Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift

Author:Earl Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Custom House
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

“Since you didn’t have TV under way, and you could go a couple of kilometers between stops, I was sort of the travel guide as well as the navigator. As John drove, I was keeping him on course, but I was also taking pictures every fifty meters,” using a custom-made, motorized Hasselblad attached to the chest of his space suit. “And I was describing the terrain: ‘Now we’re in a blocky area—blocks of such-and-such size,’ and ‘Now the rocks have disappeared, and we’re going over another ridge, and it’s smooth but undulating.’ Those kinds of descriptions, so that they could match where we were to the pictures I took. It was kind of like being a travel guide on a tour bus.”

The other crews decided on the same division of labor: the commander would drive the rover, and the lunar module pilot would ride. “Occasionally we turned on the movie camera,” Duke added. “We had a sixteen-millimeter movie camera that was mounted to a post right next to the instrument panel.” Its primary purpose was to capture moving pictures while the rover was itself moving. NASA called it a “data acquisition camera,” or DAC. The label was so vague as to be virtually meaningless, but it gave the astronauts another acronym to use.

When the astronauts weren’t on hand, Survey staffers used the Grover to time and streamline sample gathering for the upcoming Apollo missions. By monitoring its TV and radio feeds from their offices in Flagstaff, geologists practiced the role they’d play at Mission Control in real time. In terms of bang for the buck, the Grover might have been the Apollo program’s best purchase.

Then again, if things had been running smoothly in Huntsville and Santa Barbara, it wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

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