Documents / Document
This is Volume 1 of NASA's Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, dated July 31, 1969. The Mission Operations Branch of the Flight Crew Support Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston prepared it, and it was originally classified Confidential. In it Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins go phase by phase through suiting, launch, powered flight, Earth orbit and lunar surface activities. They comment on suit fit, vibration, checklists, lunar dust, footing and poor sleeping conditions in the lunar module. A section titled Visual Sightings appears in the table of contents.
“Roll”17 pages
# CONFIDENTIAL COLLINS to the horizon. They kept telling me that it was all (CONT'D) right to go ahead and mark anyway. ALDRIN They didn't really mean that. We're sure they didn't. Now, I'm not sure what they meant. Maybe you hit the nail on the head. What they meant was that the spacecraft did not have to be rolled in such a manner that the spacecraft roll was parallel to the substellar point. In other words, what they were saying is that the computer program could accommodate a change in spacecraft roll simply by torquing the optics around to go off at a peculiar angle. Nonetheless, when you look through the sextant to get accurate marks, you must have the reticle pattern parallel to the horizon or you are not measuring the true angle between the star and horizon. Here's the star and the horizon, and instead of measuring this angle, you're measuring this angle or that angle or some other oblique angle that is larger than the true angle, which is the angle from the star normal to the horizon. So this initial run on P23 got very confused. The following day, the problem went away because we were far enough away from the Earth, and the fact that their angles were not at the substellar point became immaterial because the Earth was small enough that a very small maneuver on my part could locate the CONFIDENTIAL
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 251 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.