Sky Tour Astronomy Podcast. By: J. Kelly Beatty November 1, By: Alan MacRobert October 29, Constant Contact Use. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt with the American flag. Earth glows blue , miles in the distance.
Six Apollo missions successfully landed on and departed from the Moon between July and December Top, clockwise: James Irwin salutes the flag at Hadley Rill; Harrison Schmitt collects rock samples in the Taurus-Littrow Valley; Buzz Aldrin's footprint in the lunar regolith; Charlie Duke placed a photo of his family on the Moon and took a picture of it; Edgar Mitchell photographs the desolate landscape of the Fra Mauro highlands; and Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor 3 probe to see how firmly it's situated.
The astronauts' tracks as well as the rover and other items are plainly visible. Click for a large version. All the landing sites can be found using these five prominent lunar craters. North is up in this view. Apollo 11 landed on July 20, , on the relatively smooth and safe terrain of the Sea of Tranquility. For an extra challenge, see if you can spot the three craters named for the Apollo 11 astronauts just north of the landing site. They range from 2.
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean achieved a pinpoint landing on Nov. Apollo 14 touched down on Feb. Somewhere in the scene are two golf balls hit by Alan Shepard with a makeshift club he brought from Earth. This was the first mission to use the Lunar Rover, greatly expanding the amount of ground the astronauts could cover.
Lunar footprints. Here on Earth, footprints generally don't last very long. Wherever you leave your tracks, you fully expect that whether it takes minutes, days, or weeks, eventually the natural phenomena in the world will cover them up. Winds blowing along the sand dunes, rains in the forest, or plant and animal activity will eventually eliminate the evidence of your passing.
On Earth, footprints or other markings on the surface are only temporary, and are easily erased by Without winds, rains, snows, glaciers, rockslides, or any other means of moving and rearranging the particles on the surface of the Moon, any footprints that we left there should remain for an interminable length of time. The only rearrangement of lunar sand and grains that we know of occurs when there are impacts on the Moon which kick up dust, which then can settle across the lunar surface.
Sunlight striking these particles is inefficient; the lunar atmosphere is only approximately one atom thick; launch and lander activity isn't energetic enough to substantially alter the distribution of material on the Moon.
If we ever landed and traveled on the Moon, the evidence should still be there. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has orbited and mapped the Moon at the highest resolution ever, returning hundreds of Terabytes of data, has something to say about that. Apollo 12 was the first precision landing of humans on the Moon, and we explored a much greater The dark grey markings on the surface are astronaut footprints, which have stood the test of time on the Moon, as the processes that erase them on Earth are absent on the Moon.
The orbiter's Narrow Angle Camera has photographed three of the landing sites: Apollo 12, 14, and 17, to unprecedented precision and accuracy. By going close to the lunar surface and photographing it with modern instruments from that low altitude, they were able to achieve resolutions as low as 35 centimeters about 14 inches per pixel.
The Apollo 12 image shows not only the physical landing site marked "Intrepid Descent Stage" on the image , but also the Surveyor 3 probe that had been on the Moon since , visited by the Apollo 12 astronauts two-and-a-half years later!
There's the bright, white "L" shape near the ALSEP equipment label; the "L" is due to highly reflective power cables that run from the central station to two of its instruments. The Apollo 14 landing site is still intact, and our images of it in modern times still carry the The lunar surface changes very slowly over time, and the changes we made in are still perceptible, virtually unchanged, today.
The view of Apollo 14 is less spectacular, but perhaps even more famous. Well, except for the footpaths once again! Whose are they? Edgar Mitchell and the famed Alan Shepard. Although we never found the golf balls that Alan proclaimed went "miles and miles" when he hit them with a 6-iron, we can absolutely see the evidence of the astronauts' presence left behind on the Moon, nearly 50 years later.
A photograph from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the landing site of Apollo The tracks of the Apollo 17, where Eugene Gene Cernan and Harrison Jack Schmitt became the last men to walk on the Moon, paints a notably different picture at this high resolution.
But look closer. There's also something marked "LRV" as well as a lighter set of two parallel tracks that run across the surface. Know what they are? The Lunar Roving Vehicle was included on the last three Apollo missions and enabled the astronauts The tracks of these vehicles are still present today, and can be seen in data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle!
Included on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, its tracks on the surface are distinctly different from human footprints, and allowed the astronauts on those missions to achieve distances far greater than those reached on the earlier missions. The tracks from Apollo 17's LRV don't even come close to fitting in this image; they extend for a total distance of over 22 miles, reaching a maximum range of nearly five miles away from the landing site!
Why, what's this? Again the charts will help you. Finding the Apollo 11 landing site where Neil Armstrong took his "one small step" off the Eagle's ladder is quite easy. Just find the large crater Theophilus and put it at the top of your field of view. You'll see an obvious 'promontory' of bright ground beneath the crater, jutting out into the darker lava sea. The ' Tranquility Base ' is just beneath this striking feature. One of the moon's most impressive craters will guide you towards the Apollo 12 landing site in the Ocean of Storms.
Just find the huge crater Copernicus , and place it at the bottom of your inverted field of view. To Copernicus' upper right you'll see the smaller crater Reinhold and beyond it the crater Lansberg. Apollo 12's landing site lies to the upper left of the 3. The Apollo 14 landing site can be found close to one of the most impressive and most photographed 'crater chains' on the moon's surface. Once you have found craters Arzachel, Alphonsus, and Ptolemaeus, jump across to the right of Ptolemaeus, where you will find the smaller ring-like crater, Parry.
The Apollo 14 landing site is just to the lower right of this crater. The lunar module Falcon touched down in July in the most stunning location any Apollo mission visited—close to a meandering valley in the shadow of the Apennine mountains.
To find it, look for the break in the curve of the mountains, to the left of the crater Archimedes, past Autolycus and Aristillus. Apollo 15 landed above and to the left of these craters, in the foothills of the mountains. The landing site of the Apollo 16 lunar module 'Orion' is probably the most challenging to find. If you place the crater Theophilus to the left of your eyepiece's field of view, you'll see a smaller, sharper-rimmed crater to its right. This is Kant, and Apollo 16 set down in the rugged highlands to its lower right.
The final Apollo mission in December saw the lunar module Challenger land in a notch-like 'bay' on the southern shore of the Sea of Serenity.
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