Word: lunar
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WITH remarkable clarity, the words reached the earth from a quarter of a million miles away in space. "Houston," the distant voice announced, "Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Though somewhat overlooked in the drama of the lunar landing, the intricate electronics systems that brought Neil Armstrong's voice back from the moon were almost as much of an engineering triumph as the rocketry that carried him there...
...long, electronic link with the earth started with tiny microphones carried inside the astronauts' space helmets. Their voices were fed from the mikes into a small, 3-ft.-sq. box directly behind them in the lunar module. Despite its deceptively simple appearance, the 100-lb. package was the heart of the LM's communications system. Known as a signal processor, it accepted the astronauts' voices as well as 900 other signals-telemetric data on heartbeats, for example, pressure readings in the cabin, data from the computers-and imposed them on a single "carrier" frequency...
...York for rebroadcast throughout the U.S. and the world. In one of the longest roundabout routes in the history of radio, Goldstone also relayed the voices back into space where they were picked up by Mike Collins in the command ship, some 70 miles above their source on the lunar surface. The reason for the round trip of nearly half a million miles: Collins was in direct radio line with the LM for only 15 minutes during each two-hour orbit of the moon...
...Aldrin's voice, in turn, was broadcast to Armstrong by a tiny FM transmitter. It was Armstrong's backpack equipment, however, that converted Aldrin's voice back to a standard AM frequency, combined it with his own signal and fed it into the lunar module, which converted it back into FM for transmission to the earth. The intricate AM-FM system linking the two astronauts was devised to save the weight of an extra receiver...
...next lunar show should be even more spectacular. The $400,000-camera abandoned by Armstrong and Aldrin on the surface of the moon could transmit only in black and white. In the months ahead, NASA hopes to have ready a color camera capable of withstanding the extremes of lunar temperatures for the Apollo 12 flight in November...