Originally posted by apathist
Were you still involved when apollo 13 happened?
The most amazing true story I'm aware of.
It sure was but I got there just after that. It was a heady experience I can tell you. The way they did things back 40 years ago on my job, Apollo tracking and timing, it was mainly analog acoustic ring looping the same digital pattern but one of four loops like that. Of course now it would all be simulated on a cell phone a thousand times faster than anyone could have done it in 1970 but what they did worked, very complex circuitry I can tell you.
The gist of it was they transmitted a unique digital pattern, hell, I forget the bit rate now, must have been a megabit per second though, anyway, it transmitted that pattern to Apollo when it was on it's way.
Then there was a transponder onboard Apollo that received that digital signal and retransmitted it back to Goddard or whatever radio scope was in line of sight, and when the signals got back to Goddard, they were compared bit by bit basically like laying a ruler out side by side.
Think of having a ruler go out into space and loop around and come back to Earth and there the patterns were compared and it turns out that for each and every bit pattern of the signal going out and coming back and compared, there was only one distance the craft could be and that was how they determined exactly (well, within 50 feet, if needed they could have tweeked the signals to get it within 6 inches but that was never needed) So it was basically a tape rule in space hooked up to Earth and the craft so they knew in Z what the distance was at all times.
The timing part of my job was to sync the switching of radio telescopes from one site to another since Earth spins under the craft as it is on its way to the moon or any other kind of probe to the moon, they have to be able to track it 24/7 down to the microsecond and so when switching from one scope to another to maintain line of sight, they had to be sync'd to within 100 nanoseconds, one tenth of a microsecond.
Pretty tricky, eh, especially for the 60's and 70's where laptops were a distant dream. They used off the shelf Hewlett Packard atomic clocks, one cesium beam clock and the other a Rhubidium beam clock, Cesium was accurate to within a second in about 2000 years and Rhubidium about 1/10th of that,'only' accurate to within a second in 200 years. Then there was a tertiary backup, a very advanced quartz crystal clock like in a wrist watch of today but a thousand times more accurate, it was third in line though, Cesium beam, prime, Rhubidium second and crystal third backup.
That equipment was installed in every radio telescope in the deep space tracking network, maybe 10? something like that, around the world to keep all the scopes sync'd when they had to switch.
I was offered a job at Goldstone space tracking center out in the desert of California which I stupidly turned down, but in the station itself I could see (this was a few years later after Nixon screwed us, no more moon trips or cities on the moon) there was new tile laid out where the timing clocks had been and it felt really sad to see it all gone so quickly, they just jerked out all those billions of dollars of equipment and junked it including the Saturn V rocket booster, they literally threw the plans for the Saturn V in a dumpster.
Frigging asssholes. Now they have to rebuilt it all over again, basically the same design, for the Mars trip, bigger better faster and so forth of course, with 40 years of rocket design upgrades but still with Saturn V they could have had some plans to review to do a redesign on but they had to basically start from scratch, and of course something better will be built but it is about 40 frigging years too late.
They could have had men on Mars by 1990 if that ASSSHOLE nixon hadn't nix'd the space program and we went with the stupid Space shuttle. What an unmitigated disaster that was.
Touted to be a lot cheaper than the Saturn V and Atlas rockets, one use jobs and be reusable but instead it ended up costing about ten times as much as they said it would and they never did get the quick turnaround time they touted as the reason for the damned thing in the first place. We all know how well THAT turned out, eh.
So now we are about 30 years behind where we should have been if politics hadn't ruined it, if we could have kept going to the moon there would have been for one thing, this really stupid and treasonous moon landing hoax BS. Oh well, do I sound bitter.....
25 Nov '16 18:17
Intelligent? Design
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