Apollo Telescope Mount

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Apollo Telescope Mount

The Apollo Telescope Mount, or ATM, is the name of a solar

Sun

The Sun , a G V star, is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and other matter orbit the Sun, which by itself accounts for about 98.6% of the Solar System's mass....
observatory

Observatory

An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial and/or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geology, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed....
that was attached to Skylab

Skylab

Skylab was the first space station the United States launched into orbit, and the second space station ever visited by a human crew. The 100 ton space station was in Earth's orbit from 1973 to 1979, and it was visited by crews three times in 1973 and 1974....
, the first US space station

Space station

A space station is an artificial structure designed for humans to live in outer space. So far only low earth orbit stations are implemented, also known as orbital stations....
.

The ATM was one of a number of projects that came out of the late 1960's Apollo Applications Program

Apollo Applications program

The Apollo Applications Program was established by NASA headquarters in 1968 to develop science-based manned space missions using surplus material from the Apollo program....
, which studied a wide variety of ways to use the infrastructure developed for the Apollo Program in the 1970s. Among these concepts were various extended-stay lunar missions, a permanent lunar base, long-duration space missions, a number of large observatories, and eventually the "wet workshop" space station.

In the case of the ATM, the initial idea was to mount the instrumentation in a deployable unit attached to the Service Module

Apollo Command/Service Module

The Command/Service Module was a spacecraft built for NASA by North American Aviation. It was one of the two spacecraft that were utilized for the Apollo program, along with the Apollo Lunar Module, to land astronauts on the Moon....
, this was then changed to use a modified Apollo Lunar Module

Apollo Lunar Module

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Encyclopedia

The Apollo Telescope Mount, or ATM, is the name of a solar

Sun

The Sun , a G V star, is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and other matter orbit the Sun, which by itself accounts for about 98.6% of the Solar System's mass....
observatory

Observatory

Skylab

Space station

Apollo Applications program

Apollo Command/Service Module

Apollo Lunar Module

The Apollo Lunar Module was the Lander portion of the Apollo spacecraft built for the United States Apollo program by Grumman to achieve the transit from cislunar orbit to the surface and back....
to house controls, observation instruments and recording systems, while the lunar descent stage was replaced with a large solar telescope and solar panels to power it all. After launch, it would be met in orbit by a three-crew Apollo CSM who would operate it and retrieve data before returning to Earth. As many of the other concepts were dropped, eventually only the space station and ATM remained "on the books". The plans then changed to launch the ATM and have it connect to Skylab in orbit. Both spacecraft would then be operated by the Skylab crews.

With the cancellation of the later Apollo landing missions providing a Saturn V

Saturn V

The Saturn V was a multistage rocket liquid-fuel expendable launch system rocket used by NASA's Apollo program and Skylab programs from 1967 until 1973....
, the wet workshop concept was no longer needed. Instead, the plans were changed to orbit an expanded, dry version of the station. The ATM would now be launched attached to the station, as the Saturn V had enough power to launch them both at the same time. This change saved the Skylab program when a problem during launch destroyed one of the workshop solar panels and prevented the other from automatically deploying. The windmill-like arrays on the ATM, which fed power to both the ATM and the station, remained undamaged due to the protection within the launch shroud, and provided enough power for manned operations until the one remaining workshop array could be deployed.

The Apollo Telescope Mount was designed and construction was managed at NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an agency of the Federal government of the United States, responsible for the nation's public list of space agencies....
's Marshall Space Flight Center

Marshall Space Flight Center

The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center , the original home of NASA, is a lead center for Spacecraft propulsion, Space Shuttle propulsion, Space Shuttle external tank, crew training and payloads, International Space Station design and construction, for computers, networks, and information management....
. It included eight major observational instruments, along with several lesser experiments. The ATM made observations at a variety of wavelengths, from extreme ultraviolet

Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of visible light, but longer than x-rays, in the range 400 nanometer to 10 nm, and energies from 3 Electron volt to 124 eV....
to infrared

Infrared

Infrared radiation is electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength is longer than that of visible light , but shorter than that of terahertz radiation and microwaves ....
.

The ATM was manually operated by the astronauts aboard Skylab, yielding data principally as exposed photographic film

Photographic film

Photographic film is a sheet of plastic coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive silver halide salts with variable crystal sizes that determine the sensitivity, contrast and of the film....
that was returned to Earth with the astronauts. The film had to be changed out during the manned mission during spacewalks

Extra-vehicular activity

Extra-vehicular activity is work done by an astronaut away from the Earth, and outside of a spacecraft. The term most commonly applies to an EVA made outside a craft orbiting Earth , but also applies to an EVA made on the surface of the Moon ....
.

As of 2006, the original exposures are still on file (and accessible to interested parties) at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the Capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790....
.