Spacelog Apollo 8

Houston, Apollo 8.

Roger. Read you. We're looking at data now. (Laughter)

I suppose you'll tell me my heart has quit beating.

We couldn't argue with you. That doesn't help at all. That's pretty bad.

Is the pneumogram NO-GO for entry?

Roger.

One thing you might be interested in: we listened to that low speed information that you taped on the first couple of REV's that we thought was going to be unusable. And it must have been a ground problem because it's coming in loud and clear now.

Hey, that's great. I was just writing a long dissertation on why we have problems and can't use that DSE in low bit rate. So that's real good.

Yes, it's coming in loud and clear. Pretty interesting.

Let me tell you, it was a hectic revolution.

If you've got the music going, I'm not hearing it, Ken.

No, I was waiting to see what we did on that before I started it up again.

Okay. If they could hold off here for a couple of hours, if they have anything at all, just tell them I'm alive, why, I'll give my real good going over here when I get done. I might even make a statement to the world that I haven't noticed that their little amplifiers had gotten hot.

You say it did get hot?

No, I hadn't even noticed it until I started changing the lead.

Oh, okay. Okay. I'm going to crank the music up again then.

Okay. Have they got anything at all down there?

Well, we're on low bit rate right now, so it'll be a few minutes before we get a chance to take another look at it. We'll let you know if you get sick.

Oh, well, we can hold off for a little while.

Roger.

(End of music)

Houston, Apollo 8.

Hello, Apollo 8. We interrupt this program of music to bring you the late evening status report.

Good. What's up?

Okay. We are getting ready to have a shift turnover, and I wanted to go over a few items before I do. On the midcourse correction number 6: right now, that looks like it is at most 0.3 a foot per second, so there will be no burn for midcourse number 6. Midcourse number 7 is a little larger, and we'll make a decision on that later. Your weather in landing site still reported as being good and the forecast to be about 2000 scattered and 12 000 broken, about the same numbers they gave Frank earlier. Visibility will be about 10 miles, wave height about 4 feet. And I guess there is some scattered thundershowers, like less than 5 percent, that you should worry about. And they're 10 to 30 percent maybe at 2000, broken as opposed to scattered; so it looks pretty fair. We have got a —

Just my kind of weather.

Roger.

Okay. Some of the folks in sitting back and looking at the TV business have some ideas about things they would like to see tried with the filters. And I would like to read you what they have here and let you think about it; and in the next 10 hours, you can decide whether or not you think it is worth the effort. Basically, they would like to try using a whole different series of filters —

Okay, Ken. I got something to write on. Was that P52 at 18:30 or 19:30?

119:30.

Okay. I'm ready to copy on TV.

Okay. Before you copy, let me read it all through to you here so you will get the feel for what it is we are talking about. The title of this little epistle is “TV and Film Photography Correlation Experiment,” and what they want to do is mount the TV camera with the telephoto lens on a bracket. in the rendezvous window and take a TV picture of the earth through the red and blue filters, 1 minute per filter; that means red and blue filters individually. Then they would like to take a TV picture of the earth through through the red, in this case, the 25 Alfa filter combined with the polarizing filter. Rotate the polarizing filter through 360-degree increments, again 1 minute per position. Then they'd like to take a TV picture of the moon with the polarizing filter at 360-degree moon-rotation increments and again, 1 minute per position. And to go with this, we would like to have Hasselblad pictures.

One minute.

Okay. I am standing by.

Are those—when you were talking about pictures through the polarizing filter, is that the TV pictures through the polarizing filter?

That's affirmative. All above was TV.

Okay. Now the only thing—the only problem here is it's darn near impossible to aim that television camera; the field of view is so narrow that it took three men and a boy up here to get the thing pointed in the right direction. And we tried using chewing gum for a sight and everything else, and let me tell you that the odds of getting that thing in the earth is pretty small.

Okay. I think we weren't too clever in our ground callup as to how to point the spacecraft. For one thing I think we can do that a lot better next time now that we have stumbled through it once. I agree with you —

It's not the spacecraft; it's not the spacecraft that's hard to point, it's the camera. The bracket has sufficient slump in it that it can take the camera out of field of view when configured through the window. And it took a lot of microadjustments with a lot of coaching from the ground to get the thing in, and it was a real tough job. So I think you ought to take all this in mind; if you could possibly use the wide angle, you might be better off.

Okay. I understand what you are saying now. I'll run that back by the TV guys and see what they have to say about that. In conjunction with the above, they wanted to take some Hasselblad pictures of the earth through the rendezvous window with the red and blue filter and black and white film, and then again through the polarizing filter, and this is all going to be used in order to try and correlate the TV and the regular film photography. So if you think it is a worthwhile thing, and you would like to give it a try, I'll run this by Jack and the TV cats and see if they would like to get something out of it with the wide angle, and we can talk about it a little later.

Okay. Another thing to keep in mind is that we haven't seen the moon—we didn't see all the way out, and we rarely see it going back. We have seen it once since we left, but we have maneuvered the wrong way from a sighting attitude to the shortest way to PTC and to go from an earth view to a lunar view will take quite a bit of time and some RCS. So you might keep that in mind, too.

Let me ask you one thing then. Do you want a coldsoak sometime prior to the midcourse correction for 1 hour. Is that what you're trying to tell me?

Not really. I think we are looking at that prior to the midcourse correction as being the time when we would like to check out the water boilers. The coldsoak does involve some water boiler, too, but that's going to be done right before entry when these things are not going to be very sensitive, and if we don't do it in 12 hours, it is not real clear where the coldsoak takes place or where you turn on the secondary water boiler. In looking through the entry checklist tonight, we didn't find a place for that.

Okay. Is it really clear that you need the cold soak? We kind of figured on sometime prior to SEP bringing up the secondary EVAP, and also having the primary at that point sometime prior to that date on your suggestion.

Okay. We're talking about doing that like an hour prior to SEP; but in the pre-SEP check, one of the things we power down was the secondary loop. And they won't need to turn it back.

We do that to save —

Right. We're doing that to keep our power profile where we want it. And then we're going to be turning it back on sometime prior to entry. And the time to turn it on in entry, of course, isn't specified because as you turn it on, the voltages show that they can hack it.