EASEP Handbook for Apollo 11 Flight Crew
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Source document: 1969-06-easep-handbook-for-apollo-11-flight-crew.pdf
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Original: Prepared by the General Electric Company, Apollo Systems Department, for the Lunar Surface Project Office, Science and Applications Directorate, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston (≈June 1969; the deployment task sequence cites data supplied by the Flight Crew Support Division on June 11, 1969).
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Available online: LPI — EASEP Handbook for Apollo 11 Flight Crew (also in the USRA repository).
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The crew-facing handbook for the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP) — the science hardware Apollo 11 deployed and left on the Moon. It introduces the scientific rationale for instrumented lunar study, describes the power and instrumentation of the Passive Seismic Experiment Package’s central station, details the three experiments (Passive Seismic, Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector, Solar Wind Composition) with their principal investigators, objectives, and physical designs, and lays out the deployment geometry, constraints, and step-by-step surface task sequence for one-man deployment. It is the most equipment-specific of the library’s sources on the surface experiments.
Key takeaways
Section titled “Key takeaways”- EASEP = two self-contained packages: the Passive Seismic Experiment Package (PSEP) and the Laser Ranging Retro-Reflector (LRRR). The Solar Wind Composition (SWC) experiment is included in the handbook but is a separate, self-deploying item — confirming the LSOP’s framing.
- Electrical Power Subsystem (EPS): the PSEP runs on solar power — six solar panels of 420 cells each, feeding 30–45 W to a Power Conditioning Unit (PCU) that converts the array’s 16 V to six operating voltages and dumps excess heat to space via a shunt regulator.
- Central Station: houses the data subsystem (uplink command decode, downlink science/engineering telemetry to the Manned Space Flight Network), a redundant transmitter pair, a modified axial-helix S-band antenna (right-hand circularly polarized, manually indexed to one of five lunar sites), and a dust detector (three solar cells measuring dust accretion and radiation degradation).
- Principal investigators: Passive Seismic — Gary Latham (Lamont Geological Observatory); LRRR — Dr. C. O. Alley (University of Maryland); SWC — Dr. Johannes Geiss (University of Berne).
- Deployment: planned for one-man deployment with the PSEP and LRRR set ~70 ft from the LM (nominally south), coarse-leveled within ±5° and aligned in azimuth within ±5° using a gnomon shadow on a sun-compass rose; the PSEP must not face due east/west. Packages are pulled from the LM SEQ bay on booms (Package 1 = PSE, Package 2 = LRRR); SWC is deployed first, facing the Sun.