Back to the future
Back to the future
Honouring the stars
To help foster trade relations between the US and Australia, the Australian American Chamber of Commerce, Houston and the Western Australian Trade and Investment Office have paid tribute to the Australian-based teams responsible for delivering the world images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s 1969 Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
The Stars of Australia Awards were presented on the 26th January 2007 by Apollo 17’s Captain Eugene Cernan at the Australia Day Gala at the Hotel Derek in Houston.
David Cooke, who was Officer-in-Charge of the Parkes Observatory from 1988 to 1993 was one of the award’s inaugural winners. He was the senior receiver engineer at the telescope during the time of the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969.
His role during the 1969 mission was to look after the receivers that capture the radio signals as they come in from space. He then had to install them on the telescope, test them, and monitor their performance while the spacecraft approached the Moon and landed.
“When the tracking was over, I went outside and looked up at the Moon, and thought, ‘Wow, are there really people up there?’”, Mr Cooke says.
Only two weeks earlier, the telescope he used to track the spacecraft underwent “preventative maintenance” to its drive gears.
Mr Brian Wilcockson, Site Services Engineer for CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility, says the original German-designed gears first used in the 1950 were starting to show wear three or four years ago.
The six new gears range in size from 600mm diameter to 1200mm, the largest weighing about a tonne; they are attached to the rollers that make the telescope turn in the horizontal plane.
The engineers removed the gears from inside the gearbox while it was still on the telescope rather than jacking up the telescope and taking off the gearboxes.
A recent American study found that of 20 ground-based radio telescopes for the period surveyed, the Parkes telescope is one of the world’s most productive telescopes worldwide; Parkes produced the third-highest number of scientific papers and received the second-highest number of citations.
Lost in space
While Australia and the US commemorate their collaborative work that helped put man on the moon and televise it to the world, vital records of that work remain lost somewhere on earth. All is not lost, however copies of the clearest versions of the monumental event are nowhere to be found. The only reason anyone knows these are lost however is thanks to the efforts of a small group of enthusiasts and ex-staff of the Australian tracking stations who meet each year at the recently decommissioned Honeysuckle station near Canberra.
Honeysuckle Creek was the other tracking station in the right position to capture images directly transmitted from Apollo 11 in 1969. Images were sent from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek stations to the Overseas Telecommunication (OTC) exchange in Paddington, NSW which then routed it to Houston. But because the transmissions were sent in a format incompatible with the frequency standard to black and white televisions, staff at these stations need to convert the transmissions before sending them to Houston for broadcast to the world.
As Colin Mackellar, a local space enthusiast who attends the annual meetings at Honeysuckle Creek and administers the site www.honeysucklecreek.net, explains, NASA realised early in the Apollo Program that the bandwidth from the Moon would be very limited. Voice, telemetry, biomedical data and television needed to share the link from the Lunar Module. To fit this information in, NASA budgeted only 500kHz for TV from the Lunar surface which was much less than the 4.5MHz standard for commercial broadcast television. The system NASA mission planners developed meant that transmissions would be sent in a non-standard slow scan format of 320 lines of resolution at 10 frames per second, viewable within the then US TV standard of 525 lines at 30 frames per second.
Staff at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes were responsible for recording the original transmissions, which was done on 14-inch magnetic tape. Staff then sent the tapes to NASA for safe-keeping.
At the 2003 reunion, Ed von Renouard, the man at Honeysuckle Creek responsible for processing the images the world would see, brought photos he had taken of the screens showing the original transmissions. The photos showed that the pre-converted images were much clearer than the simulacra viewed by the rest of the world.
The new evidence sparked interest in the U.S. in finding the 14-inch tapes but sadly the tapes that should have been stored at the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland, have been lost.
Mackellar though doesn’t blame NASA for losing the records. “What’s hard for me to get my head around is that so much was happening in the 1960s. Each Apollo mission could generate thousands of tape, including the unmanned missions. So NASA had tens of thousands of tapes coming in. In hindsight they should have put red stickers on these particular tapes.”
The group, says Mackellar, is still looking for the lost tapes. “We’re talking to retirees and others who worked at the stations. Some of them haven’t even heard about the search for the lost tapes. There were also lower quality unofficial copies but these have gone missing too. We’ve got a real window of opportunity here and if we leave this for another ten years it’s going to be too late.”
In 2006 the man who was ultimately responsible for the broadcast, Stan Lebar, visited the group at the reunion at Honeyseuckle Creek. Says Mackellar, “Some of the guys from Parkes were there too, including Dave Clarke. We launched a DVD of footage that Ed von Renouard took at the time.” This footage was taken on Super 8 which Mackellar explains runs at 18 frames per second. The quality of this footage is of higher quality than what the world saw, yet ironically it was of the screens showing the converted transmissions. While Super 8 footage of the pre-converted tranissions suffers due to the “strobing” caused by the mismatched frame rates, the converted transmissions improved under the Super 8 format.