APOLLO 8 Modern doc
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Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Rotating the spacecraft in that manner equalized the heat of the Sun bearing down on Apollo 8, which was plus 250 degrees on one side and minus 250 degrees on the other side.
Glynn Lunney @GLFlightApollo8
We have just acquired a signal from Apollo 8 as the spacecraft emerges from the far side of the Moon. Frank Borman reports that the burn duration was near optimal, approximately 11 seconds.
Glynn Lunney @GLFlightApollo8
Our data are showing that the spacecraft is now in an almost perfectly circular orbit around the Moon. Commander Borman confirms an apogee of 62 miles and a perigee of 60.8 miles… perfect!
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
One of the great results which we hope to gain with these wonderful Apollo explorations is to find out how the Moon was formed. Some may wonder why it matters to us to know how the Moon was formed and I would like to offer a view on that.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
Our interest is primarily on the Earth of course. And in the longer term on the possibility, or probability, of other Earth-like planets, possibly inhabited.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
Initially, we’d like to know how the Earth was formed and what conditions were like on the Earth in the very early years of its history. Currently, we do not know this.
Dr. Robert Jastrow (1929 – 2008)
Robert Jastrow was a leading NASA scientist, astronomer, physicist and author. He became the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee and was responsible for establishing the scientific goals for the exploration of the Moon throughout the Apollo program and lunar landings. He became the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1961 and served until retirement from NASA in 1981. After leaving NASA, he became Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
It happens that the first billion years of the Earth’s history has been completely erased by the erosion of water, weather and the biological activity of the life that has since developed.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
Information about that missing billion years is the critical billion years in which life appeared on Earth according to the fossil record. We have now, for the first time, a good chance of finding out something about the early Earth by studying the surface of the Moon.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Is Dr. Jastrow suggesting that we might find some life in its early form on or under the surface of the Moon? Wouldn’t that be something?!
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
We may find the physical and chemical conditions that existed on the early Earth around the time that life here first appeared. It’s not likely that life exists or existed on the Moon because it’s a very dry place.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
However, the possibility of life on the Moon cannot be completely discounted; there may be sub-surface water of some form. There may have been water when the Moon was young – enough for the chemical evolution of life to have gotten a start.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
The point is – we will find something about that missing billion years in the Earth’s history. In order to do that, however, we have to unravel a record of the Moon’s past which the orbital photographs have shown to be quite complicated.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
There is an overlay of meteorite impacts and some volcanic activity perhaps. That is why we would like to know what the Moon’s formation and early history entailed.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
So we pose the overriding, generalized question to Dr. Jastrow to get his frank opinion of whether or not this mission will advance the scientific knowledge which the scientific community hopes to gain from this ambitious program.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
Indirectly, this mission will contribute a great deal because it is a major step on the route to a lunar landing. The lunar landing will have the big scientific payoff, namely the return of samples of lunar rocks to the Earth for laboratory studies and for dating.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
We may find pieces of rock on the Moon whose age turns out, when dated on the Earth, to be four or four-and-a-half billion-years old. That would make them older than any rocks we have ever found on the Earth.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
We may even find, within those rocks, organic molecules which we recognize as the precursors of living molecules under a more favorable environment like ours.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
As soon as the next signal from Apollo 8 is acquired by Mission Control, we will go to Mission Control in Houston to listen in to their communications with the astronauts.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
We have heard nothing from Houston yet to indicate that the spacecraft has come around again from the far side of the Moon and that communication has been re-established. We will continue to wait in hope and expectation.
Paul Haney @PHMissionControl
We expect to acquire a signal from Apollo 8 momentarily. The first call has gone out, with no return signal or reply from our astronauts so far.
Paul Haney @PHMissionControl
We have acquired! We have acquired telemetry signal from the spacecraft and are reading good tank pressures. Still no voice comms from the crew. We have sent out a second call.
Frank Borman @CDRApollo8
I’ve reported to Houston that the burn was on time and has given us an apogee of 62 miles and perigee of 60.8 miles.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
So voice communications has once more been established with the Apollo 8 astronauts and they are reporting on the apogee and perigee numbers achieved as a result of the engine burn on the far side of the Moon.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Apogee is, of course, the highest point of the orbit, while perigee is the lowest point, the closest to the lunar surface as the spacecraft circles the Moon.
Bill Humphries @BHNewcastleUNI
How do they know the apogee and perigee until they have completed an entire orbit in the new configuration? Guess it’s all down to some kind of predictive math and smart onboard computers. This is really smart stuff!
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Apollo 8 has now come around from the far side of the Moon and this pass has been an important one because on the pass behind the far side of the Moon, the only engine the astronauts have available to them was supposed to fire to drop them into a circular orbit around the Moon.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Houston has informed us that the engine has indeed fired correctly. Apollo 8 is now only about 60 or 70 miles above the lunar surface in an almost perfectly circular orbit.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
There will be no TV transmissions on this pass (none scheduled at any rate). The spacecraft will be oriented downwards and the crew will be able to look downwards out of the side windows and Bill Anders will be taking a series of photographs which is one of the principal purposes of the mission.
3 days 1 hour 53 minutes mission time
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
We are hearing an extremely noisy circuit – reception from the spacecraft. That has not been the case with any of the previous transmissions. There has been no explanation from Houston as to why this particular transmission should be this noisy.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The Mission Control apogee, measured by instruments on the ground which are tracking the spacecraft, put Apollo 8’s orbit at almost exactly 70 statute miles above the lunar surface – quite a bit different to that reported by the crew.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The onboard computers
give new orbit as 71.3 statute miles by 69.9 statute miles. The indications from the tracking statements on Earth give it as a near-perfectly circular orbit of 70 miles with just 4/10ths of a mile difference between its apogee and its perigee… quite an achievement.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The apogee (the highest point) comes on this side of the Moon. The perigee (lowest point) comes on the far side of the Moon, although there is now little difference between the two.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
There continues to be ongoing problems with communications from the Apollo 8 spacecraft. The dimensions of that problem we do not know as yet. All we are hearing at the moment is static – no voice at all.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
We have heard no voice communications from the astronauts since they read out that initial information on apogee and perigee. It may be that voice communications are being cut while telemetry data (which is far more important to the engineers) is being transmitted.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
We are now hearing a little bit of voice communications between the astronauts and Mission Control, but the signal is incredibly noisy with static. However, it’s all engineering data at the moment so I guess those of us who are not of an engineering bent are not missing much.
3 days 2 hours 3 minutes mission time
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
This is Apollo 8’s third pass around the Moon. For the next five passes, up to the eighth pass, the main function will be photography – a series of still pictures (one taken every 20 seconds) so that the entire path of the spacecraft around the Moon will be shown in one long strip.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The crew will also take motion pictures with a long lens (telephoto lens), wide angle lens, color, black and white, etc. Most will be taken by Bill Anders, the lunar module pilot on this flight, who is sitting in the right hand seat of the three seats abreast in the spacecraft.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Anders is technically the LM pilot - that is the lunar module pilot, although the actual lunar module wasn’t ready in time for this flight.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The lunar module is that funny, spider-legged spacecraft that will make the actual descent to the Moon’s surface carrying two of the Apollo astronauts on future flights.
The completed lunar module would be fully tested on the next Apollo mission – that of Apollo 9
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
As the astronauts were passing over the Sea of Tranquility and other lunar features, craters, mountains and rills, they were calling out the sites as if they were guides at the Washington Monument – such has been their training.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Those observations have been carried out through various windows aboard the spacecraft, many of which have been seriously obscured during the course of this flight.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
The windows are pretty well spread around the cabin and we understand that that earlier fogging, icing problems on the windows has thankfully begun to clear up.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
Perhaps now, the astronauts have a pretty clear shot through whichever window they want to use. Leo Krupp is sitting in the simulator with me and he is explaining the camera that Frank Borman is using.
Leo Krupp @LKTestastronautRockwell
Borman is using a 16 mm. motion picture camera similar to the type many Americans now use to make their home movies. It can be used to film inside the capsule, but for shooting outside the window he uses a right-angle mirror.
Leo Krupp @LKTestastronautRockwell
He attaches the mirror to the camera so that it acts like a periscope allowing him to film along the X-axis of the vehicle while staying ahead of the Moon.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
They also have a very high quality Hasselblad camera which takes still pictures on a piece of film 70mm. wide – exactly twice the width of the strip film cameras that most people are familiar with. It is a power-driven camera using a battery pack.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
The Hasselblad camera also has a set of filters – red, blue and so on which we often hear the astronauts discussing with Mission Control. The different filters are to cut out rays and different kinds of haze.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
Bill Anders will use the Hasselblad to take pictures through the windows above his head to take high speed pictures of the same ground during different orbits. These will later be put together to form a stereoptic effect.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
The result should be the best, most detailed, most accurate feel that anyone has ever had of what the surface of the Moon is like – what those rills and rays and craters really look like in fine stereoptic detail.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
There is also a standard TV camera onboard Apollo 8. That is the camera that has been broadcasting the live pictures we have been seeing so far. It is a remarkable piece of equipment with two lenses – a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens.
Leo Krupp @LKTestastronautRockwell
All the cameras can either be hand-held or mounted on brackets which are located at various points throughout the spacecraft.
Bill Stout @BSCBSNews
All of this photography will provide the raw material for thousands of feet of film, and thousands of stills, that all of us are going to wait for with a great deal of anticipation after the crew of Apollo 8 hopefully return safely to Earth in a few days from now.
Mike Collins @MCCAPCOMApollo 8
This is the fourth revolution around the Moon by a manned spacecraft, and our orbit is 60.4 nautical miles by 61.7 nautical miles – the nearly perfectly balanced circular orbit that we had aimed for.
Mike Collins @MCCAPCOMApollo 8
At 75 hours and 47 minutes into the mission of Apollo 8, we are about to acquire signal through a whole host of western hemisphere stations: Ascension, Bermuda, Mila, Grand Bahama, Madrid and the Canaries.
Mike Collins @MCCAPCOMApollo 8
However, we are having antenna problems at our main site and have handed the signal to another site, Goldstone. There is a lot of noise on the signal that is caused by the smaller-powered antennas around the high-gain antenna.
Mike Collins @MCCAPCOMApollo 8
The noise on the circuit has now become so bad that Apollo 8 is no longer readable.
3 days 9 minutes mission time
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
As the astronauts of Apollo 8 continue circling the Moon 230,000 miles away, here on Earth we again have Dr. Robert Jastrow, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in our space center studio.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
The Institute for Space Studies is an arm of the Goddard Institute which itself is part of NASA, so we are greatly interested in getting some insight into the scientific expectations of the Apollo 8 mission from the academic insiders involved in the program.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
The information we have received so far from this mission has answered some questions, but has raised many other questions. For example, the astronauts have filmed what seems to be evidence of volcanoes indicating perhaps that there is some melting in the Moon’s interior.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
Other indications show that the Moon cannot have experienced melting in its recent history. This is contradictory evidence which we will have to evaluate in detail and think about even more.
Walter Cronkite @WCCBSNews
Now is my chance to ask Dr. Jastrow something I’ve long wondered about – how we determine which craters are ‘new’ and which ones are old. And when they say ‘new’, does that mean new as in recently formed or new as in ‘just discovered’?
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
One
of the ‘new’ craters described by the astronauts is about 30,000 years old. That is relatively new in the history of the Moon, but not new in the sense that they were formed this year or last year.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
In the ‘new’ craters, we can see a clearly defined rim with big blocks of rock scattered around the edges of the rim. Those were thrown out by the great impact of a large meteorite.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
When we look at craters which are much, much older, we see that they are old and worn in the sense that the edges are well rounded. There is some mechanism involved that moves the material around, moves the soil the way earthworms do down here on Earth.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
On the Moon, we believe that this erosion of the craters is caused by the bombardment of small meteorites hitting the Moon over the course of millions of years and pulverizing the surface layer.
Dr Robert Jastrow @RJGoddardInstitute
The edges of the older craters are well rounded, but nearby the large older craters we see smaller craters whose edges are very sharply defined. Those craters have not yet been worked over or pulverized – they are quite recent.