The accomplishments of the Apollo missions to the moon unfolded on the TV screens of America almost as a given. While there were certainly moments when things did not go as planned, for the most part it looked easy. Walking and driving on the lunar surface, laying out experiment packages, and collecting samples all seemed as natural as the many science fiction stories we had been reading for years.
Of course, it wasn't that easy. Years of planning, training, rethinking, and improvement had gone into those operations. Carrying out useful work from inside a pressure suit required a great deal of compromise on the part of experiment designers and mission planners. Even then, many tasks which were accomplished turned out to be extremely difficult. The lunar environment, especially its dust, low gravity, and vacuum, made it difficult to perform many operations. The need for a pressure suit lowered the productivity of an individual, making it a constant struggle to merely grip something.
Someday we will be going back to the moon and even onward to Mars. Many of the things we want to do there will be similar to those we have already done. True, the instruments will be better and may be used for different purposes, but the tasks required of an astronaut and the design problems faced by the engineers will largely be the same. This document hopes to capture some of the knowledge from the Apollo era to make the jobs of those future designers and operators of lunar experiments somewhat more productive.
The original motivation for this database came from the Astronaut Office, Science Support Group, which wanted to document the experience of the astronaut/ experiment interface from the operations perspective. Beyond that, I hope to retain some of the "lessons learned" from the Apollo experience so that future astronauts, principle investigators, design engineers, and trainers won't need to make all of same mistakes in instrument and tool design for operation by crew in an EMU with time constraints on a planet with low gravity.
In addition to the usual meaning of the term "experiment", I have included some pieces of equipment and hardware, such as the lunar rover and some of the tools the crew had available. Also included in this database are a few experiments performed in the command module during trans-lunar and trans-Earth coasts that were precursors to some Skylab experiments. While we have come a long way since then, some of the problems we still have in microgravity today were first seen in the Apollo command module.
The progress made in the late 60's and early 70's was not as well documented as one might have hoped. We were running so hard that no one had the time to write it all down. The present effort started by reviewing relevant documents, such as Apollo mission reports, preliminary science reports, technical crew debriefings, lunar surface operations plans, and various lunar experiment documents, and then collecting general and operation-specific information by experiment. After this, the crews who actually dealt with these experiments on the moon were consulted for their input with 20+ years of hindsight. The anecdotes some of them shared concerning the deployment and operation of these units is probably the most valuable information in this document.
Thomas A. Sullivan
NASA - Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center