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– NASA has a perfect new playlist for counting 50 years of first landing on the moon next year
Well, it's almost perfect . If you were to play today on the agency's Apollo 11 audio archives and you let it pass, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would not only play on July 20th. 2019 – half a century after Neil Armstrong's "Little Step" – but would continue to play for another year, throughout the 51st anniversary of the historic mission.
The product of a partnership between NASA and the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), the audio archive contains the complete recording of the hundreds of separate conversations that took place between the flight controllers and other ground crews supporting the Apollo 11 mission. The 19,000 hours of communication channels, called "loops", cover the entire journey from Earth to Moon and vice versa.
"We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Apollo, and I'm really excited that this resource is available," said Mark Geyer, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which houses Mission Control. Bands offer a unique insight into what it takes to make history. "
The Apollo 11 main loop, air-ground exchanges between Armstrong astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins with Mission Control, it was broadcast to the public that the mission played in real time 50 years ago, but the other loops, the myriad of behind-the-scenes discussions where engineers and scientists discussed the details of the mission, were locked up on cassettes, kept in temperature-controlled boxes
These loops have never been easily accessible to the public, to technical and logistical obstacles
To begin, the only remaining functional machine capable of read the approximately 170 cassettes is in NASA's possession. To convert audio to digital for wider distribution, it is necessary to modify the SoundScriber deck to handle the 30 separate audio channels of the bands at the same time. Moreover, because the tapes also included silence between conversations, a system was needed to recognize departures and stops, as well as "hotspots" such as laughter, to produce transcripts of conversations
. Scientists at the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS) at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas were ready to take up this challenge.
Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the CRSS team developed speech therapy. techniques for rebuilding and transforming massive audio archives into "Explore Apollo", a website to provide public access to recordings. The project, in collaboration with the University of Maryland, included complete mission Apollo 11 audio and most Apollo 13, Apollo 1 and Gemini 8 missions.
"The effort is a way to contribute to the recognition of the countless scientists, engineers and specialists who have worked behind the scenes of the Apollo program to make it a success, "said John HL Hansen, Senior Research Scientist for the effort." These are really the "heroes behind the heroes" of Apollo 11! "
The conversations revealed by the archives give a glimpse of the" humans in the loop "that made Apollo possible.For example, there is a place on the bands where two NASA flight controllers work with Aldrin because the sensor measuring his breathing was not working properly.
In the extract, the Mission Control men are exploring a number of possible reasons. questi ons, and maybe 10 to 15 minutes pass. Finally, Aldrin, exasperated by the troubleshooting, informs the floor, "Well, if I stop breathing, I'll be sure to let you know!"
In another example, a flight controller responsible for putting video on large screens. the Mission Control front panel provides a channel where flight controllers can see black and white images on their consoles. Flight Director Gene Kranz informs him later that the consoles should only be used for data
The project, which included the work of a dozen people from Johnson's office of external relations , started at the end of 2013 and was completed earlier this year. . Over the past five years, staff at UT Dallas and NASA have been careful not to damage historical audio tapes while working on NASA's real-time audio projects, including the International Space Station. Said Greg Wiseman, senior audio engineer for the project at the Communications and Public Affairs Office of the Johnson Space Center. This was made possible by the large number of people "who have been concerned about the preservation of history and have found a way to communicate it to the public."
And the work continues. The 19,000 hours that make up the Apollo 11 archive only account for 25% of the Apollo project's overall record. The rest covers the first Apollo flights that circled the Earth, the Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 missions that orbited the moon and the five subsequent missions that landed on the moon after Apollo 11.
The Project also aims to develop new techniques for dealing with "noisy" audio channels, find ways to identify when conversations begin in the middle of long periods of silence and design methods to identify and track speakers by topics, keywords speaker state of mind and noise of their surroundings. [19659003″Ceprojetrassemblelesarchivesmultimédiasmassivesdel'undesévénementslesmieuxdocumentésdetoutel'histoiredel'humanitélesmissionslunairesd'Apollopourcréeruneinteractionexpérientielleavecdesmatériauxhistoriques”adéclaréHansen”[The archive is] so rich that [it] will in some way exceed what could have been experienced by any participant of the time. "
Access the audio archive here of the NASA Apollo 11
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