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Jim Lovell (CMP)
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No problem seeing the moon. When I looked for the star landmark line of sight, I—It's a very thin crescent, but it was very visible.
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Jim Lovell (CMP)
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Not at this altitude, and that's strange. I thought I could see that. At this altitude, the refraction of the light in the optics themselves, due to the reflection of the sunlight I suspect, or earth's light, completely blanked out the dark side of the moon to this altitude.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Well, what we had planned was to use the 10- to 11-hour period as your preburn preparation just as we would have done normally, and —
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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— and if you can work in this COMM check before that, it would be desirable, but that's not a constraint.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay. What we've got here is a couple of DTO COMM checks. We'll be switching around to five different modes, and only one of them will interrupt your activities. In that case, we'll be switching to the uplink backup voice, and that's the one time that you might lose temporary uplink voice COMM. You'll have downlink voice COMM throughout the entire procedure, and it ought to take you, I guess, 10 to 15 minutes MAX, the only requirement being that we should stay on a high-gain antenna.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay. That sounds pretty good.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay, Apollo 8. Another couple of minutes and we'll be ready to go into our—our COMM check. And, for your information, looks like the signal strength is 3 to 4 dB better than expected on the wide range, on the WIDE BEAM mode, and approximately that gives you 1.4 increase in your range.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Something else you might take a look at: as you go through the PTC, we have some who would like to know if you can see any detectable effect on the windows in the form of their fogging. Particularly, does the sun seem to vary fog intensity or does it increase it or decrease it or make it go in patches or anything like that that you might be able to notice?
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Frank Borman (CDR)
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The sun doesn't seem to change it much; however, the different incidences of the sun's rays magnify the—the fogging, or at least change it.
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Frank Borman (CDR)
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The sun doesn't stem to have any effect on the windows themselves, but the different inci—angles of incidence of the sun rays change the relative amount of obscuration caused by the fogging.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay, Apollo 8. We're ready to go into the COMM check now, and it's your option. We can call out switches and let you position them, or we can command it from the ground. In either event, there will be a couple of switches that you'll have to throw for us.
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Frank Borman (CDR)
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We'll have to command them, and we'll throw what we have—what you want.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay. And I'll keep you posted on what we're doing. The first test is an uplink voice and ranging with full downlink which is essentially what you're doing right now, is to be used for a baseline.
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Ken Mattingly (CAPCOM)
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Okay. We're starting on test number 1, and if you would verify that S-band NORMAL mode switch is in VOICE.
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Frank Borman (CDR)
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Maybe we'd better hold the COMM check till after the midcourse, because we'd better get fired here at 10 if we want to burn at 9.
Spoken on Dec. 21, 1968, 10:37 p.m. UTC (55 years, 11 months ago). Link to this transcript range is: Tweet
