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I was looking at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's collection, and Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 spacesuit has some text written on the left glove. It looks like some sort of instructions, related to photography:

glove

Was this some sort of inspection list for the lunar module that Neil was to perform upon exiting the module (by taking photos) or a task list? I've only been able to find pictures and general discussion about the suit in general - nothing about what this text is for.

Ian Kemp
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Timothy G.
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1 Answers1

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It's called, appropriately enough, the "sewn-on cuff checklist".

Aldrin's tasks are in parentheses as shown by the (LMP) annotation at the top.

It's a checklist of pretty much everything they were supposed to do on the surface, in NASA acronym-ese. Not just photography. Some examples:

  • Set up the camera
  • Preliminary checks
  • Gather samples
  • Inspect the spacecraft
  • Deploy the experiments
  • Stow the samples

Reference https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/images11.html#neilcuf

Organic Marble
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    Later missions had longer EVAs, and thus had longer (and multi-page) cuff checklists. See, for example, this picture of Pete Conrad on the Moon, or images of the individual pages (Caution: NSFW). – Mark Sep 09 '21 at 01:14
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    I see some of the items on their checklists are rather... revealing! Honestly quite fascinating how much these cuff checklists contain. I'm surprised how detailed they are documented on that website for what seems like a rather small piece of space exploration history. – Timothy G. Sep 09 '21 at 04:16
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    I'm surprised to see that deploying the flag does not seem to be on the list. – jpa Sep 09 '21 at 05:50
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    When I broke my arm in high school I wrote cheat sheets for important tests on my cast. I feel a stronger connection to Buzz Aldrin now. – GdD Sep 09 '21 at 08:13
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    We runners used to have something like that too in the pre-GPS times: a list with the splits per mile and sometimes hints about the course, covered in transparent tape to waterproof it and taped to the wrist. A tad lighter than my Fenix 6, TBH. – runlevel0 Sep 11 '21 at 09:24
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    @runlevel0 Lighter, and I'm sure that the Fenix doesn't have a message reminding you to describe the protuberances! – dotancohen Sep 11 '21 at 18:19