Apollo 11 Accomplishments
Apollo 11 was one of the biggest American accomplishments in its history. Apollo 11 was the first landing on the moon, commanded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA for short. “Abe Silverstein, the Director of Space Flight Development, proposed the name "Apollo" because it was the name of a god in ancient Greek mythology. The model for naming manned spaceflight projects for mythological gods and heroes had been set with Mercury” (Business Insider). There were three astronauts who landed the lunar module Eagle on the moon July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong, who was in command, Command Module Pilot, Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot, Edwin Aldrin. It is stated that Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon out of his
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Apollo 11 ended up landing a few miles west of their target. There were some alarms that sounded and they were "executive overflows" (Contributor), meaning the guidance computer could not complete all of its tasks in real time and had to postpone some of them. A letter from Margaret H. Hamilton stated: “Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was. — Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo
Apollo 11 ended up landing a few miles west of their target. There were some alarms that sounded and they were "executive overflows" (Contributor), meaning the guidance computer could not complete all of its tasks in real time and had to postpone some of them. A letter from Margaret H. Hamilton stated: “Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was. — Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo