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After piloting a paralyzed spacecraft around the other side of the moon, the NASA attack crew Apollo 13 got some good news on April 14, 1970. Turns out they had an earthquake.
In a new video of the Apollo 13 flight, NASA has put together synchronized video, audio, and images to chronicle the time Mission Control radioed the success of the mission’s seismic experiment. That experiment, which crashed an upper-stage booster from Apollo 13’s Saturn V rocket into the moon, was detected by a seismometer delivered to the lunar surface months earlier by the Apollo 12 crew.
“It looks like its propeller just hit the moon, and it’s shaking it up a bit,” capsule communicator Vance Brand told the NASA Mission Control Apollo 13 crew in Houston in the video, which was launched by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland He was referring to data collected by the Apollo 12 seismometer at 85 miles (136 kilometers) from the crash site.
Related: Jim Lovell and Fred Haise of Apollo 13 on their mission 50 years later
Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell, who a day earlier had seen his Odyssey Command Module Spaceship suffer the effects of an explosion in the service module which tore up vital connections to obtain energy and breathe air, responded laconically from a distance of approximately 200,000 miles (322,000 km) from NASA.
“Well, at least something worked on this flight,” said Lovell, who was battling for survival alongside his crewmates Fred Haise and Jack Swigert as he realized that his long-planned moon landing would never come true.
In the new NASA video, Brand starts speaking again, but stops when he hears a second broadcast coming from the crew of three astronauts. At the time, Lovell, Haise and Swigert They were using their moon lander, the Aquarius (LM) moon module, as a lifeboat to return to Earth since their command module was disabled.
“Go ahead,” Brand said.
“I mean, I’m sure we didn’t have an LM impact too,” Haise joked.
Brand paused, then lengthened his response: “Correct.”
The worldwide rescue effort to bring astronauts home was successful days later, when Odyssey successfully dove into the Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970. All three astronauts emerged in relatively good health, given that they had spent much of it from last week in cold conditions with little water available.
Lovell is now 92 and Haise 86, although Swigert died of cancer in 1982. Decades after the dangerous flight, Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger wrote a book about the mission, originally titled “Lost moon“that inspired the popular 1995 Hollywood movie, “Apollo 13.”
Seismometers placed by most Apollo landing gear allowed scientists to learn more about the moon’s structure, including monitoring lunar earthquakes and examining seismographic waves when Saturn V rocket the stages were deliberately thrown to the surface. That said, no one knew exactly where, on the moon, the Apollo 13 S-IVB upper stage made its mark until 2010, when the high-definition images of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed the crater left behind.
While the crew’s reaction to the impact has been available in transcripts for decades, the audio has been inactive at the National Archives and Records Administration since NASA donated it to the institution in 1970, Goddard said. in the same statement. The audio equipment available at the facility was unable to reproduce the footage, requiring a new rescue effort 45 years after the mission.
In 2015, the National Science Foundation funded work to restore audio equipment at the Johnson Space Center that could reproduce the footage, allowing 7,200 hours of Apollo 13 audio to be digitized. The audio was released publicly in 2020 in ApolloInRealTime.org.
The usual anniversary celebrations for an Apollo milestone will not take place this week, due to restrictions in place to address the spread of the new coronavirus. That said, NASA and other entities have Apollo 13 multimedia and other resources available online, including a new NASA documentary.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us On twitter @Spacedotcom and in Facebook.
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