ApolloHoax.net
Off Topic => General Discussion => Topic started by: jetlagg on November 11, 2013, 03:13:07 PM
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Hey all,
I'm doing visual effects on a webseries set in a universe with the sort of near-future tech you see in something like the Marvel movies or Tom Clancy's future soldier series. The scene I'm currently working on features a mission controller with access to all kinds of operation data. That got wondering what kind of information would actually be useful to a mission controller in real life, which made me remember you guys (first discovered the place last month after hearing about your beautiful takedown of AllanCW).
So, basically I'm looking for resources where I can learn what kind of information a mission controller would monitor (and why). Based off what I've read here, I wouldn't be surprised if some of you had the telemetry for the Apollo missions memorized, but I'm interested in anything else you're knowledgeable on as well.
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What kind of mission controller? There are many, each specializing in some aspect. They're led by a flight director, who obviously cannot know all of the details as well as his controllers.
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In this particular sequence the controller is only concerned about two agents intercepting a person of interest, but as the series progresses, I expect the missions will become more complex in their goals. Hence, I'm just interested in a general information resource, sort of a place to begin my own reading.
I have a military background in fire support, so I have a pretty good idea of what information is available and presented to commanders (enemy movements, troop positions to avoid friendly fire, etc...), but I also know what information could hypothetically have been useful (breathing and heart rates in your forward infantry, for example) if we had only had access to it. What I'm not so sure about is what that information might realistically look like. So, I wonder then, how did it work on the Apollo missions? What kind of bio readings did they keep track of, and what did they do with that information? That kind of stuff (and really, anything at all, it's all fascinating) would really help inspire me when it comes time to design the controller's HUD.
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The primary item of biomedical telemetry was an EKG. This was used not only to monitor the astronauts' workloads but also to estimate their consumables use -- oxygen, cooling water and lithium hydroxide (used to scrub CO2). Although heart rate can be changed by psychogenic factors, that's usually a short-lived effect so apparently it was quite useful in practice. But it definitely put the lie to Neil Armstrong's apparent coolness during the Apollo 11 landing; his heart rate hit something like 160, IIRC.
On at least one occasion (Apollo 15) the surgeons detected arrhythmias in the astronauts who had been working very hard on the lunar surface and were apparently dehydrated and hypokalemic (low levels of blood potassium).
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The following might provide a bit of an overview. It's from "The Invasion of the Moon 1969 - The Story of Apollo 11", Peter Ryan. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England (1969) -- Paperback, pages 77-82.
GET 13:32 (4.04 a.m. BST, 17 July) After going through a 'pre-sleep checklist', which included a report from Armstrong to MCC on the 'crew status', the Apollo astronauts settled down for a nine-hour rest period. The crew status report, which was made twice a day throughout the flight, was to tell the medical team at MCC how much radiation each member of the crew had been exposed to and whether they had taken any medicine. The command module medical kit to the right of Aldrin's couch contained three motion sickness injectors, three pain suppression injectors, one two-ounce bottle of first aid ointment, two two-ounce bottles of eyedrops, three nasal sprays, two compress bandages, twelve adhesive bandages, and a thermometer. Pills carried on the mission included sixty antibiotic, twelve anti-nausea, eighteen pain killing, twelve stimulant, sixty decongestant, twenty-four anti-diarrhoea, seventy-two aspirin and twenty-one sleeping. A similar, smaller kit was carried in the lunar module.
Keeping the Apollo 11 crew fit during the mission was the responsibility of Dr Berry and his team at MCC. To help him do this each member of the crew was 'wired up' with biomedical monitoring pads attached to their bodies which recorded such factors as heart and breathing rates. At lift-off the crew's heart rates were: Armstrong, 110; Aldrin, 88; Collins, 99 (the normal rate for the human heart is seventy beats per minute). Information from the monitoring pads was routed automatically
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through the spacecraft's communications system, back down to the manned spaceflight network's (MSFN) tracking stations on earth, and into NASA's two-million-mile communication system (NASCOM) to reach MCC in Houston some fractions of a second later.
On Apollo missions all communication between the spacecraft and earth — the telemetry, tracking, automatic commands and voice circuits — are combined in a single radio carrier wave which involves the use of only one antenna. This is called the 'unified S-Band system' and involves a staff of 4,500 distributed among fifteen tracking stations and numerous switching centres around the globe.
While the spacecraft is in earth parking orbit and just before splashdown, communications are routed through thirty-foot dishes at eleven sites on land and aboard four tracking ships. In addition to these thirty-foot dishes, eight Apollo range instrumentation aircraft (ARIA) operate in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. These are modified Boeing jets which carry seven-foot antennae in their bulbous noses. Once the spacecraft has completed the translunar injection burn and is on its way out to the moon, three more powerful eighty-foot dishes — one at Goldstone in California, one near Madrid, and one at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra — come into action. These deep-space tracking stations are so placed that, while the earth revolves on its daily axis, one of them can always 'see' the moon. On the Apollo 11 mission two even more enormous 'electronic ears', the 210-foot Mars antenna at Goldstone and the 210-foot dish at Parkes in Australia, were used. The Mars antenna was brought in to assist communications with the lunar module once it had separated from the command module in lunar orbit, while the Parkes dish was used to receive the television transmissions from the surface of the moon.
Apart from handling the voice, telemetry and command circuits between the spacecraft and earth, the dishes are also used to track the craft in space. By measuring the round-trip time of a ranging signal, automatically re-transmitted by the spacecraft and measuring the Doppler shift (the re-transmitted signal's frequency change, like the change in note of the whistle of a passing railway train), it is possible to determine the range of
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the craft to within a few hundred feet and its range rate or speed to within a few inches per second.
Linking all the tracking dishes of the MSFN is NASA's staggering global communications network (NASCOM). Using a web of about two million miles of cable, microwave, radio and satellites link, it is centred at the Goddard Spaceflight Center (GSFC) in Maryland. Information originating from the Apollo 11 spacecraft ('down-link data') such as the heart and breathing rates of the astronauts, the command module cabin pressure and temperature, etc., was transmitted automatically, second by second ('real-time' telemetry), through the cluster of four small S-Band dishes deployed outside the service module at the rate of 51,200 bits per second. Picked up by a ground station, it was then processed by computer before being passed on to Houston at a modest 2,400 bits per second. These computers at the tracking sites are also used for relaying commands to the spacecraft's systems for passing information ('up-link data') to the spacecraft's own computers at the rate of 1,200 bits per second. Several times a second the computers at Houston 'talk' to the other computers in the network or in the spacecraft. The MCC computers compare everything they receive from other computers with their memories and then indicate problem areas and other relevant data to the flight controllers. Another important function of the Houston computers is time-keeping, and they deal in thousandths of rather than whole numbers of seconds. Between Houston and the centre of the NASCOM web at the Goddard Spaceflight Center there are two 50,000-bit-per-second circuits. The volume of traffic handled at Goddard during an Apollo mission is equivalent to a 500-page novel per second. The computers there would take less than a second to add a column of ten-digit numbers three-quarters of a mile high. To talk to their operators, the computers around the network are capable of slowing down to a more reasonable 100 human language words per minute.
While Goddard is the switching centre for communications, it is at Mission Control, Houston, that all important decisions are taken during an Apollo flight. During the Apollo 11 mission a team of flight directors under the director of flight operations,
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Map: The main elements of NASA's two-million-mile Apollo communications network (NASCOM)
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Map: Apollo manned spaceflight tracking network (MSFN)
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Christopher Columbus Kraft, made the final go or no-go decisions based on their information and with the advice and opinion of Apollo 11's commander, Armstrong. The man at Mission Control who talks to the crew over the voice link is called the capsule-communicator (CAP-COM), and is usually a member of the astronaut team.
You might also get an idea of how things were done by watching the movie "Apollo 13." It is reasonably accurate, but still has its own glaring examples (to us) of "Hollywood Unrealism."
Note the protocols: Generally neither mission controllers nor flight directors spoke directly with the astronauts, except occasionally for a brief bit of chitchat, but nothing procedural. That duty lay with the capcom who took his orders from the flight director. One exception occurred with Apollo 8 when the head surgeon, Charles Berry, spoke directly to Frank Borman to find out more about his brief illness while on the way to the moon.
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Thanks so much for the responses. Is there any place online where I can get access to actual mission telemetry? I think browsing through that would be helpful as well.
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Space things that Hollywood and TV regularly stuff up
1. Showing sunlit objects with stars in the background. The difference in brightness between the two is so great that the human eye, film and video can properly see one or the other, but not both at once. Sunlit objects should be seen properly exposed against jet black sky, with maybe just the odd dot (Venus, Jupiter, perhaps Sirius) in believable positions.
2. Hardly ever showing real, recognisable star patterns, which should be simple these days. "Star Wars" occurred in a galaxy far, far away, so we expect it there, but any part of space that we can realistically travel to should show proper constellations. Provided we don't also see sunlit objects at the same time.
3. Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon. Many of them pinch footage from "For All Mankind" where he's showing jumping down to the footpad instead of later, when he took that one small step.
4. Spacecraft soaring in space. Bruce Willis's shuttles did it when he took off to save the planet, but that's Hollywood for ya. Soaring requires the same thing gliders require and space lacks: Air.
5. Spacecraft firing their engines continuously. That currently requires more fuel than a craft could launch with. Once under way at the right velocity, Mr Newton does the driving without requiring more fuel.
6. Spacecraft travelling in straight lines everywhere, and soaring in to land. Currently, everything travels in one particular orbit, then switches to another if necessary.
7. Billowing smoke. That too requires air. Remember the military hotheads who wanted to fire off an atomic bomb on the moon back in 1957 so the Soviets would have the hell scared out them by the big mushroom cloud? They seem to have forgotten that that also required air.
8. Noises in a vacuum. 'Nuff said.
9. Noises in a vacuum that reach the viewer's ear or the camera's microphone at exactly the same time as the very distant explosion -- with the billowing smoke -- becomes visible.
10. The ignition start-time and liftoff time of a Saturn V rocket (8.9 seconds to go and zero in the countdown). Even with space nut Tom Hanks on board, Hollywood still stuffed it up.
Again from "The Invasion of the Moon 1969 - The Story of Apollo 11", Peter Ryan. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England (1969), pages 65-66
T minus fifteen seconds... twelve, eleven...
T minus 10 seconds. Positioned on either side of the flame trench below the Saturn, nozzles of the water deluge system began pouring water into it at a rate of 8,000 gallons per minute.
... nine...
T minus 8.9 seconds. Automatic ignition of the five FI engines of the S-IC first stage. Five plumes of flame began to roar down into the trench from the eighteen-foot-high, fourteen-foot-wide engine nozzles, vapourizing the water pouring from the deluge system.
... Ignition sequence starts. Six, five, four, three...
T minus 2 seconds. All engines were now running at ninety per cent of the seven and a half million pounds of thrust, gulping kerosene and liquid oxygen at the rate of 10,000 pounds per second.
... one ...
For the first time ever the normally monotone voice of Jack King at launch control began to break with emotion.
T minus 0 seconds. Ground elapsed time, GET 00:00:00 (hours:minutes:seconds) 2.32 p.m. BST. The 'launch commit' signal was flashed by computer to hold-down arms on the platform of the mobile launcher which gently released the 3,000-ton rocket, now some 86,000 pounds lighter since ignition. At the same moment the remaining service arms swung clear and the
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deluge system poured water down on the platform and into the flame trench at the rate of 50,000 gallons per minute.
...zero, all engines running. Lift-off, we have a lift-off.
The sound of the shouts and cheers of 3,500 newsmen was heard for a moment before it was drowned by the earthquake and thunder of the Saturn.
GET 00:00:02 A yaw manoeuvre, achieved by gimballing the four outer FI engines of the cluster of five, gently tilted the Saturn; eight seconds later the Saturn had cleared the launch tower, watched by close on a million people who had come to Cape Kennedy, including Hermann Oberth (the German rocket pioneer who had inspired von Braun) and many of America's political leaders.
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Space things that Hollywood and TV regularly stuff up<SNIP>
T minus fifteen seconds... twelve, eleven...
T minus 10 seconds. Positioned on either side of the flame trench below the Saturn, nozzles of the water deluge system began pouring water into it at a rate of 8,000 gallons per minute.
... nine...
T minus 8.9 seconds. Automatic ignition of the five FI engines of the S-IC first stage. Five plumes of flame began to roar down into the trench from the eighteen-foot-high, fourteen-foot-wide engine nozzles, vapourizing the water pouring from the deluge system.
... Ignition sequence starts. Six, five, four, three...
T minus 2 seconds. All engines were now running at ninety per cent of the seven and a half million pounds of thrust, gulping kerosene and liquid oxygen at the rate of 10,000 pounds per second.
... one ...
For the first time ever the normally monotone voice of Jack King at launch control began to break with emotion.
T minus 0 seconds. Ground elapsed time, GET 00:00:00 (hours:minutes:seconds) 2.32 p.m. BST. The 'launch commit' signal was flashed by computer to hold-down arms on the platform of the mobile launcher which gently released the 3,000-ton rocket, now some 86,000 pounds lighter since ignition. At the same moment the remaining service arms swung clear and the
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deluge system poured water down on the platform and into the flame trench at the rate of 50,000 gallons per minute.
...zero, all engines running. Lift-off, we have a lift-off.
The sound of the shouts and cheers of 3,500 newsmen was heard for a moment before it was drowned by the earthquake and thunder of the Saturn.
GET 00:00:02 A yaw manoeuvre, achieved by gimballing the four outer FI engines of the cluster of five, gently tilted the Saturn; eight seconds later the Saturn had cleared the launch tower, watched by close on a million people who had come to Cape Kennedy, including Hermann Oberth (the German rocket pioneer who had inspired von Braun) and many of America's political leaders.
This zooming shot of the launch from the movie Apollo 13 (from 2:05 in the video) gives me goosebumps and a lump in my throat every time I see it.
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This zooming shot of the launch from the movie Apollo 13 (from 2:05 in the video) gives me goosebumps and a lump in my throat every time I see it.
Me too, though it's tempered a little by the many mistakes. I'd like to re-edit that sequence into the proper order, but to do it right I'd need clean copies of the dialogue to mix back into the sound track. I wonder if that can be extracted from the 5.1 soundtrack...?
I can't fix the incorrect umbilical tower sequence or the igniting engines that look like CO2 extinguishers (because they were), but at least I could have the mission clock start with liftoff, not before, and have the "BPC Clear" call come after the tower jettison. And that "ignition" call at T=0, instead of T=-8.9 sec, and the "tower clear" call before the fact...
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Note the protocols: Generally neither mission controllers nor flight directors spoke directly with the astronauts, except occasionally for a brief bit of chitchat, but nothing procedural. That duty lay with the capcom who took his orders from the flight director.
Another exception not widely known is that during network problems that cut off a ground station from Houston while the ground station was still in contact with the spacecraft, the communications technicians (comtechs) at the ground station spoke directly with the astronauts to test the radio link and inform them about the problem. Some of the Australian station staff speak very fondly on their webpages of those brief exchanges.
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Thanks so much for the responses. Is there any place online where I can get access to actual mission telemetry? I think browsing through that would be helpful as well.
The individual mission reports include much of it for the important mission phases. For example, the Apollo 11 mission report section on the lunar landing has extensive plots of the LM's state (position, attitude, velocity), the heart rates of the crew, the signal strength at the ground station (there were comm dropouts early in powered descent) and so on. Heart rates are also given for the entire EVA.
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Thanks so much for the responses. Is there any place online where I can get access to actual mission telemetry? I think browsing through that would be helpful as well.
The individual mission reports include much of it for the important mission phases. For example, the Apollo 11 mission report section on the lunar landing has extensive plots of the LM's state (position, attitude, velocity), the heart rates of the crew, the signal strength at the ground station (there were comm dropouts early in powered descent) and so on. Heart rates are also given for the entire EVA.
Beautiful. That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again.
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But it definitely put the lie to Neil Armstrong's apparent coolness during the Apollo 11 landing; his heart rate hit something like 160, IIRC.
Just personally, I think it made his coolness even more impressive; one definition of courage is when you're scared shitless but you steady down and do the job anyway.
On at least one occasion (Apollo 15) the surgeons detected arrhythmias in the astronauts who had been working very hard on the lunar surface and were apparently dehydrated and hypokalemic (low levels of blood potassium).
Definitely more dangerous than have ever seemed to let on; my wife died quite suddenly of what turned out to be a potassium imbalance.
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But it definitely put the lie to Neil Armstrong's apparent coolness during the Apollo 11 landing; his heart rate hit something like 160, IIRC.
Just personally, I think it made his coolness even more impressive; one definition of courage is when you're scared shitless but you steady down and do the job anyway.
On at least one occasion (Apollo 15) the surgeons detected arrhythmias in the astronauts who had been working very hard on the lunar surface and were apparently dehydrated and hypokalemic (low levels of blood potassium).
Definitely more dangerous than have ever seemed to let on; my wife died quite suddenly of what turned out to be a potassium imbalance.
Sorry for your loss. Sodium/Potassium balance is the mechanism which controls all muscle and nerve action. A sudden rise in potassium can cause cardiac arrest. It is one of the substances used in execution by injection.
The muscle cells mitochondria exchanges sodium for potassium with a small "pump" driven by protons which again are bonded to oxygen, creating an electrical potential across the cell membrane. About 70 mV. This is again used to bond a phosporus group to ADP, promoting it to ATP, which is the "universal" energy carrier inside the cell.
Having too low levels of potassium in the blood inhibits this function, so the cell essentially "starves" - even though it is fully fuelled and oxygenated. Heart tissue is very sensitive to this, because it works all the time.
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Definitely more dangerous than have ever seemed to let on; my wife died quite suddenly of what turned out to be a potassium imbalance.
That's terrible; I'm very sorry to hear that. My wife has had several run-ins with hypokalemia, spending several days in hospital during one. It seems genetic; her biological mother has similar problems. Now she's careful to take KCl supplements and have it monitored.
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On a more amusing note, the Apollo 15 astronauts' close call with hypokalemia resulted in a probable overreaction by the flight surgeons who overstocked Apollo 16 with potassium-loaded orange juice. The crew hated it, as John Young revealed in a private comment to Charlie Duke that was picked up by a hot mike and broadcast to the world.