nasa-uap-d4-apollo-11-technical-crew-debriefing-1969.pdf

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NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
APOLLO 11
TECHNICAL
CREW DEBRIEFING
(U)
JULY 31, 1969
PREPARED BY:
MISSION OPERATIONS BRANCH
FLIGHT CREW SUPPORT DIVISION
VOL. I
GROUP 4
Downgraded at 3-year
intervals; declassified
after 12 years
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NOTICE: This document may be exempt from
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United States
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person is
CE…

CONFIDENTIAL 6-33

COLLINS
I think particularly when you get into the later flights of extended EVA's and lunar activity, somehow the crew must place themselves in a frame of mind of looking on the separation of the LM as the beginning of the flight plan and to relax, get plenty of sleep, and conserve their energies in all the events leading up to that point. To arrive in lunar orbit tired can create problems and it's possible to do that if you don't approach it in the right frame of mind.

ARMSTRONG
I think Mike's hit the nail on the head. We did precisely that. We got a lot of rest and got i…

6-34
CONFIDENTIAL

COLLINS
How'd we see this thing? Did we just look out the window and there it was?

ALDRIN
Yes, and we weren't sure but what it might be the S-IVB. We called the ground and were told the S-IVB was 6000 miles away. We had a problem with the high gain about this time, didn't we?

COLLINS
There was something. We felt a bump or maybe I just imagined it.

ARMSTRONG
He was wondering whether the MESA had come off.

COLLINS
I don't guess we felt anything.

ALDRIN
Of course, we were seeing all sorts of little objects going by at the various dumps and then we happened to see this one …

CONFIDENTIAL 6-35

ARMSTRONG We should say that it was right at the limit of the resolution of the eye. It was very difficult to tell just what shape it was. And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size.

ALDRIN So then I got down in the LEB and started looking for it in the optics. We were grossly mislead because with the sextant off focus what we saw appeared to be a cylinder.

ARMSTRONG Or really two rings.

ALDRIN Yes.

ARMSTRONG Two rings. Two connected rings.

COLLINS No, it looked like a hollow cylinder to me. It didn't look like …

6-36
CONFIDENTIAL

COLLINS
It was during the period when we thought it was a cylinder that we inquired about the S-IVB and we'd almost convinced ourselves that's what it had to be. But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. The fact that we didn't see it much past this one time period — we really don't have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was. It was something that wasn't part of the urine dump, we're pretty sure of that.

Skipping ahead a bit, when we jettisoned the LM, you know we fired an explosive charge and got rid of the dockin…

CONFIDENTIAL
6-37

ALDRIN

The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. I don't know whether I saw it the first night, but I'm sure I saw it the second night. I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart and I didn't think too much about it other than just note in my mind that they continued to be there. I couldn't explain why my eye would see these flashes. During transearth coast, we had more time and I devoted more opportunity to investigating what this could have been. It wa…

6-38
CONFIDENTIAL

ALDRIN (CONT'D) some static electricity because I was also able, in moving my hand up and down the sleep restraint, to generate very small sparks of static electricity. But there was a definite difference between the two as I observed it more and more. I tried to correlate this with the direction of the sun. When you put the window shades up there is still a small amount of leakage. You can generally tell within 20 or 30 degrees the direction of the sun. It seemed as though they were coming from that general direction; however, I really couldn't say if there was near enough …

CONFIDENTIAL 6-39

ALDRIN
Sometimes a minute or two would go by and then you'd see the two within the space of 10 seconds. On an average, I'd say just as a guess it was maybe something like one a minute. Certainly more than enough to convince you that it wasn't an optical illusion. It did give you a rather funny feeling to contemplate that something was zapping through the cabin. There wasn't anything you could do about it.

ARMSTRONG
It could be something like Buzz suggested. Mainly a neutron or some kind of an atomic particle that would be in the visible spectrum.

CONFIDENTIAL