I read at www.moonhoax.com that the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes are missing. For the life of me, I do not know what telemetry tapes do exactly (nor do I know what significance this claim has for HBs.) I have done searches through google trying to find a simple explanation of what telemetry is (and telemetry tapes) but everything I find only mentions telemetry (tapes) as if I already know what they are. Can anyone shed more light on this topic? Thanks.

Welcome to the BABB, mathyou9.


Telemetry contained measurements of plenty of sensors in the spacecraft. It was sent down to earth digitally encoded. It was received by the deep space network stations and sent further to Goddard from where it went to Houston in real time. Telemetry was also taped at the stations.

Now, for the tapes gone away: The missions produced huge amounts of telemetry and data storage was on expensive tapes with - for todays standard - had not a very high storage density. So, when a mission was done and everything evaluated and reports written, tapes were recycled.

If you are interested in the subject, I recommend the website about Honeysuckle Creek, one of the three stations active during Apollo.
One section gives information about the technology.

http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/station/technical.html

Some time ago, an old tape surfaced that was believed to contain data from Armstrong's first steps on the moon.
Here's the story as told by John Saxon (former Operations Supervisor at Honeysuckle):

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Welcome, mathyou9.

If I read the sites correctly the fact that the tapes are re-used or missing is irrelevant since all the information on them was transcribed and stored in other ways. HBs like to say things like "the tapes are missing" conveniently ignoring the fact that the information still exists.

Ah, a question I don't have to pretend to be an expert on! (I've spent a big chunk of my life dealing with spacecraft telemetry.)

The word "telemetry" is based on the Greek words for "at a distance" and "measurement." It refers to the data being transmitted from a spacecraft to the ground that contains information on the health and status of the spacecraft, and, if a scientific spacecraft, contains the science data that the spacecraft is collecting.

This information is almost always recorded for later analysis and processing, in those days on magnetic tape, in these days in files on some computer's disk drive. I would daresay that any such information recorded long ago has since been transferred to computer or CD or somesuch since magnetic tapes don't last forever.

You can find more of an overview of spacecraft communications here.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Thanks. your replies were way more useful than my google searches were.