project apollo

"The mission of Apollo 11 is one of the greatest achievements in human history – hundreds of thousands of people spread across tens of thousands of companies all focused on putting the first humans on another world.”

TODD DOUGLAS MILLER,
director of Apollo 11

Project Apollo

Project Apollo’s goals went beyond landing Americans on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth. They included 1) establishing the technology to meet other national interests in space;

2) achieving pre-eminence in space for the United States;

 3) carrying out a program of scientific exploration of the moon,

 4) developing man’s capability to work in the lunar environment.

Nostalgia for that great year in history ... 1969
• Where were you on July 20, 1969 when man first walked on the moon?
• Grandparents can take their grand kids to the movie and tell their stories.
• Tap into the music and culture of the day… the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Woodstock was only 3 weeks away. 

Moon Rock and Apollo Exhibits 

If you know about a moon rock, Apollo artifacts or other space exhibits, now is the
time to feature these valuable items and a program around the film celebrating the science, technology and history of the Apollo missions.So please visit PGSC (Pushpa Gujral Science City) ,Kapurthala, Punjab.

The six Apollo missions that landed astronauts on the Moon returned a collection ofrocks and sediment samples weighing 382 kilograms and consisting of more than2,000 separate samples.

Moon Rock

 

MOON ROCKS UNDER

                 Transmitted polarized light photomicrograph of 30 micrometer thin section sample obtained from the Mare Tranquillitatis lunar region by Apollo 11 astronauts “Buzz” Aldrin and Niel Armstrong. This basaltic lava sample is high in iron and titanium and is approximately 3.7 billion years old.

Technology
Then and Now

Great message for young people:: Your smartphone is
millions of times more powerful than NASA’s combined
computing in 1969. It shows what you can do with
creativity and determination!
Computers were used for only a limited number of tasks
on Apollo, such as guidance and communications. But
Apollo did use computers for the FIRST TIME, launching
the computer era.

There is more
COMPUTING POWER
in your cell phone than the
entire computing power for the
Apollo 11 program.

     At left is the now ancient Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) developed by MIT. Astronauts could type in nouns and verbs that controlled the spacecraft. It only had 64K byte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.

Then …at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland flight technicians and computer experts employed the

IBM System/360 Model 75s mainframe for independent computations and to maintain

communications between Earth and lunar landers. These computers cost $3.5 million each and were the size of a car! Now … A simple USB stick is more powerfull.

She wrote the code that helped land
man on the moon.

Margaret Hamilton, from MIT, stands next to program “listings” of the actual computer code that she wrote by hand for the Apollo Guidance Computer. She is credited with inventing the term “software engineering.” “There was no choice but to be pioneers,” she said. In 2016 she received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama for her pioneering work.