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• Log 01: Houston, do you read?

  Tom Mladenov • 4 days ago • 0 comments

  The general idea was to preserve the Orbit Map in a way which resembles Mission Control in Houston. The MOCR (Mission Operations Control Room had a series of huge projection displays at the front of the control room). These showed orbit tracks, launch graphs and other live projections during various mission phases.
  
  

  The orbit maps themselves are were also used in the control room and can be seen in below frame on the right during the Apollo 13 mission:

  A nice technical drawing of the room can be found on the Honeysuckle Creek website, a well documented Apollo tracking station in Eastern Australia.
  

  I ended up going for an acrylic LED concept and started scanning the entire map in sections, stitching them together and then calibrating it such that it was true to size, loading the PNG into Inkscape and tracing the sections that should be lighting up on the map. Below image shows in magenta the to-be-laser engraved traces, mirrored as they should be lasered on the back side of the plexiglass.

  The final magenta SVG shapes were sent to the laser engraver along with the plexiglass material

  
  Next up was the alignment and plexiglass sandwich the map between a milky plexi back-sheet and the engraved clear front sheet (engraved on the side facing inward), including some brackets for the stands.

  
  Next up will be the lighting and pulley system for the spacecraft position indicator.

• Log 00: A Space Map?

  Tom Mladenov • 12/27/2024 at 16:39 • 0 comments

  LCame across a cool orbit chart of Apollo 17 on Ebay. You might have seen these as they were drawn up by a subcontractor of NASA with given launch parameters which allowed calculation of the AOS and LOS times - that is the times they are expected to come into and out of contact of the various NASA ground stations during the first earth revolutions.
  
  This one is for Apollo 17 for a December 6th 1972 launch date. Apollo 17 actually launched on December 7th, the cause of the 1-day delay being a failure of the sequencer to command pressurization of the S-IVB liquid oxygen tank.

  
  The map measures roughly 3.5x1.5 feet and has that usual 1970s musty smell which it unleashed once unfurled into this beautiful diorama of orbital mechanics representation.

  The circles on the map represent the "footprint" of the groundstations, if the ground track position of the spacecraft is within this circcle, there is a line-of-sight from the S/C to the ground antennas. They are not perfect circles due to horizon blockages by trees, buildings and mountains. However the red station marked "VAN" does appear to have a clean coverage, in fact this was the Vanguard tracking ship and had great coverage due to no blockages out on the ocean!
  The map shows the first tree Earth revolutions for launch azimuths 72 and 100 degrees (marked in between the tracks), when Apollo 17 launched a day later, the actual launch azimuth was around 82 degrees. The orbit tracks also feature boxes on them with the lapsed time since launch in hours/minutes notation which can be used to read the expected AOS and LOS contact times with the various ground sites.
  

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