Animation of Apollo LM/CSM docking hardware and procedures

[jfb]

This randomly showed up in my feed the other day - it's a good animation and explanation of the Apollo docking hardware between the LM and CSM.

I had never really understood how that whole system worked, and found this to be a good overview. 

[JayUtah]

This is superb.  I sent the link to my first mentor, who worked on the docking probe and was one of the people consulted when Apollo 14 couldn't dock.  His academic research was also in computer modeling, so he will be further interested in the skill which which this animation was put together.

And yes, it's actually common even for people in the know to be unsure about the docking mechanism.  I knew an engineer who worked for North American on Apollo, who wasn't really sure.  (He specialized in re-entry.)

[bknight]

So it was a bit of debris on the locking ring that prevented some of the latches from fully engaging the locking ring.
Great animation.