Apollo Guidance Computer - PGNCS Trouble

PGNCS Trouble

PGNCS generated unanticipated warnings during Apollo 11's lunar descent, with the AGC showing a 1201 alarm ("Executive overflow - no vacant areas") and a 1202 alarm ("Executive overflow - no core sets"). The cause was a rapid, steady stream of spurious cycle steals from the rendezvous radar, intentionally left on standby during the descent in case it was needed for an abort.

During this part of the approach the processor would normally be almost 85% loaded. The extra 6400 cycle steals per second added the equivalent of 13% load, leaving just enough time for all scheduled tasks to run to completion. Five minutes into the descent Buzz Aldrin gave the computer the command 1668 which instructed it to calculate and display DELTAH (the difference between altitude sensed by the radar and the computed altitude). This added an additional 10% to the processor workload causing executive overflow and a 1202 alarm. After being given the "GO" from Houston Aldrin entered 1668 again and another 1202 alarm occurred. When reporting the second alarm Aldrin added the comment "It appears to come up when we have a 1668 up". Happily for Apollo 11, the AGC software had been designed with priority scheduling. Just as it had been designed to do, the software automatically recovered, deleting lower priority tasks including the 1668 display task, to complete its critical guidance and control tasks. Guidance controller Steve Bales and his support team that included Jack Garman issued several "GO" calls and the landing was successful. For his role, Bales received the US Medal of Freedom on behalf of the entire control center team and the three Apollo astronauts.

The problem was not a programming error in the AGC, nor was it pilot error. It was a peripheral hardware design bug that was already known and documented by Apollo 5 engineers. However because the problem had only occurred once during testing they concluded that it was safer to fly with the existing hardware that they had already tested, than to fly with a newer but largely untested radar system. In the actual hardware, the position of the rendezvous radar was encoded with synchros excited by a different source of 800 Hz AC than the one used by the computer as a timing reference. The two 800 Hz sources were frequency locked but not phase locked, and the small random phase variations made it appear as though the antenna was rapidly "dithering" in position even though it was completely stationary. These phantom movements generated the rapid series of cycle steals.