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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 expand dry version of the station, the ATM was launched attached to the station, a change that saved the program when the workshop solar panels were either destroyed or damaged during launch and 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. 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. As of 2006, the original exposures are still on file (and accessible to interested parties) at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C..
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