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A few days earlier, Armstrong and his fellow astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, had exploded over a 6.2-million pound rocket. They had embarked on an eight day epic journey to the Moon and vice versa, including a brief stay in the Sea of Tranquility and ended with a splash in the Pacific Ocean.
Throughout the mission, NASA recorded thousands of hours of audio communications between astronauts, mission control, and behind-the-scenes support staff.
For decades, most of these tapes have been stored. Only a small part of the audio – like the famous first words of Armstrong on the Moon – has been broadcast to the public. But now, a multi-year project to digitize and process the sound of tapes has given new life to this historic record.
The initial impetus for the project was simply to find a large set of audio data to develop tools to assess how teams work together.
But for NASA enthusiasts, students and the public, audio also offers the opportunity to relive these historic moments in a new light.
"I think that Apollo 11 is one of the greatest engineering achievements in the history of mankind," said Greg Wiseman, NASA Johnson Space Audio Engineer. Houston Center, involved in the project. "Landing on the moon was not just Neil Armstrong. It was a whole team of people working together to make it happen, and all that audio is their side of the story. "
One machine for work
Once the Apollo missions were completed, most of the audio cassettes were eventually routed to the National Archives Building and Archives Administration in College Park, Maryland. The first step of the project was to find them.
"I sent many emails to NARA representatives to try to find out where these tapes were," Wiseman said. The process reminded him of the last scene of Indiana Jones and the adventurers of the lost arch, where the audience sees the ark being stored in a gigantic warehouse. "It could be difficult to locate a few boxes of tapes in this vast ocean of historical treasures," wrote Wiseman in a later e-mail.
The hunt began after John Hansen, an electrical engineering researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas, contacted NASA with a request for audio. Hansen was leading a project to develop voice technology to analyze long audio recordings of problem-solving groups and search for test data. The Apollo audio was up to scratch, but the next challenge was introduced by mid-twentieth century analog technology.
The existing tapes could only be read on a machine called SoundScriber, a large beige and green machine with vacuum tubes. NASA had two machines, but the first was cannibalized for parts to spin the second.
"There is literally only one machine on the planet capable of decoding [the audio]"Said Abhijeet Sangwan, a researcher from UT Dallas who also worked on the project.
NASA has found a retired technician to help refurbish the machine and Hansen and his team have designed and installed a personalized reading head. NASA recorded the audio content of the mission on 30-track strips. The team had to read the 30 tracks at the same time to reduce the time needed to scan them and avoid damaging the bands by almost 50 years by reading them over.
Once everything was operational, an undergraduate student used the machine five days a week for several months to capture all the sound from the Apollo 11 cassettes, as well as most of the Apollo 13, Apollo 1 and Gemini 8 cassettes The Apollos 1 and 13 and Gemini 8 audio files have not been validated yet, and the researchers are now trying to get support for digitizing the remaining Apollo 13 data.)
A resource for the speech processing community
With 19,000 hours of newly digitized data in hand, Hansen and his team began the complex task of analyzing it.
They built software to detect speech in recordings, identify speakers, group audio by speaker, transcribe it and detect positive and negative feelings. Most state-of-the-art voice recognition algorithms are designed for short transactional declarations, such as asking Siri to provide weather forecasts. The sheer volume and complexity of NASA tapes presented unique challenges.
The recordings lasted long periods of silence and when people were talking, the channels were often noisy or the air-to-ground communications – the main mission broadcast – were broadcast in the background. In addition, the engineers spoke a dialect specific to the space mission containing words not found in the dictionary. Hansen and his team spent about six months researching and collecting all the acronyms used by NASA, including improving the performance of automatic speech recognition, he said.
After refining the algorithms, the researchers set up three large computer clusters on the UT campus in Dallas and processed the data continuously for about seven months. The transcripts they produced ranged between 60 and 97% – which is not enough to get a true history of what was said, but useful for analyzing feelings and, when it is associated with the identity of the speaker, understand the commitment and problem solving. process of team members.
The team hopes that the solutions developed will also be applied to tasks such as monitoring the team's astronaut dynamics during a long and stressful journey on Mars. Closer to home, the techniques could help analyze and improve the performance of large teams that rely on real-time audio communication, such as emergency response units or remote control. 39 – army – or even something more banal, like a teleconference.
According to Hansen, data is an important resource for the speech-processing community because it is both lengthy and naturalistic. He announced the data at an international conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing in September and encouraged researchers to use them to develop better tools to address the key challenges in this area.
But another important mission of the project is to share the data with the public.
The heroes behind the heroes
In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of its first landing on next summer, NASA has authorized the audio of Apollo 11 for publication. The University of Dallas Student Design Teams have created a website, Explore Apollo, where audiences can listen to key moments of the missions.
NASA has also uploaded the audio file to archive.org, a library of cultural artifacts available to the public on the Internet. This file has been shared with filmmakers who are working on new ways to tell the story of the lunar landing. Many retrospective projects on the Apollo 11 mission, such as the recently released movie First man, focus on the feats of astronauts who risked their lives. But there were hundreds of other people whose collective work was also vital, including over 600 band voices.
"These are the heroes behind the heroes," Hansen said.
Ben Feist, a software engineer currently based in Canada, uses audio to create an interactive website where the public can explore the entire timeline of the Apollo 11 mission. This site will be similar to Apollo17. org, a site he has built to showcase a wide range of audio, video and photo content from NASA's latest mission to the moon. However, the background audio channels of the newly digitized Apollo 11 cassettes provide a new kind of behind-the-scenes perspective.
For example, when Armstrong first walked to the moon, he was supposed to immediately grab a surface material, called a contingency sample, in case the mission was interrupted. But as he began to explore and take pictures, he did not reach any material. There were behind-the-scenes discussions about whether he was going to take the sample, and the engineers seemed reluctant to remind him of a live broadcast broadcast by the media, Feist said. Finally, CAPCOM – the person designated to talk to the astronauts about mission control – solved the problem by telling Armstrong that they saw him recovering the contingency sample, subtly signaling it to the astronaut, Feist said.
Feist has processed the audio to remove flutter and other distortions, and plans to give the cleaned version to the National Archives once the project is completed.
As the tapes were recording continuously, they captured moments when NASA staff took breaks to chat with each other or call friends and family. "These were people like us," Feist said. They sometimes telephoned home to say that they would be late or complain about overtime.
However, when engineers were stationed, a casual professionalism was found, according to many researchers who listened to audio snippets.
"NASA's engineers and scientists are only the most skilled professionals," said Hansen. "There are things that could make others tremble and they are as calm as you can be."
"They are extremely concentrated and very calm," said Wiseman.
It's up to the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, that he's coming back to spring. After greeting the crew of Apollo 11 after returning to Earth, he exclaimed: "This is the biggest week in the history of the world since Creation. "
And now, a much more complete recording of this exhilarating and exhausting week will be kept digitally for generations to come.
This article originally appeared in Inside Science.
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