Inside the Mission Operations Control Room - a freezing-cold space in Houston that smelled like coffee and so much tobacco that a cloud of smoke would draft out when the door opened - that dust meant the landing was no longer theoretical. After that, it felt kind of anticlimactic to me.” It was the first time humans had ever been in a spacecraft with a rocket engine blowing particles off the surface of some place that wasn’t Earth. “In fact, I just got the same chill again. “When he said that, it sent a chill up my back,” says Gerry Griffin, who was then a 34-year-old flight director. Shortly after 4:05 p.m., the words came across from Armstrong’s fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as the astronauts were looking for their landing spot: “Picking up some dust.” But the larger the scope and higher the power, the closer you'll be able to pinpoint each landing site and better able to visualize the scene.The words spoken by astronaut Neil Armstrong when he became the first man to step foot on the moon - at 10:56 pm Eastern Time on Jhave since become one of the most famous sentences ever uttered.īut NASA’s Mission Control staffers in Houston were moved by a different line, spoken about six hours earlier. To see each locale, a 4-inch or larger telescope magnifying 75× or higher will get the job done. With the Moon waxing this week and next, the advancing line of lunar sunrise will expose one site after another beginning with Apollo 17 in the Moon's eastern hemisphere and finishing with Apollos 12 and 14 in the western. The astronauts' tracks as well as the rover and other items are plainly visible. ALSEP stands for Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package. Photos of each of the six Apollo landing sites photographed from low orbit by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Apollo 12 astronauts even found the first meteorite ever discovered on another world, the Bench Crater carbonaceous chondrite. Astronauts bagged 842 pounds (382 kg) of Moon rocks, which represented everything from mare basalts to ancient highland rocks to impact-shattered rocks called breccias. All the landing sites lie on the near side of the Moon and were chosen to explore different geologic terrains. LRO's orbital imagery and photos taken in situ by the Apollo astronauts will serve to illuminate our ramblings from one Apollo site to the next. 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. Six Apollo missions successfully landed on and departed from the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972. Given that the largest piece of equipment left on the Moon after each mission was the 17.9-foot-high by 14-foot-wide Lunar Module, you can see the problem.ĭid I say problem? No problem for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which can dip as low as 31 miles (50 km) from the lunar surface, close enough to image each landing site in remarkable detail. In visible light, it's 0.05″, or closer to 300 feet. Hubble's 94.5-inch mirror has a resolution of 0.024″ in ultraviolet light, which translates to 141 feet (43 meters) at the Moon's distance. Not even the Hubble Space Telescope can discern evidence of the Apollo landings. They're the only places where humanity has achieved one of its oldest dreams and "touched the stars".Īs you're well aware, no telescope on Earth can see the leftover descent stages of the Apollo Lunar Modules or anything else Apollo-related. But here and there among the nooks and crannies, you'll find six of the most remarkable locales on the Moon - the Apollo landing sites. How can you ignore it? You've doubtless observed craters and mountain ranges and probed for volcanic features like rills and domes. We all love dark moonless skies, but let's face it, the Moon's out two weeks a month. Earth glows blue 240,000 miles in the distance. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt with the American flag.
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