Hey there, it’s me Jerry Garrett. Today, I’m going to be doing something that is a bit different to what I usually do. Today I’ve Researched on the topic of Man to the Moon and I’m writing this Essay on one topic. “The role of software to get man to the moon.”
It all started on July 16th 1961, when President John F. Kennedy gave a challenge, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” (Reference 1)
And with that, the Apollo Missions started like wildfire, NASA started working on the codes, and the designs, and then the first launch test was done on January 27, 1967. There was a fire that tragically led 3 Astronauts trapped inside leading to their last breath. (Reference 2)
On the afternoon of 2 January, 1959 Luna 1 left from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. In fact, It successfully left the earth and was targeting the moon, but in the end they missed the moon by 5,995 kilometers. And then it landed back on Earth. (Reference 3)
Then was September 12, 1959. Luna 2 left the Earth. Destination? The Moon. And then successfully reached the moon on the date of September 14, 1959. And then they came back to the earth.
Apollo 11 Left Cape Kennedy on the date of July 16, 1969. And then on July 20th 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. And finally at last, Neil Armstrong was the first person to step foot on the moon.
All of this is fine, but how did all of this happen?
America
Leading the entire software part of the Apollo Mission was Margaret Hamilton, who worked at MIT. Later switching to NASA.
Just like our brain, the space shuttle also has a brain. And that is a computer or, also known as the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC.) This helped with many things when getting man to the moon. First of all was Navigation. After USSR’s fail with Luna 1, They wouldn’t want to do all that work just to miss the moon by a few thousand kilometers. So the AGC Provided Navigation for the Apollo Rocket.
When the AGC system was getting built, the tensions were rising for NASA. They only had a small amount of space to fit the AGC inside. And within the thousands of lines of code that are there, there are lives on the line. If there is a single error, many people can loose their lives. Just because of one tiny detail.
And then the Guidance system, helping it to autonomously land on the moon the the lunar-sensors it had built into the system and into the rocket. They used C, C++ and a special version of assembly language for the Apollo 11.
And then NASA had made a built in fault detection into the system called the AGS. So incase anything goes wrong, at least the crew would know and they could do something to fix it. Like for example, the lunar landing system might be dangerous, so then it will suggest a safer descent path.
At that time the AGC was way ahead of it’s time they would say. They made it kind of like the AI in today’s world. It has a system where it can also make decisions. If humans were put had that role, that would have lots of tension. But there was a system where it made decisions if the path that they are going in at that time was wrong, or not safe. It was like a safety net for the astronauts that were flying. It made sure that they were never flying blind or without knowing a potential disaster could strike.
In fact, The AGS was used in the mission of Apollo 11. It was during the lunar-ascent phase when the LM crew performed a sequence of rendezvous measures that resulted in Gimbal lock (It happens when a rotating system, like in spacecraft or cameras, loses one of its degrees of freedom, making it impossible to control certain directions of movement. This occurs when two of the three rotational axes align, causing the system to “lock” and lose its ability to rotate freely.)
Thankfully, the AGS was used to acquire altitude control.
Fun fact, the AGC only had 4kb of RAM. And modern phones itself have 4GB of RAM.After the mission concluded, they would need to see and evaluate the photographs and the lunar rock samples that they collected from the moon, they would also process the data such as, Telemetry and Scientific Samples. There was a system called Post Mission Data Processing. (Reference 4)
Another one of the main things that the computers aboard the Apollo 11 had was Communication. Even with planes communication is a requirement. Because the people who are communicating to them could give information that could potentially save lives of the astronauts onboard.
All the code of NASA’s Apollo 11 is actually inside a GitHub Repository. You can view it at https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/master/Comanche055
All the computers that were used to get man to the moon, AGC and the AGS, and many many more that we may not even know of. All of these are behind the computers of this day. But it accomplished a task that was very important to man. And that was to get man to the moon. Or rather, to get Neil Armstrong to the moon.
In the end we can conclude that software played a major role in getting man to the moon, without it, you probably can’t even get above the earth if it isn’t for computers. And Computers also helped like I mentioned above with regaining control in dire situations.
References
(1): https://www.nasa.gov/history/the-decision-to-go-to-the-moon/
(2:) https://www.nasa.gov/mission/apollo-1/
(3:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_1
(4:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#:~:text=The%20AGC%20has%20a%2016,write%20core%20memory%20is%20available.
Thank you for reading my blog post, this was a long one. If you read this fully leave a comment with your feedback.
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