Monday, December 24, 2018
50 Years Ago: Xmas From the Moon
The broadcast, at the time, was watched by more people than any other TV show or event.
I was such a space geek, at the time, that my parents put their TV in my room for manned missions. I saw this oen, live.
It wasn't until a couple of years later, when the main oxygen tank of the Apollo 13 Service Module blew up, that people understood the risk of going into orbit around the Moon entailed.
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2 comments:
I am surprised that we haven't sent more camera bots into orbit around celestial bodies like the Moon and Mars and others. I know the signal feed may be insane to manage at longer distances, but an ongoing live feed of Saturn would be mind-blowing (for about a week).
Bandwidth. There’s simply no way to “stream” a live view at any real distance. The broadcast power of the probes we send is pretty small, Cassini-Huggens was pushing all of 81w at its estimated peak. The only “real-time” transmission (actually about 80 minutes delayed) was the RSS system, which only transmitted a carrier signal. This system allowed determination of various gases and objects that the radio waves interfered with. For total downlinked data per day, Cassini can return about 5 GB total per day. So it could possibly return a 240p video signal a maximum of 16 hours day...except that 4 of those 5 GB occurred when the craft reoriented to aim its high gain antenna at earth for 9 hours a day, rendering it unable to make observations.
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