Yesterday I posted the OK Go optical illusion fest that is their video for The Writing’s On The Wall.
Today, I read an article on how it has recently been discovered that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins wrote on the walls of their Apollo 13 command module to help them during their flight.
According to BBC News, new 3D scans of the inside of the module – rarely seen as it has been on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington since 1970 – reveal a calendar and various other scribblings on the walls of the module.
On the calendar “all the boxes, except for 24 July, are crossed out, as if somebody was literally counting the days. When you think about it, they didn’t have a sunset or sunlight. They had a clock which showed what’s called Mission Elapsed Time. But once it gets past the first 24 hours it doesn’t translate very well.” (source)
Allan Needell believes the calendar was probably created by Michael Collins, who stayed in the Command Module while the other two landed on the Moon.
“He would have been the loneliest man in the universe because whenever he passed behind the Moon he couldn’t talk to anyone else. There was no radio contact or anything. One of the things he may have done in that time was written the calendar on the wall.
“It’s protected with plastic sheeting and taped over with duct tape. My imagination tells me that when Mission Elapsed Time showed another day had gone by, he pulled up the corner of the duct tape, crossed off another day and pulled it back down.”
Neil Armstrong died in 2012, but Needell contacted Aldrin and Collins to ask them about the calendar. He says neither had any firm recollection of it, but Aldrin said it was most likely drawn by Collins.
The next step to bringing this piece of history back to life is to match the scribblings up with the voice recordings and NASA logs, with the aim to place the markings in their original context.
The Columbia Command Module was the astronauts’ living quarters but never actually landed on the moon. The Service Module contained the propulsion system and the Lunar Module, nicknamed Eagle, was the craft used by Armstrong and Aldrin to reach the moon’s surface.
If it’s good enough for them…
