Apollo Archive Explorer
Version 3.2, October 26, 2007
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland
Latest version: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/apollo/

This viewer was developed as a prototype to explore time-synchronized
examination of of multimedia Apollo mission records from from the NASA
archives.  The system is presently designed to handle the following
types of materials:

o One channel of audio (presently Space-to-Ground radio)
o One channel of video (presently EVA TV)
o Two sequences of still photography (presently CDR and LMP)
o Several scanned transcripts (presently DSE, DSEA, and GOSS 1 TEC)
o Two scanned flight plans (CM and LM)
o Several sources of postflight analysis (presently the Apollo Flight
  Journal, the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and a traverse map)

Everything listed above is available for the Apollo 15 mission.  For
Apollos 14, 16 and 17, the scanned flight plans are not presently
included (although they would be easy to add), and complete the Apollo
Flight Journals were not available at the time this release was
finalized (the available parts of the Apollo 16 Flight Journal as of
this date are used, however).  The other two lunar landing missions
(Apollos 11 and 12) are not yet incorporated.

System requirements:

The present system was initially developed using a prototyping process
that emphasized functionality over efficiency, so at present the
resource requirements are fairly high.

o CPU speed: 1 GHz or greater (and faster is much better)
o RAM: 256 MB or greater (to try with 128K, close all other programs)
o Disk: about 6 GB of free space (allows loading all the video)
o Screen resolution: 1024x480 or better (the bigger the better)
o Speakers or headphones (if audio is desired)
o Operating systems: Tested on Windows XP.
o An Internet connection (required only for the Apollo Flight Journal 
  and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal).

Known limitations:

This version of the Apollo Archive Explorer has the following known
limitations that may be fixed in subsequent releases:

Data limitations:

o Video and space-to-ground audio are available mostly during lunar
  surface EVA television periods.  At most other times, the system is
  silent.

o Only lunar surface photography is included

o The Apollo Flight Journal and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal load
  over the Internet in order to comply with copyright restrictions.

o The hypertext links in the Apollo Flight Journal and the Apollo
  Lunar Surface Journal are not active.

Design limitations:

o The time synchronization of the TEC transcript is designed to show
  only GOSS-1.  When the LM is on the surface, communication between
  Houston and the CM generally occurs on GOSS-2, which appears on
  different pages from GOSS-1 in the TEC transcript that are not shown
  by this version of the system.  (For Apollo 15, this data is
  available in the Apollo Flight Journal.)

o The system will not work on the 800x600 display of older laptops and
  projectors because a minimum 1024-pixel display width is required.

o The video does not work on Solaris installations of JMF (this is a 
  JMF limitation).

o The response to mouse actions is sometimes slow (on slower systems).

Bugs:

o There was a bug in older versions of JMF that caused the system to
  run faster than real time.  Upgrading to the latest release fixes
  it.

o Highlighting in scanned transcripts is offset a bit on some pages.
  This results from undetected changes to the resolution of the
  scanned page images.

o The video may starts a few seconds before the rest of the program is
  ready to go on slower systems.

In general, the operation of the system is fairly straightforward, but
controlling the Ground Elapsed Time requires a few tricks to manage an
11 day mission without using a lot of screen space.  By default, the
replay starts early in EVA 2 at a point that is suitable for
demonstrations (i.e., with video and photos).  Here's how to adjust
the Ground Elapsed Time:

o Drag the horizontal timeline slider to the desired time (1 hour
  increments) or click inside the slider to move it right or left by
  one hour.  

o Click in the expanded timeline panel above the timeline slider to
  get to a more precise time.  The events shown in the timeline panel
  are shown at their actual time (not at the preflight plan).

o The flight plan shows the planned events in much greater detail.  To
  get to a flight plan event, click on the vertical timeline in a CM
  or LM flight plan to move to any time displayed on that page.  The
  flight plans normally contain one hour per page (sometimes in a
  two-column format).  Note that the times in the flight plan reflect
  pre-flight planning, so this may not be a very precise way of
  finding a specific event in the actual mission.

Installation:

You don't need to be a Java programmer to install the apollo archive
explorer, but you do need to use the command-line interface.

1) Install the Sun Java 2 SDK (version 1.4.0 or later) and the Sun
   Java Media Framework (JMF).  JMF requires a separate installation
   after you have installed the Java 2 SDK.  Both are available from
   http://java.sun.com.  Run the JMF test applet that Sun provides to
   ensure that your installation is working.  You will also want to
   set your path to include the bin subdirectory of the directory
   where Java is installed since subsequent steps require command-line
   access to programs found there.  On Windows XP this is done in 
   My Computer-Control Panel-System-Advanced-Environment Variables.

2) Install Apache Lucene (version 2.2.0 or later).  Lucene is
   available from http://lucene.apache.org.  To install it, unzip the
   release anywhere you want (it creates a directory for its files),
   and then edit the CLASSPATH environment variable to include the
   full path name for the Lucene JAR file (which is called
   c:\java\lucene-2.2.0\lucene-core-2.2.0.jar on my system).  On
   Windows XP, this is done in the same window that the path is set
   (described above).

3) Obtain the file apollo.zip from
   http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/apollo/ and unpack it where you
   want to install the transcript viewer.  The present code assumes
   that this is the top level of the c: directory.  If you put it
   somewhere else, you will need to modify the code (see below).  Use
   WinZip to unzip the file.  This will create an "apollo" directory
   and a "data" subdirectory, and will unpack the source and class
   files for the program and this README.TXT file.

4) Obtain the files a15data.jar and a16data.jar from the same source
   and unpack them in the data directory (NOT in the top-level
   directory).  This will set up all of the needed data files except
   the video (for which an empty directory is provided).  The video is
   distributed separately because of the file sizes and copyright
   restrictions.

5) Optionally, obtain the CD that comes with the "Apollo 15 Mission
   Reports" book from CG publishing
   (http://www.cgpublishing.com/apollo15.htm, $13 each from
   Amazon.com) and copy all of the .mpg files (which are in the
   top-level directory) to the a15\video subdirectories (which are
   inside the data subdirectory).  If you prefer to pull the video
   from the CD every time you run the program (which is slower), edit
   the appropriate line in the Video.java file to specify where the
   video is and recompile (with javac *.java).  Do the same for Apollo
   16.

5) If necessary, if you placed the "apollo" directory is anywhere
   other than at the top of c:, edit Replay.java and change the line
   where the variable "root" is set and then recompile (with javac
   *.java).  You can skip this step if everything is in the right
   place.

Running the program on Windows:

1) Launch a command window using the run selection in the start menu
   and entering "cmd" (or "command" on older systems).

2) cd to the "apollo" directory and issue the command "java -Xmx256m Replay"
   (proper capitalization is important here).  The program should
   start, displaying status information in the command window.  Once
   all data has been read in (which may require a minute or so), a
   window will appear.  The window can be resized to make it larger or
   smaller, but making it narrower than is necessary to show at least
   some portion of the video window will have undesirable effects.

3) You can terminate execution using the using the close widget in the
   upper right corner of the window or with a control-C in the command
   window.  Or you can let it run for the length of the full mission
   if you want to see how it ends ...

Redistribution:

The software in apollo.jar is distributed under the GNU Public
License, which essentially means that you can use it for any
noncommercial purpose that you want, but that you cannot use it in a
commercial product without my permission.

Copyright is not claimed on the data in apollodata.jar that is
provided by the U.S. Government or on the postprocessing performed on
that data at the University of Maryland.

The video itself is not subject to copyright, but the postprocessing
of that video to put it in .mpg format is, which is why you need to
get it from CG books.

Bug reports:

Please send bug reports to Doug Oard (oard@umd.edu).  This program is
not under continuous development, but if I do make changes, I'll make
an effort to either clean up known bugs or at least make note of them
in this README.TXT file.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Glenn Swanson at the NASA Johnson Space Center for making the 
scanned transcripts available and to Eric Jones, David Woods and Frank 
O'Brien for creating the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal and the Apollo Flight 
Journal.  This project would not have been possible without their
trailblazing efforts!  Thanks also to Huanfeng Ma and David Doermann at the
University of Maryland, who performed the OCR and zone detection on which
the handling of the scanned transcripts depends.