Apollo Comms Part 22: How NASA Upgraded the Moon TV to Color

Barely a year after the first black and white TV transmission from the Moon, NASA upgraded it to color. This is how this was done, and we try it on our original Apollo link too.

Links to doc:

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[ReneKnuversrk]

Again a nice mixture of historical footage, technical details and experimentation. I really like this series!

[titusllewelyn]

Thank you CuriousMarc for filling in some blanks of a story told to me by my older brother. He was an electronics technician living and working in the Houston area in the early 70s. He never worked at NASA, but knew people that did,

My brother told me about the early color camera that was pretty much one man's idea and that it contained a spinning wheel. As he understood it, the camera was selected from a group of camera ideas submitted by several companies.

My brother passed away before we could talk about it again.

Now I know that the man was Stan Lebar and the company was Westinghouse. And of course the reason for the design was the limited bandwidth with the communication equipment.

[Xboerefijn]

I love it how you show that the astronauts were not only highly trained space pilots, but also just people really enjoying the things they do on the moon^^

[raymitchell]

This whole series of videos needs to be edited and put together to make a documentary, even a multi-part documentary... you are capturing important bits of history that I doubt anyone has ever seen or thought about... We take our technology for granted these days not realizing the miracles of what NASA and all those people had done.

[mspysu]

The chance to do the impromptu interview of Stan Lebar at the Early Television Foundation Museum was a once-in-a-lifetime event. It went on long enough that we were running out of tape while recording the interview, luckily there were two of us with cameras rolling so one could run out to the car grab some tape and then start recording while the other changed tapes.
The interview ended when Stan's lovely wife Elaine said, "Honey we are going to miss our flight"

[feicodeboer]

That S-band system was pretty darn good from the beginning and there were some darn good engineers making the most out of it with the technology available. Impressive.

[NinerFourWhiskey]

I remember in great detail watching that Apollo 17 moonwalk as a young child. Thanks for playing it and explaining how they got it to happen. I remember seeing the first moon mission launch from my grandmother's home in Miami when as I had just turned 4 years old. Truly a child of the moon missions.

[jaut-]

Just about when I’m drowning in my electronics university essay I can relax for a well deserved few minutes.

[alpcns]

Absolutely fascinating. What a wonderful time that was.

[Dudley]

Thanks a million, Marc & Company. This stuff is the right stuff. 👍

[StringerNews]

Actually the visual portion of an NTSC broadcast signal is only 4.2 MHz, with 1.25 MHz of it being redundant because the NTSC color system uses the same sync pulses as EIA monochrome. The pulses have a DC component, so true SSB wasn't possible. Because the Apollo signal didn't have to be compatible with any TV receivers, the ~330 TV lines of resolution could have been had in just under 3 MHz of baseband bandwidth. And because the bandwidth translates into detail, the ~2 MHz of bandwidth for the LM is pretty close to the ~240 lines that U-matic, VHS and Betamax provided.

The color system was essentially what CBS proposed for the NTSC color standard. At the time it was rejected because it was electro-mechanical, and a fully electronic system was considered better. While EIA monochrome had 2 fields per frame, NTSC color had 4 fields per color frame. The sync needed for sequential color would have to be different to get 3 fields per color frame, and interlace would have to go as well.

When I was in college, I had a student job in the campus ITFS TV station that broadcast classroom videos to remote sites on channels above 2.5 GHz. Our color studios used the Ikegami HL-79. I was one of the few students who knew how to register the color cameras. I can only guess how the sequential color signals from the moon were converted to NTSC color! But three monochrome cameras facing three monochrome monitors would have been a registration nightmare.

[michaelcherry]

When I was going to technical college in the early 1980s, I did a presentation on the CBS-Columbia 12CC2 Field Sequential Colour System from 1951. It too used spinning colour filter discs and also suffered from fringing issues. Interesting that they revived that concept more than a decade later for the colour cameras on the Apollo missions.

[martinsiegbahn]

Excellent video as always! And, man, are we looking forwards to see Artemis astronauts walking on the Moon in 4K!

[Toymortal]

What brilliant timing for a video to drop as I was just considering taking a break from my pile of work! Fascinating as always Marc and the team.

[tabajaralabs]

Another INCREDIBLE video...Thanks a lot, Marc and team!!!

[UnexpectedBooks]

Great video! It brings back memories for this lifelong space nut. Boy, do I remember when that camera burned out at the start of the Apollo 12 EVA. I was 13 years old and I was pissed.

[chrissavage]

First met Ikegami ENG cameras in the early 80's Lovely bits of kit. My first was the HL77. I kid you not, the HL stands for Handy Looky :)

Those NASA guys certainly did manage to squeeze remarkable results from hardly any bandwidth.

[Zadster]

Chrominance bandwidth is only usually a fraction of the luminance's. You can probably safely get away with 1/10th or less. It would be a bit of work, but you could split off the NTSC colo(u)r, filter the luma with a low pass filter, and remodulate the chroma within the available bandwidth. Obviously the receiver monitor would need a chroma decoder based at the correct new offset. It sounds like they were trying to copy PAL/SECAM colour encoding towards the later missions.

[mike]

There is a great movie about Parkes and the Moon mission. It's called "The Dish". I remember seeing Apollo 17 launch in December.

[KeritechElectronics]

Great insights on Apollo history, and damn cool revival again :)
I'm impressed by how NASA pulled it off so early. I wouldn't expect them to have any color even in 11, let alone 10.
Oh, and singing astronauts, always a nice one!