View Single Post
  #1  
Old July 26th 19, 02:07 AM posted to sci.space.history
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3
Default Question abt Lunar landing simulators

Did the LLTVs have images of the lunar surface projected onto their 'windows'?

Did some other lunar landing simulator have moving lunar surface images displayed on the windows to simulate motion across the lunar surface in response to the pilot's control actions?

Background: In 1962-64 I was a computer programmer at NASA's Langley Research Center. One of my projects was a program to generate data to feed to an automated carving tool (which I never saw) which was to track back and forth across a slab of paraffin to shape a model of a section of the lunar surface. I understood that the LM mock-up pilot's control actions would control the motion of cameras moving across the moon model and send those images to the 'windows' of the simulator to simulate the view as the 'LM' approached the surface.

Does anyone know if such a simulator was actually built and utilized? If so, was the model lunar surface preserved? stored? displayed? photographed?

We had contour maps of the lunar surface. The input to my program was generated by sampling points along contours. That data essentially had fixed z-coordinate values (elevation) and randomly changing x-y coordinates. My output was regularly incrementing x-y coordinates with approximated z values..