Word: rover
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With a tug on a cable, the $12.9 million lunar rover folded slowly out of Falcon's side. Its hollow, wire-mesh wheels snapped into place, and the moon car was lowered to the ground. Like most earthly vehicles the rover had a problem: the front-wheel steering did not work. Nonetheless, a 25-yard test drive showed that it was ready to go with its back wheels steering. After a motherly reminder from Mission Control ("Okay, Dave, remember to buckle up for safety"), the astronauts clambered aboard, strapped themselves into place, pushed the control stick forward and moved...
...Fendell's responsibility to control the moon rover's camera during the astronauts' lunar explorations. Sitting at his large, 15-button console in Houston, Fendell operated the RCA camera from a quarter of a million miles away. With a push of the appropriate button, he could swing it across the mountain-ringed horizon, raise it up to focus on a peak or lower it to peer down Hadley Rille. He could zoom in on the astronauts for a closeup or even adjust the lens opening to compensate for the moon's harsh lighting conditions...
...beginning of every stop along the rover's route (there were no telecasts while the car was moving because its high-gain antenna could not be kept aligned with the earth), Fendell's "shooting script" called for what was dubbed a "WAP," or wide-angle panorama. The camera slowly swept in a full circle around the horizon, enabling the scientists in Mission Control's science support room to take a series of overlapping Polaroid snapshots off their TV monitor, quickly study them for any oddity and then request Fendell to zoom in on it. Such a closeup...
...electronics engineer with no previous TV experience, Fendell faced his toughest challenge at the end of the lunar visit. Left behind on the moon along with the rover, the remotecontrolled camera was scheduled to give the world its first pictures of a lunar lift-off taken from the moon's surface. Because of the nagging time lags, Fendell could not afford to look at the TV monitor himself. He had to go completely by the clock. At exactly T-minus-zero, Fendell had to begin tilting the camera upward. Thus, by the time his command reached the moon...
When they get back to the landing site, Scott will park the rover 300 ft. from Falcon and 31 hrs. later, at 1:09 p.m., the car's camera should give the world its first live view of a spacecraft blasting off from the moon. By 3:04 p.m., Scott and Irwin should dock with the command module Endeavour (named for the ship used by 18th century English Navigator and Explorer James Cook). That will also reunite them with Worden, who will have conducted more scientific experiments than any other command-module pilot during his three days alone...