Surveyor confirms a solid surface for Apollo lunar landing

©Mark Ollig

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to land the first humans on the moon is less than two months away.

Three years before the Apollo 11’s lunar module (named Eagle) successfully touched down on the lunar surface, another NASA spacecraft had already safely landed.

Named Surveyor 1, this robotic lunar lander was launched May 30, 1966, from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

June 3, 1966, Surveyor 1 fired its retrorocket and three thrusters as it descended toward the moon’s surface. Its speed slowed to 3 mph as it gently landed on the moon.

Surveyor 1 had become the first spacecraft launched by NASA to safely land on the moon.

Its current location is in the Oceanus Procellarum, or “Oceans of Storms.” Looking at a full moon, its position would be near 9 o’clock.

Surveyor 1’s mission was in preparation for the Apollo moon landings. It contained scientific instruments for surveying (no pun intended) the moon’s surface, measuring its temperatures, and using onboard cameras to photograph the lunar surface.

The first photo from Surveyor 1 on the surface of the moon confirmed an Apollo lunar module landing on the moon’s surface would not sink into a top layer of dust; as some had thought.

Surveyor 1’s landing foot was seen firmly resting atop the lunar soil.

A total of 11,237 pictures were taken by Surveyor 1.

Communications between NASA and Surveyor 1 took place using radio-telemetry over NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN).

The DSN is a vast, worldwide array of radio antennas located in California, Spain, and Australia.

Communication with NASA’s Earth-orbiting and interplanetary spacecraft is accomplished using the DSN.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, are still communicating with the DSN several times each week from distances of 11.7 and 9.5 billion miles, respectively.

July 28, 1964, NASA’s Ranger 7 was launched from Florida and headed toward the moon.

Ranger 7 was not designed to land. Instead, the specific data it obtained was transmitted to Earth before its mission ended upon impact with the moon’s surface July 31.

However, valuable information was obtained from Ranger 7 before its mission ended.

Before colliding with the moon’s surface, Ranger 7’s six cameras took 4,316 photographs of the lunar surface, which were converted into an RF (radio frequency) and transmitted to Earth using the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna.

Ranger 7 also took the first photograph of the moon’s surface from a US spacecraft about 17 minutes before it crashed. You can see the photo here: https://go.nasa.gov/2EABMrq.

With only 1,703 feet before impacting the moon in an area called Mare Cognitum, Ranger 7 took its last two photos of the lunar surface. Those photos can be seen at https://go.nasa.gov/2Wtgrdo.

Historically, the world’s first human-made spacecraft to reach (crash) onto the moon’s surface was named Luna 2, also known as Lunik 2. It was launched by the Soviet Union Sept. 12, 1959, from Tyuratam, USSR. It crashed on the moon’s surface Sept. 14.

Before it crashed, Luna 2’s sensors radioed back to Earth no evidence of a lunar magnetic field or radiation belt circling the moon.

After 33.5 hours of operation, Luna 2’s radio signals ended, indicating it had impacted on the moon.

Luna 2 was designed so that upon lunar impact, two pentagonal-shaped titanium spheres would be scattered across the lunar surface.

The metallic spheres imprinted in Russian read “CCCP September 1959,” and include a symbol showing a wreath of grain around a hammer and sickle.

It is not known whether the two spheres survived or were vaporized when Luna 2 struck the moon at 7,382 mph; the impact temperature was estimated to be over 19,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Feb. 3, 1966, four months before Surveyor 1, the Soviet Union’s 5-foot sphere-shaped, Luna 9 robotic lander became the world’s first spacecraft to successfully soft-land on the surface of the moon.

The 218-pound lander, using its onboard television camera, took several photographs of the moon’s surface, which were radioed back to Earth.

As for the Surveyor 1, it stopped operating Jan. 7, 1967; NASA could no longer receive radio signals from it.

In 2009, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed Surveyor 1’s current resting place on the moon’s surface.

In the photograph, Surveyor 1 is very small; although if you zoom in, the shadow it casts can be seen. Check it out using this link: https://bit.ly/2Kal8SQ.

NASA’s Surveyor 3 spacecraft landed on the moon April 20, 1967, and was operational until May 4.

Nov. 19, 1969, Apollo 12’s lunar module (named Intrepid), landed 525 feet from the Surveyor 3 spacecraft.

The two astronauts aboard Intrepid explored Surveyor 3’s landing site during their second EVA (extravehicular activity).

The astronauts took photographs and removed electronic parts from the lander to bring back to Earth for analysis.

Surveyor 1

Surveyor 3 and Apollo 12 Commander Charles Conrad Jr. (Intrepid lunar module seen in the background)

USSR's Luna 2's pentagonal-shaped titanium spheres 

Photo taken from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of Surveyor 1 in 2009

Closeup zoom (noticed the shadow cast to the right of Surveyor 1.
Photo taken from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of Surveyor 1 in 2009

The Cuban Missile Crisis establishes the ‘hotline’

©Mark Ollig  

“Get Premier Kissov on the hotline,” said US President Merkin Muffley during the 1964 movie, “Dr. Strangelove.”

Muffley is using the direct telephone hotline connection with the Russian premier in hopes of avoiding nuclear war.

An earlier scene in the movie mentions the infamous “red phone.”

The US president’s hotline telephone was specifically highlighted during scenes in the 1964 movie, “Fail Safe.” Although the movie was filmed in black-and-white, I assume the hotline phone was red.

Come to think of it, the 1960s television series, “Batman,” featured a red Bat Phone with a direct hotline to Commissioner Gordon’s office.

And so, the hotline became thought of as a red telephone sitting on the desks of the US president and Russian Soviet leader. An immediate connection between the two occurred whenever the handset of either phone was lifted.

Well, that’s not quite how it worked.

The hotline was not a red telephone, but a teletype printer. There was one inside the US Pentagon, and one inside Russia’s Kremlin.

Due to the lengthy amount of time required to send, receive, and decipher messages with the Russian premier during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, both countries came very close to having a nuclear confrontation, which would have resulted in massive devastation and an enormous loss of life.

There were plenty of atomic missiles around during October 1962; the US nuclear warhead total was 3,500, while the Russian stockpile had about 580.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the Cuban Missile Crisis ended without nuclear missiles being used.

Talks then began in earnest about implementing a direct communication link; a hotline between the two superpowers. This hotline would be used to reduce the risk of nuclear war because of delayed communications.

June 20, 1963, the US and Russia signed the “Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.”

The memorandum understanding became known as the hotline agreement.

“For use in time of emergency, the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] have agreed to establish as soon as technically feasible a direct communications link between the two Governments,” the memorandum began.

Ensuring the continued operation of the communications link and rapid delivery of any messages received over it would be the responsibility of each government.

Some of the technical specifics of the 1963 hotline agreement included:

• Telegraph-teleprinter equipment used for exchanging communications.

• One uninterrupted duplex wire telegraph circuit route connecting Washington to Moscow via London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Helsinki for message transmissions.

• One full-time duplex radiotelegraph circuit routed from Washington to Tangier to Moscow, which shall be used for service communications and for coordination of operations.

Some of the equipment installed inside the Pentagon for the Washington hotline was provided by the Russian company, Avtomatika Concern. This equipment was tested and approved by US specialists.

American communications equipment was also installed inside the Kremlin for the Moscow end of the hotline.

If a US president wanted to quickly contact the Soviet premier/leader, they would call the Pentagon (by phone) with the message to be sent over the hotline to Moscow.

Both the US and Russia encrypted text messages using an ETCRRM (Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer) cipher machine built in Norway.

The physical path used for a hotline between the US and Russia was the TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1) submarine copper coaxial cable system. TAT-1 consisted of two individually amplified cables; one for transmitting and one for receiving.

The two cables, totaling 4,000 miles, were placed 3.7 miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean. TAT-1 became operational Sept. 25, 1956.

In the event the physical cable between the two countries was disrupted, the dedicated radio circuit between Washington and Moscow using a radio relay station in the city of Tangier, located in northwestern Morocco, would be used for message exchanges.

Aug. 30, 1963, the first test message was sent over the hotline from Washington to Moscow: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890.”

Rumor has it the Russians responded with “What does it mean when your people say the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog?

The hotline was first used by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, to inform Russia of the US Naval fleet movements in the Mediterranean region during the Middle East Six-Day War.

President Richard Nixon used the hotline in 1971 and 1973.

The hotline agreement was updated in 1971, to provide the addition of two satellite circuits, which became fully-operational in 1978, the same year the TAT-1 cable was retired. The physical path of the hotline was transferred to a transatlantic fiber optic cable.

By 1980, Norway’s ETCRRM cipher machines were replaced by the Siemens M-190.

In 1986, high-speed facsimile (fax) telecopy machines were added to the “hotline.” They could be used to send typed messages, maps, charts, and drawings.

Since 2008, a dedicated computer network links Washington and Moscow for sending and receiving email, and instant messaging chat.

Oct. 31, 2016, President Obama used the hotline’s secure satellite connection to send a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about his concerns with computer cyber hackers disrupting the upcoming US election.

“This age of fast-moving events requires quick, dependable communication in time of emergency,” President John F. Kennedy said June 20, 1963. He added, the hotline agreement was a “first step to help reduce the risk of war occurring by accident or miscalculation.”

The Memorandum of Understanding has been active for 56 years and, so far, there has been no nuclear exchange between the US and Russia.

It seems having a hotline keeps things from boiling over.

The "Bat Phone"

Red Phone in the Jimmy carter libray

"Fail Safe"

Our ‘common information space’

       

©Mark Ollig  

 

Tim Berners-Lee, an engineer and computer scientist, wrote the programming code we use to point and click our way through the web portion of the internet.

I say “portion,” because the web and the internet, despite what folks may think, are not synonymous with each other.

The internet is an interconnected global data network made up of computers, routers, gateways, and cables. TCP/IP communication protocols send and receive packets of information. A packet of data can be compared with an addressed envelope.

If you put the correct address on a packet and drop it off into any computer connected on the internet, the computer would figure out which path to send it down next, until the packet reaches its final destination.

The internet will deliver packets to an internet destination anywhere in the world using various protocols, and it does this very quickly – usually under one second.

“The web is simply a name for all the information you can get online,” said Berners-Lee.

In 1989, Berners-Lee, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, proposed a global hypertext space where any network-accessible information could be referred to by a Universal Document Identifier (UDI).

The UDI is known today as the Uniform Resource Locator or the URL we type when accessing a particular website.

Berners-Lee called his web creation, a “global hypertext system.”

By 1990, Berners-Lee finished programming the code for the web browser application, calling it a “WorldWideWeb Program.”

May 17, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee installed his newly-coded HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) software on his NeXTcube computer.

Berners-Lee’s NeXTcube computer had become the first web server connected to the internet.

Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web platform was operating as an overlay on the internet to support his newly-created web protocols.

Aug. 6, 1991, the first web page was created by Tim Berners-Lee on his NeXTcube computer and was publically-available over the internet.

This website was publicized by Berners-Lee on several internet newsgroups, including alt-groups such as alt.hypertext.

The eyes of internet users opened wide upon understanding the potential uses for websites.

The tremendous growth of new websites with unique themes over a global internet had begun in earnest; a new chapter in the lives of our virtual online community had begun.

The rest, as they say, is history.

In 1996, the undertaking of storing and preserving the rising number of webpages from the internet was started by an organization called the Internet Archive.

This organization began with a mission to preserve past and current internet webpages – and other types of online data – so future generations could look back, research, and educate themselves with the internet’s historical information as initially presented.

“The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past,” their original mission statement said.

Each day, the Internet Archive collects, organizes, catalogs, and preserves web content from websites on the internet, and from the data files uploaded by the public.

This organization preserves and stores digital records for future generations, and offers historians, students, researchers, and you and me, access to the many thousands of digitally-saved historical collections.

These free collections contain a treasure trove of photographs, books, movies, music, audio files, software, educational and historical references, and archived internet web pages.

I think of the Internet Archive as a continuing collection of websites being stored in a digital time capsule.

As I have done, you too can upload videos, text, audio, and photos to be archived for current and future generations. To begin, you will need to obtain your Internet Archive virtual library card at http://bit.ly/2gxWGJV.

“The dream behind the Web is of a ‘common information space’ in which we communicate by sharing information,” said Berners-Lee in 1989.

Thirty years later, his dream has progressed from sharing information on websites to using specific web apps for monitoring, analyzing, and advancing information obtained from electronic devices which make up the Internet of Things.

The world’s first website can be seen at https://bit.ly/2V08wUe.

The Internet Archive website is https://archive.org.

The first web page went made by Tim Berners-Lee.
It ran on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN
August 6, 1991

The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.
Photo by Coolcaesar at the English language Wikipedia