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[i]Dick Nafzger, a NASA employee involved in video for more than four decades, explained the decision to restrict the feed from the lunar surface to black and white. "We had narrowed the bandwidth as much a possible to try and get a good S/N, "Getting TV from the moon was a big unknown. We figured that slow scan video would give us the best chance for locking onto [the signal] with a 210-foot dish." Nafzger observed that at time, Apollo missions had a fairly wide bandwidth FM link to Earth for telemetry and voice communications — so wide in fact, that it was possible to send nearly full bandwidth 525/60 NTSC video back from both the command module and the lunar lander. However, a design decision was made to limit the LEM video transmissions to 500 kHz to assure a good signal-to-noise ratio from the moon's surface, as there were many unknowns, including a small transmitting antenna and low power transmitter. This necessitated a reduced resolution/slow scan television system. "It was obvious that we couldn't do color," he said. The first [lunar landing] mission wasn't going to change to include a color camera. It was only after this that we began to get confident that we could handle three MHz from the moon's surface."[/i]
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