.

[billybong]

Thanks GPS. Very interesting and also very interesting (and I have to say something of a surprise when I read it) that you say that the Appollo 11 take off wasn't filmed because I'm pretty convinced it was (or at least a take off was broadcast on TV - very poor quality in black and white and the module gone just like that and bits of flying debris - in a blink almost instantaneously) and from pretty close up compared to film of the module take off of later Appollo missions which had rovers. A quick search does seem to confirm your view but that still doesn't alter my recollection of the first moon landing - a particular event that was of course very special in those days. Very interesting.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

Thanks GPS. Very interesting and also very interesting (and I have to say something of a surprise when I read it) that you say that the Appollo 11 take off wasn't filmed because I'm pretty convinced it was (or at least a take off was broadcast on TV - very poor quality in black and white and the module gone just like that and bits of flying debris - in a blink almost instantaneously) and from pretty close up compared to film of the module take off of later Appollo missions which had rovers. A quick search does seem to confirm your view but that still doesn't alter my recollection of the first moon landing - a particular event that was of course very special in those days. Very interesting.

You might be remembering the view from the window where it looks like the flag falls over rather than the view from outside the LM that was filmed on 15,16 and 17. The 15 takeoff filming is pretty crap because they didn't get the camera pan right, all you see is the lm on the surface, the explosives bolts fire and then insulation go all over the place. Its on youtube.

[happy_renting]

It's odd to think that the Pimblyweebs who live on the far side of the Moon have no idea that we exist.

[sPinwheel]

I think it's a scandal that everyone is ignoring our second, bigger Moon.

[happy_renting]

I think it's a scandal that everyone is ignoring our second, bigger Moon.

Shhhhhhh.

[LC1]

There is no "dark side of the moon". We always see the same bit as it it locked in synchronous orbit! The other side gets light too, althought we don't see it. Unless you go round the other side!

Doesn't this fact seem a little suspicious to you? Together with the fact that the moon perfectly fits over the visible sun during an eclipse, it's all far too convenient...

[happy_renting]

Meanwhile British Astronaut Tim Peake has paid tribute to Capt Eric "Winkle" Brown, who died at the age of 97, saying he was "the greatest test pilot who ever lived".

I for one am proud that we have put an astronaut in space so he can make cosmic astrospace-tributes from scientific Space.

When an astronaut makes a tribute, it is Science, which is why it is in the Science section of the BBC website.

[sPinwheel]

I think his death is suspicious. Does Peake have a plausible alibi?

[billybong]

You might be remembering the view from the window where it looks like the flag falls over rather than the view from outside the LM that was filmed on 15,16 and 17. The 15 takeoff filming is pretty crap because they didn't get the camera pan right, all you see is the lm on the surface, the explosives bolts fire and then insulation go all over the place. Its on youtube.

It wasn't from inside - it's a memory of the take off a bit similar to the one you mention for the later missions that I also saw on youtube when I was checking. I associate the memory with the first landing as that was so special with the actual event and with needing to stay up to watch and so on. I remember thinking sort of crikey that went up so instantaneously (in a blink) that realistically you hardly saw what happened. Fair taken aback the way it was. It was there then it wasn't - no build up of jet smoke or anything like that but some debris like tin foil. Thinking about it now for those on board the acceleration forces demonstrated at that instant would be massive/almost infinite.

So it was a real surprise when you said it. So much so that I had to check and pretty confident I would find something but what you said is confirmed on a few sites using google/blink and nothing there that I've found so far to the contrary.

Incidentally I did find a couple take off videos/images under the title of Appollo 11 but so far I've discounted them as later take offs which have been used to demonstrate what happened with Appollo 11 - so not really genuine imagery of Appollo 11 (and not how I remember the transmission).

I also remember how poor the images of the moon surface were on landing (presumably the landing shot was out of the window but that camera location wasn't clear at the time) - just grey and flat with a few small circular bobbles (most likely craters) with a bit of sideways direction from the module movement. It was impossible to make out the module's altitude from that - then all of a sudden they were saying they'd landed/touched down. There seemed to be no change in perspective as they had got closer (you would have expected the circular bobbles to get bigger as they neared the surface but they didn't).

To be fair some of the landing etc imagery such as that was pretty puzzling but one just accepted it in those days as being the way the moon was around the landing area and maybe limitations on camera technology. In those days there was even a small chance they might sink in moon cheese or maybe something worse.

Then there weren't TV video recorders for viewers in those days (1969) - or at least not for general consumers.