What do most people get wrong about the Moon landing?
The computer that got us there had less power than a modern calculator.
The answer
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, the onboard Apollo Guidance Computer had just 74 kilobytes of memory and operated at 0.043 MHz - roughly a millionth the power of a modern smartphone. During the final descent, the computer triggered multiple '1202' alarms (executive overflow errors) but was designed to prioritize critical tasks and continue. Neil Armstrong also had to manually pilot the lander to avoid a boulder field, touching down with only about 25 seconds of fuel remaining.
Source: NASA
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- United States
- NASA
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