The little moon rover in my last post had an antenna. We recognize the concept today because there are about 88 billion Dish antennas (yes, yes, I know) scattered across the earth. We have the deep space network to get the least little thing out of our starships and other Voyagers. My question is, just WTF was that stupid antenna for? It's clearly not stabilized. UHF or VHF could be heard any place on earth with a radio and I'm pretty sure the Apollo didn't need a special antenna to hear the two guys on the moon.
Clearly, it's aliens.
4 comments:
...Almost certain the rover antenna was used for transmitting a live television picture from a camera on the rover.
OK, but how?
...A high gain antenna that was not used when moving, but could monitor the astronauts and terrain (with geologists watching avidly) at each stop..Ground control worked the camera...Apollo 17 got it right to watch the LEM when it lifted from the moon..Don McCollor...
when stopped, manually trained the antenna on the earth by line of sight. S-band. one way telecommunication, voice was a different system, very low power output and way before LSI integrated circuit chips and apple computers, DSN antenna in Australia was necessary to pluck the signal out of the noise. it was a very good picture that first step, the problem was what you saw on the home TV screen
was a screen shot of a video screen in australia sent to the states by undersea cable. hence the very rough noisy picture you saw. first couple of video cameras sent with the crews were vidicon tube type susceptible to Mr. Sun burning the tube out. the last few missions used cameras with extremely expensive CMOS chip image receptors instead of the tubes. somewhat less sensitive to looking Mr. Sun in the face. and in COLOR! some day, some enterprising person will go to the moon and recover the rovers that were left there and have a used car sale to end all used car sales.
Post a Comment