![]() ![]() To this date Surveyor 3 remains the only probe to have been sent to another world and receive a subsequent visit from its creators.The spacecraft needs to know its position very accurately from the moment its mission starts. The crew landed in the moon's Ocean of Storms near Surveyor 3, a robotic probe that had previously landed on the moon two years earlier. The Saturn V rocket that launched the mission from Earth was struck by lightning twice during its ascent to orbit, but luckily, no serious damage occurred and the mission was a success. Mission: Apollo 12 is said by many to represent the most congenial of the Apollo crews, featuring the boyish Pete Conrad, who made no attempt to hide his obvious elation while he was shuffling around on the moon. ![]() If you want to see the original photos in all their glory, check out NASA's press release here or head over to Arizona State's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter Camera website for additional details.Īstronauts: Pete Conrad (commander), Al Bean (lunar module pilot), Dick Gordon (command module pilot, stayed in orbit) My composite images have lower resolution than the actual pictures taken by LRO. ![]() For each image shot from above, I inserted a picture taken from the surface during the original mission in order to provide a sense of perspective and scale. Here's a quick rundown of the three Apollo missions as seen in the new images. Each lunar module had a meaningful name used to simplify communications during missions. Apollo lunar modules landed as a combined spacecraft, but separated into ascent/descent units when it was time to head home, using the descent stages as launch pads to blast the astronauts back into lunar orbit. That's right – you can actually make out trash sitting on the lunar surface!Īnother improvement is the crispness of each mission's lunar module descent stage. In the case of Apollo 17, the detail is fine enough to make out individual package components, such as geophones (used to record seismic activity), heat transfer cables (used to measure heat emanating from the moon's interior), and discarded packing equipment. For example, the new images feature a sharper look at the Apollo Lunar Service Experiment Packages (ALSEPs) left behind by astronauts on each mission. When compared with the old images of the three landing sites, the improvements are drastic. The orbiter spent the past month in its lower orbit getting the new high resolution pictures, before returning to its standard altitude. LRO started snapping pictures of Apollo sites in 2009, but those images were shot from a height of around 50 kilometers. To date, the spacecraft has sent a whopping 192 terabytes worth of data back to Earth. ![]() The pictures were taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a mapping satellite that has been in lunar orbit since 2009. On Tuesday, September 6, NASA released new high-resolution photos of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites, from vantage points as close as 21 kilometers from the surface. The Apollo program continues to amaze, 42 years after Neil Armstrong took humankind's first steps on the moon. ![]()
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