[Apollo 11]

Directly from the Personal Collection of Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin

A LUNAR SURFACE FLOWN DATA CARD WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON ABORTING THE DESCENT OF THE LUNAR MODULE ONTO THE LUNAR SURFACE

BUZZ ALDRIN'S provenance letter reads, in full: "On July 16th, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and I lifted off from Pad 39A at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on our journey to perform humankind's first landing on the Moon at the Sea of Tranquility.

This PDI 1/2 Data Card involves a descent abort on the Descent Propulsion System (DPS). The first column shows the abort times in minutes, from one minute into the Powered Descent Initiation (PDI), to nine minutes and forty seconds into PDI, just short of landing. An abort late in the landing could not have been fully achieved by the DPS alone and would have required that we burn the remaining fuel out of the descent stage and then fire the ascent stage to get back into orbit. The second column heading, “V_h”, is velocity in feet per second and is the Lunar Module (LM) velocity needed to reach orbit. The numbers in the third column are altitudes in nautical miles. H­_ins is the altitude at orbital insertion, and H_a is the achieved apolune of the orbit. This card defines the starting conditions for a post-abort rendezvous with the Command Module. The times on the two cards are roughly one lunar orbital period apart, so the second card would apply if PDI were delayed an orbit.

This PDI 1/2 Data Card is one of the few objects carried into lunar orbit and is also a rare example of an astronaut flight-certified object used during our mission to land on the Moon."

REFERENCES:

NASA. Apollo 11 Stowage List. Mission AS 506 CM 107/LM-5. Houston, Texas: Manned Spacecraft Center, July 15, 1969, pp. 51 & 74 (as part of the Data Card Kit, LM XFR)

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