Surprised that the moon landing footage was actually broadcast on a specific TV standard

I was watching a documentary last night and they mentioned the Apollo 11 broadcast wasn't in standard NTSC. It was done in a format called SSTV that had to be converted before anyone could see it. I always just assumed they pointed a regular camera at the monitor. The fact that NASA engineers had to jury rig a conversion process in real time is wild. Has anyone else looked into the technical side of that broadcast and found something unexpected?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_brian20d ago

Wait, are you saying the conversion happened live and not in post? I had no idea they were working with a completely different video standard up there. That must have been a nightmare to get working reliably on the fly. I remember reading somewhere the signal was so weak they had to use these huge dish antennas just to pull in a grainy picture.

cooper.reese20d ago

That 525 to 625 line conversion was done in real time with basically a box of hot transistors and some guy riding the sync knob. NASA had a team working around the clock just to keep the scan converters from drifting apart during the broadcast. The signal strength was so low the Parkes dish in Australia had to manually track the spacecraft because the automatic system kept losing lock.