Apollo 11 TV in LEO

[onebigmonkey]

As part of the long running and endlessly tedious process of banging Heiwa's head against solid objects over at the Flat Earth place I came across a reference in the Apollo 11's transcripts to "about a minute's worth of usable TV" taken in LEO to test out the TV camera :

00 01 53 56 CC
Roger. We've checked over the spacecraft and the launch vehicle guidance. They're both looking to be in good shape. We estimate you have better than a 99-percent probability of a guidance cut-off on the launch vehicle, so things are apparently holding in very well. For your information, MILA received approximately 1 minute of a usable TV picture, so apparently the system is working.

Has anyone seen this TV, or know what it contained? The only broadcasts and camera tests I've seen are post-TLI ones.

[Kiwi]

Go to the Apollo Flight Journal,
https://history.nasa.gov/afj/
and click on Apollo 11, then the second part, "Earth Orbit and Translunar Injection".

Put "tv" in your browser's search function and you'll find plenty of discussion about the TV camera, both with Houston and onboard.

At one stage Mike Collins prepares to use the TV camera and apparently Buzz Aldrin later gets hold of it. Mike's sense of humour comes into play when he tells Houston:-

001:29:27 Collins: Cecil B. DeAldrin is standing by for instructions.

From a quick perusal I got the idea that the spacecraft was in darkness so they only videoed the interior of the command module, but a bit more study than I had time for should give you the full picture. Please give us a summary.

Following 001:54:59 the Public Affairs Officer says:-

PAO: This is Apollo Control at 1 hour, 55 minutes into the mission. Canary has had Loss of Signal. We were unable to use the 1 minute of TV time from the MILA station. There is no longer a converter at MILA. The one formerly there has been sent to the Australian station. Tananarive will acquire Apollo 11 on its second orbit of the Earth at 2 hours, 9 minutes, 18 seconds. We expect the Translunar Injection burn at 2 hours, 44 minutes, 14 seconds. Duration of 5 minutes, 47 seconds and the Delta-V, or the velocity that we will add to the spacecraft, of 10,435.6 feet per second. We'll come back up at Tananarive acquisition. This is Mission Control, Houston.

[onebigmonkey]

Aah I'd got all the preamble to the broadcast from the AFJ but had missed the PAO comment afterwards.

I just wondering if they'd pointed the camera out of the window or just waved it around inside to checl.

Thanks

[Kiwi]

The first book I bought about Apollo 11 mentions the episode briefly:

Safely in orbit, the crew removed their helmets and gloves as they, the flight directors in Houston, and the computers on board the CM and at MCC, started an exhaustive series of checks that was to last one and a half orbits, before the S-IVB engine was restarted to put them on the flight path to the moon.

GET 00:16 (hours:minutes)  The tracking station in the Canary Islands took over from the dish at Cape Kennedy.  In turn, the Canary Islands handed over to Tananarive in Madagascar, then Carnarvon in western Australia, the Honeysuckle dish near Canberra, and so on round the globe as they completed their ninety-minute orbit.  Coming up over the complex of dishes at Goldstone in California, the Apollo 11 crew switched on their television camera for the first time but equipment on the ground was not yet ready.  'Not too unusual,' remarked some rather unkind person at MCC.

The Invasion of the Moon 1969: The Story of Apollo 11, Peter Ryan, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, UK (1969), page 71