Don Eyles
Don Eyles was a computer scientist who designed the guidance system on the Antares lunar lander, part of the Apollo Program.
Don Eyles was a computer scientist who designed the guidance system on the Antares lunar lander, part of the Apollo Program. In January 1971, during the Apollo 14 mission, the Antares's computer guidance system malfunctioned, flashing an "Abort" signal1.
Eyles, then twenty-seven years old, was at the instrument laboratory at MIT when NASA called him to design a workaround. He had less than two hours to create a solution that would cause the spaceship's computer to override its own Abort signal. Eyles recalled, "We deceived the program by telling it an abort was already in progress." His solution was a sixty-one-keystroke sequence1.
Edgar Mitchell on Antares copied down these critical keystrokes and entered them into the computer, allowing the mission to proceed despite the malfunction1.
Sources
- Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩
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