page_title: Apollo TV camera
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Apollo TV camera / Westinghouse Apollo lunar television camera / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the National Electronics Museum, 1745 West Nursery Road, Linthicum, Maryland, USA. All items in this museum are unclassified. The museum permitted photography without restriction.
context_page_description: The Apollo program used several television cameras in its space missions in the late 1960s and 1970s; some of these Apollo TV cameras were also used on the later Skylab and Apollo–Soyuz Test Project missions. These cameras varied in design, with image quality improving significantly with each successive model. Two companies made these various camera systems: RCA and Westinghouse. Originally, these slow-scan television cameras, running at 10 frames per second, produced only black-and-white pictures and first flew on the Apollo 7 mission in October 1968. A color camera – using a field-sequential color system – flew on the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969, and every mission after that. The color camera ran at the North American standard 30 fps. The cameras all used image pickup tubes that were initially fragile, as one was irreparably damaged during the live broadcast of the Apollo 12 mission's first moonwalk. Starting with the Apollo 15 mission, a more robust, damage-resistant camera was used on the lunar surface. All of these cameras required signal processing back on Earth to make the frame rate and color encoding compatible with analog broadcast television standards.
context_section_description: In October 1964, NASA awarded Westinghouse the contract for the lunar TV camera. Stan Lebar, the program manager for the Apollo lunar TV camera, headed the team at Westinghouse that developed the camera that brought pictures from the Moon's surface.
  The camera had to be designed to survive extreme temperature differences on the lunar surface, ranging from 121 °C (250 °F) in daylight to −157 °C (−251 °F) in the shade. Another requirement was to be able to keep the power to approximately 7 watts, and fit the signal into the narrow bandwidth on the LM's S-band antenna, which was much smaller and less powerful than the service module's antenna.
caption: Lunar television camera for Apollo 11 Moon landing, Westinghouse, identical to the model used on the Moon
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