Apollo 15 and 16 Ground-Commanded Television Assembly

The Ground Commanded Television Assembly, developed by the Astro-Electronics Division of RCA Corp. for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, represented a new level of performance for space application television equipment. During the Apollo 15 and 16 missions; a special camera provided the scientific community and the home viewer with real-time coverage of the lunar exploration. The lunar blast-off of the Apollo 16 ascent module was tracked by the mission controller at NASA's Manned Space Center and watched 250,000 miles away on earth. The operation of this television camera and the remote control unit arc described and block diagrams given. Ground-command capability from the Mission Control Center permitted versatility and optimization of the TV coverage, without diverting the astronauts from their primary role of lunar exploration. — The assembly consisted of a color TV camera, which utilized the now familiar field-sequential color wheel to generate color TV images, and a TV control unit. During operation on the lunar Rover, the color television camera video signal was routed through the television control unit where a vertical interval test signal was inserted. Next, the signal was supplied to the Lunar Communications Relay Unit where it was used to modulate a 10-W, S-band transmitter. The transmitter output was beamed to earth, received at one of the four earth sites and relayed to NASA's Manned Space Center at Houston, where the field-sequential format was converted to standard NTSC video and supplied to the TV pool for network transmission.

Print ISSN

0361-4573

Published

1972-12

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J08179