Items tagged with apollo 11
If you were alive 50 years ago, and old enough to cast your eyes on a television, you no doubt remember the launch of Apollo 11. On July 16th, 1969 at 9:32am ET, the Apollo 11 Saturn V lifted off from Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral, FL, sending astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin on their journey towards the Moon. Apollo 11 made one and a half orbits around the Earth after liftoff before performing a burn to put in a trajectory to intercept the Moon. The Columbia command module and Eagle lander carrying the three astronauts entered lunar orbit on July 19th, and on July 20th, Aldrin and Armstrong detached from Columbia and descended towards the lunar surface. On July...
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On July 16th, 1969 the Apollo 11 mission commenced, shooting Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin into an orbit around the Moon. Four days later, the Apollo Lunar Module “Eagle” touched down on the Moon, after which Armstrong first stepped onto the surface to deliver this historic phrase: “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Leading up the actual anniversary, Google is paying homage to Apollo 11 starting with a new augmented reality (AR) experience. In order to join in on the action, you will need to have an AR-capable smartphone in your possession and search for “Apollo 11” in Google Search. From there, you should see...
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Houston, we have some code. The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code is now available for free online, thanks to a NASA intern that uploaded it to Github. In the 1960’s, MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of esoteric code for Apollo 11's flight software. They invented “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Margaret Hamilton, Director of Software Engineering, standing next to the stack of code The AGC code has since been available to the public for quite a while (it was uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003). He transcribed it from scanned images of the original hard copies MIT had put online. Burkey remarked, “It was scanned...
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