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The 'Apollo Telescope Mount', or ATM, is the name of a solar observatory that was attached to Skylab, the first US space station. Based on the Apollo Lunar Module and originally designed to be a free-flying module manned by a three-crew Apollo CSM, it was later combined with the Skylab project and planned to be launched separately and docked with the wet workshop version of Skylab in a feat similar to that employed by the Russians on the Mir space station.
With the cancellation of the later Apollo landing missions providing a Saturn V to orbit an expanded, dry version of the station, the ATM was launched attached to the station, a change that saved the program when a problem during launch destroyed one of the workshop solar panels and prevented the other from automatically deploying. The windmill-like arrays on the ATM, which fed power to both the ATM and the station, remained undamaged due to the protection within the launch shroud, and provided enough power for manned operations until the remaining workshop array could be deployed.
The Apollo Telescope Mount was designed and construction was managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.[1] It included eight major observational instruments, along with several lesser experiments. The ATM made observations at a variety of wavelengths, from extreme ultraviolet to infrared.
The ATM was manually operated by the astronauts aboard Skylab, yielding data principally as exposed photographic film that was returned to Earth with the astronauts. The film had to be changed out during the manned mission during spacewalks.
As of 2006, the original exposures are still on file (and accessible to interested parties) at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C..