It has been agreed that it is more important for the LM to obtain rendezvous navigation tracking data than to complete the platform realignment after insertion into orbit if problems occur which prolong it. The point is, an accurate CSI maneuver is vital but it is recognized that bad angle data does not substantially degrade…
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…
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…
G Rendezvous Mission Techniques
If you can stand it, I would like to announce another change in the G mission lunar rendezvous timeline. In order to provide more tracking which will hopefully improve CSI targeting and to avoid bothersome real time variations of time between CSI and CDH which foul up the plane change scheduling, we propose:…
July 9 and July 24 “G” Rendezvous Mission Techniques meetings
During the July 9 and July 24 “G” Rendezvous Mission Techniques meetings we have developed preliminary intra-vehicular rendezvous navigation sighting schedules. Crew work load estimates currently in use for the “D” mission rendezvous are included. These tracking schedules are very important since they have a predominating influence on almost everything else. For example, from these…
D Rendezvous Mission Techniques
On October 4 we met to review a draft of the D Rendezvous Mission Techniques. Although we spent the entire day we didn’t get past page 3 and so it is obvious we are going to have to beef up our effort in order to get all this cleaned up. In fact, I am going…
Apollo 12 Mission Techniques
On September 15 and 16 we had the second (and last) Mission Techniques meeting for Apollo 12. It was advertised to be a “catchall” and it was. It all went smoothly enough considering how many people were there – the place was stuffed (even the projection room!) – and the exhaustion and emotion these things…
More about LM radar rendezvous data processing
This note is in answer to some questions you scribbled on the bottom of my LM radar observations memo (67-FM-T-81). You asked if there is any smoothing process on the LM radar data prior to its input to the spacecraft computer. My understanding is that there is not. That is, when the computer wants it,…
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…
The Apollo rendezvous can be shortened by 2 hours
As you no doubt are aware, there is a movement afoot to shorten the Apollo rendezvous by 2 hours. This would be done by eliminating the CSI and CDH maneuvers and executing TPI about ½ hour after insertion. I thought the reason this was being considered was to reduce the crew’s workday, which has been…