TRW Systems released the AS-207/208 Preliminary Spacecraft Reference Trajectory during the first week of May. This report was put together on a compressed schedule, starting from rather hastily defined mission requirements. As a result, there are a number of things about it which were recognized as being in error even before release; however, since we…
Category: Orbital rendezvous
LEM radar angle bias correction
As you know, the rendezvous orbit navigation process involves updating the spacecraft state vector based on the spacecraft radar data. However, the radar apparently has unacceptably large angular bias errors for some reason. Instead of fixing the damn radar, someone decided to include in the LEM spacecraft computer program the capability of computing these radar…
Rendezvous terminal phase guidance program in the Apollo spacecraft computer
On July 7, 1966, a team of MSC and MIT “experts in rendezvous” (including Paul Kramer, Ed Lineberry, John Dablen, and Norm Sears) met at MIT to discuss and review the preliminary Guidance System Operation Plan (GSOP)which MIT has unofficially distributed, covering the terminal phase and External ΔV programs for the AS-207/208 mission. This meeting…
Automatic rendezvous braking maneuver
As you know, MIT is currently designing the command module and lunar module computer programs without provision for automatic braking maneuvers. There has been some thought to reversing this direction. However, Don Cheatham, Aaron Cohen, and I agreed today to proceed as we are for the AS-207/208 programs–that is, do not provide automatic braking maneuvers…
Alternative rendezvous technique – mission planning status
Since our meeting in your office on the stable orbit rendezvous, Ed Lineberry and I have met on a number of occasions with other interested people in an attempt to lay out a schedule of work needed to arrive at the decision as to how to go on 278 and subsequent missions. This note is…
More on Program Development
On October 5th, we had the second of our weekly all day program development plan meetings at MIT. Most of our attention was given to the open items on the AS-278 program which I will discuss later, but first I would like to pass on some general comments regarding the work at MIT. Based on…
VHF ranging by CSM for ascent monitoring
Attention everyone!! As far as I can tell, everyone wants to get that VHF ranging device on the CM and there’s a big effort going on right now to put together the proposal and justification for it. Most attention to date has been given to its use for rendezvous. It is obvious that it should…
Analysis of LM rendezvous navigation is needed
This memorandum is just a reminder for a couple of action items I discussed with you coming from the lunar landing GSOP review August 17. I think it is very important that you really get on with analyzing the performance of the rendezvous navigation in the LM using the radar. Two items you should specifically…
How do we get and use LM rendezvous radar observations?
There is a lot of concern at the present time regarding the manner in which the LM rendezvous radar data is to be processed onboard the spacecraft. I feel that you should devote as much attention to this as you possibly can since it influences both the formulation of the spacecraft computer program and, to…
Mission rule for TPI – ground or onboard
This is just a reminder of an action item you picked up at our August 31 panel meeting. As you recall, it is necessary that we establish the magnitude of the difference between the ground computer and onboard computer TPI maneuver which is used by the crew to decide which solution should be used. I…