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Old 20th Jul 2019, 7:10 pm   #4
Bazz4CQJ
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Oxfordshire, UK.
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Default Re: 50 years ago today (Apollo 11)

If anyone wants to know the detail about why the computer kept overloading (the 1202 alarms) the cause is explained brilliantly well here https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...-moon-landing/.

It was due to "a crazy confluence of events", but primarily, the signals from the landing radar and the rendezvous radar systems had been specified as needing to be at the same voltage and the same frequency, but the need for them to be phase-sync'd was overlooked. That detail nearly cost the mission. Of course, when Apollo 12 flew just a few months later, everything had been fixed and with no great drama, they landed within feet of their target point, and were able to stroll across to an old "Surveyor" soft landing craft and cut bits off for return to Earth.

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