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. Got a couple of flight plan things to consider. Now number 1 at 119:30: we have got a P52 IMU realignment which we need to slip in ahead of the P23 sightings, and that will be an option 3 REFSMMAT.

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 —

That sounds like a real good place. Okay. I'm sure we're going to discuss that one a little bit more, Bill. But right now those are the kind of things we're talking about doing. And on the high gain, there is still a lot of discussion about as to what—exactly what we saw and what it means. And I think it is a little too early to tell you anything about that one.

Roger. I think it's got X-ray eyes.

That's as good as some of the explanations.

Yes, I think that's what they hashed out on the ground, Ken.

Okay. I think we all agree that we don't want to try experimenting with it if we really don't know what it is we're looking at.

Roger. I've written down some numbers here that I hope will be helpful.

Okay. Fine.

And I'll give them to you in the debriefing.

Real fine.

I don't think it's any great big deal, because the antenna switching is not hard at all and the … is required to work; if it doesn't work as advertised, at least it works in a reasonable manner.

Ken, is it my imagination, or do you have the music running?

I'm sorry; say again.

Is it my imagination, or do you have the music running?

I think it's your imagination.

Uh-oh. Don't let the doctors hear that.

It's too late; he already heard you.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, 8.

Roger. Just to make sure the urge to get red and blue filter shots of the moon haven't crept into this TV test. We have got red and blue filter shots of the moon, so you need not worry about that.

Okay. I don't think that would throw it away. I think we're trying to come up with something definitive so that postflight will have some real good data to compare with what we do on the ground for future work. I would like to have you go over and take a look at the battery Charlie, please.

I'm on my way.

Okay. Battery Charlie, that's about 36.8 volts.

Okay, 36.8. Thank you.

Roger.

Also with respect to the TV test, I would think that we could probably get a pretty good handle on the operation just by taking red and blue and polarizing shots of the earth independent of the TV, but within the same time frame or at about the same range we had the TV last time.

Okay. That's what—the second portion of this really is asking that we do this with the Hasselblad, and again we won't be using the red and blue filters so we have our baseline.

Taking a picture of the earth with the Hasselblad is no big deal because it does swing by the earth now and then. But trying to get the TV and the Hasselblad all pointed to the earth at the same time would really be tough.

Houston, Apollo 8.

Go ahead, 8.

Go ahead, 8.

We're going to hold up on the LiOH change for about a half an hour. The PCO₂ reading is low, and we don't want to wake up the CDR. It's right by his feet.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Go ahead, Houston.

Okay, Bill. We are coming up on the P52 and then the P23 sightings, and there is some concern that if we just go directly to P23 attitude that we are liable to overheat quad Charlie. So we would like to have you maneuver to place the minus X-axis towards the sun now. And I have some gimbal angles here for you. And if we take it over there and point the minus X at the sun between now and the time we have to start into the alignment, then the P23 business—we will tend to coldsoak Charlie, and then we will be able to go through the P23 operations without worrying about the temperatures.

Okay. Give me them.

Okay. Roll 183.3, pitch 136.7; yaw 13.5.

Right. 183 roll, 137 pitch, and 14 yaw.

Okay.

Actually, we worked out up here on Lovell's slide rule and got 183.25 roll.

Houston, you wanted to go to this coldsoak attitude prior to the P52, did you not?

We would like to go to the coldsoak attitude now.

And that was to keep from heating up quad D, was it?

Negative. That's quad Charlie.

Apollo 8, Houston.