Spacelog Apollo 11

That's affirmative.

11, Houston. Do you read?

Roger. We read you. It seems to be rather marginal on the high gain.

Roger. We concur.

Houston, Apollo 11. Could you give us a time of crossing the prime meridian 150 west? Over.

Roger. Stand by about a half a second, here. Okay. Your time of crossing the 150 west meridian will be 77 50 05. Over.

Thank you.

11, this is Houston. We have about 6 minutes remaining until LOS, and in order that we may configure our ground lines, we'd like to know if you're still planning to have the TV up with the beginning of the next pass. Over.

Roger, Houston. We'll try to have it ready.

This is Houston. We are inquiring if it is your plan to. Over.

It never was our plan to; but it's in the flight plan, so I guess we'll do it.

Houston. Roger. Out.

11, Houston.

Roger. Go ahead.

For use in connection with the prime meridian crossing, you have an orbital period now of 2 hours 8 minutes and 37 seconds. Over.

Thank you.

Apollo 11, this is Houston. A little over 2 minutes to LOS. All your systems parameters and orbit are looking good from the ground. We have AOS on the other side at 78 23 31. Over.

Roger. 78 23 21.

Roger. That was 31 on the end.

Apollo 11, this is Houston. Over.

This is Apollo 11. Are you picking up our signals okay?

Apollo 11, this is Houston. Affirmative. We are reading you loud and clear on voice and we have a good clear TV picture, a little bright crater in the —

— No, no, no —

— the bottom of the picture. I guess that's the spot on the tube.

I'm sorry about that one.

And if you give us P00 and ACCEPT, we will uplink our new state vector and target load to you.

Okay.

Houston, Apollo 11. One of the larger craters on the back side—I noticed a small, dark speck on the outer wall and I put the monocular on it. I was able to see—oh, an area maybe a quarter of a mile in diameter. It was really a freshlooking dark colored pit, and that seems to be in contrast with all the other fresh little craters or holes that you can perceive on the walls of any of these craters. Around this particular one there seems to be two or three of these—especially the one that caught my attention. Quite remarkable. Over.

Roger. Do you have a location on that one?

No, not a precise one. I've got several pictures of it, though.

Roger. We copy.

We're getting a beautiful picture in down there now, 11. The color's coming in quite clearly, and we can see the horizon and the relative blackness of space, and without getting into the question of grays and browns, it looks, at least on our monitor, sort of a brownish gray.

That's a good, reasonable way of describing it. It appears to me as though it made a difference just sitting back in the tunnel and gazing at all windows; it makes a difference which one you're looking out of. For example, the camera right now is looking out the number 5 window, and it definitely gives a rosier or tanner tinge, especially when you look straight through it and not at an angle. Over.

Roger.

And if you rear back 95 or 100 degrees …

… Still holding … Okay.

Say again, 11?

I'd say we're about 95 degrees east, coming up on Smyth's Sea.

Roger. And for your information, we show you at an altitude of about 92 miles above the surface right now.

Okay.

Houston, Apollo 11. Could you observe a difference in the N₂ pressures before LOI? It seems to me as though the two were not equal on the … B tank was a little low on pressure. Over.

I'm flying it in SPS minimum impulse, Houston, and it's rather difficult to keep it on a constant data. The LM wants to wander up and down. I'm not sure if it's in response to MASCONN's or what, but I can get it completely stabilized in DATA and let it alone, and in another couple of minutes it will have developed its own rate.

This is Houston. Roger.

Houston, we'll be moving shortly from the side window to the hatch window, and we'll try and pick up some of the landmarks that we'll be looking at as we approach the powered descent. Over.

11, this is Houston. Roger. And we're through with the uplinks; the computer is yours. You can go to BLOCK and we'll have the information on nitrogen for you shortly. Over.

Roger. Copy.

Okay, Houston. Several minutes ago I was exactly steady on data, and since then I have been moving toward the LM, pointed straight down toward the radius vector, and that's been despite a number of down minimum pitch impulses.

Here we show you over the Sea of Fertility now, and we ought to have Langrenus down south of track a few degrees, about 9 degrees south of track.

Now the crater that's in the center of the screen now is Webb. We'd be looking straight down on it at about 6 minutes before power descent. It has a relatively flat bottom to the crater, and you can see maybe two or three craters that are in the bottom of it on the western wall, the wall that's now nearest the—the camera. Near the bottom of the screen, we can see a dimple crater, just on the outside. And then coming back toward the bottom of the screen and to the left, you can see a series of depressions. It's this type of connected craters that give us most interest to discover why they're in the particular pattern that they're in. I'll zoom the camera in now and try and give you a closer look at it.

Roger. We're observing the dimple crater now. The central peak we can see on the Orbiter photos doesn't seem to stand out very well here.

Well, they're not central peaks. They're depressions in the center.

Roger.

And you'll notice on the pitch thruster activity, I've still—I've put in a dozen minimum impulses in pitchdown, and I'm still far from correcting back to 315.