Not one but two Aussie dishes were used to get the TV signals back from the Apollo 11 moonwalk

The Conversation (Australia) ^ | 19th July 2019 | John Sarkissian

[Don W]

17 blondes, 2 brown and a mousey. Nope, no redheads= no cheers from me.

[Equine1952]

I read the start of your posting, and immediately thought two Australian babes pulled it off? That’s how old and out of the loop I am. I remember listening to and watching what was on limited tv news. I also am still fond of the idea of two Aussie dishes. 😊

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

After Apollo, came the Shuttle. Canada gave NASA the Canadarm.

On to the True-dope Jr. era. Justine wants to give the US something, too. The previous generation gave America the Arm, Justine gives PDJT the finger at every opportunity.

We used to have ‘statesmen’ Prime Ministers, to one degree or another. Now, we have a petulant forty seven year old who acts like a prepubescent little girl. God help us!

[A strike]

Back when Britain, Canada, US, NZ and Australia meant a good thing.

[Midwesterner53]

God bless our friends in Australia!

[golux]

Cool article. Thanks!

“...The Commonwealth Rocket Range at Woomera...”

Naturally it only takes a few paragraphs in an Aussie article until one starts seeing strange names...

[dakine]

FVEY...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

On 20 July, Apollo 11 was in lunar orbit. Pointing and sensitivity checks were performed on the spacecraft in preparation for the landing and EVA. During this period an interesting observation was performed by the Observatory's senior receiver engineer, Dave Cooke (who later became the Director of the Parkes Observatory), and a young PhD student, Jasper Wall (who later became the Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As the spacecraft moved behind the Moon and the signal was lost, they fed the signals directly into the observatory's new PDP-9 computer (the observatory's first computer, purchased by John Shimmins in 1967 and arriving in April 1968). They produced plots of a classic Fresnel diffraction pattern as the point source signal passed behind the Moon's knife edge.

Jasper Wall relates the following:

"The occultation trace was made by Dave Cooke and myself. We noticed how the chart record produced this superb pattern as we tracked the spacecraft's disappearance behind the moon and its reappearance. We'd just got the PDP-9 computer system up and running and were working hard on making it sample so that we could record and analyse survey data on-line. But it was in a primitive state. We could make it sample, but not display what it was sampling. Thus for the next occultation, we set up to record it by sampling the receiver output (a novel concept) and hammering it all on to punch tape. With no display, we then had to read back hundreds of meters of punch tape, looking at numbers to find where the occultation was ... took us hours I remember, and the punch tape dripped from the control room down the gap in the stairs to the ground floor, where it piled up..." All the spacecraft and telescope systems were fully checked and were now ready for the great day.

[naturalman1975]

It’s a very appropriate name for a rocket range - a woomera is a spear throwing stick in the Dharug aboriginal language that was spoken around Sydney - designed to hurl a spear with greater force than an arm alone can manage.

[Celtic Conservative]

I saw what you did there👍😀

CC

[foreverfree]

bump

[TalBlack]

It was a typical July winter’s day – grey overcast skies with rain and high winds.

LOL!

[bert]

Yeah Ausies!!

You can stream excellent Ausie TV on ACORN

[gov_bean_ counter]

👍

[zeugma]

Asking for a FRiend who still mourns the loss of the “only” high quality tape of the original signal...

From what I understand, they recovered some of that video. It was sitting in a closet somewhere, degrading. Only the government could manage to lose the master tapes of the most important video ever shot.

This is why we call it "government-level incompetence".