Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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left out the one thing that reall y made -- just like
being in the desert -- you are flying along out there
over the desert and a very, very small ·;hink road
st ands out and the reason it does, is because it ' s
got the r i ght contr ast ratio.
You can put a 6 foot
road in brown in a brown field and you ' re not going to
see it from 100 feet in the air.
And t his was .the
whole trouble.
The targets were to small that their
contrast ratio didn ' t help us acquire.
I feel the
experiment was really a good one .
I re~lly feel
badly about not getting the data, but ~1 opinion
hasn' t changed from before flight -- I ·,ras worried
before flight that the contrast was gob.g to be
such that we would never locate it and that was
exactly what our problem was.
Now the Woodleigh
si te, I feel might have been a little bit different:
We had such a good sighting cue in that Sharksmouth
Bay, and there was no doubt in our mind where the
target was the one time we saw it with t he smoke and
in relation to Sharksmouth Bay, and eve:cything that
if we had had some fuel up there, we ve:cy well may
have seen those targets far enough out t o acquir e the
si te and start t r acking and then we might have gotten
them some useful dat a .
No doubt in our mind that we'd
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