How NASA Captured This Iconic Footage Of Apollo 17 Leaving The Moon

When Apollo 17 lifted off from the moon 42 year ago this week , a tv camera captured the front of the spacecraft — even though nobody was left behind to , say , found a lunar base . How was that potential ?

The solution : With a television camera on the lunar scouter that could be controlled — or even programmed — from Earth .

Pretty telling applied science for the takeoff 42 years ago on December 14 in 1972 — although it took three endeavour to get the technique the right way .

Here ’s the complete video of the Apollo 17 lunar takeoff . The natural action gets start at the 3:00 fall guy .

As the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum explain in a2011 web log post , the camera was available on Apollos 15 , 16 and 17 . The television set camera communicated from Earth using a in high spirits - addition antenna on the rover , but there was a slender time delay for the radio wave to travel ( a dyad of seconds ) between the Earth and the Moon .

So the engineers suggested moving the wanderer a sure aloofness from the lunar faculty and setting the camera to automatically slant to show the lunar liftoff when dominate from Earth .

Second Screen Portable 15 Monitor

That was the plan , at least . On Apollo 15 , the tilt mechanism malfunction and the camera never travel upwards , allowing the lunar module to slip out of sight . And while the endeavor on Apollo 16 gave a longer view of the lunar module rising up , the astronauts actually park the bird of passage too close to it , which threw off the calculations and timing of the tilt upwardly so it left scene just a few moments into the flight .

Ed Fendall was the mortal doing the controlling . In anoral history for NASA done in 2000 , he recall how complex the routine was .

Now , the way that worked was this . Harley Weyer , who worked for me , sit down and figure what the trajectory would be and where the lunar rover would be each 2nd as it moved out , and what your setting would go to . That picture you see was taken without looking at it [ the liftoff ] at all . There was no watching it and doing anything with that video . As the crowd number down , that ’s a [ Apollo ] 17 picture you see , as [ Eugene ] Cernan counted down and he knew he had to park in the right seat because I was going to kill him , he did n’t — and Gene and I are good friends , he ’ll tell you that — I actually transmit the first command at liftoff minus three endorsement . And each bidding was scripted , and all I was doing was looking at a clock , send command . I was not face at the television set . I really did n’t see it until it was over with and play back . Those were just pre - set commands that were just punched out via meter . That ’s the manner it was follow .

Hp 17 Touchscreen Laptop