Apollo 17 Landing Site

The camera flies low over the Taurus-Littrow valley, primarily east to west, arriving at the South Massif, where it tilts up to view the Earth. On December 11, 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt landed their lunar module, Challenger, in a lunar valley named for the Taurus mountain range and the nearby Littrow crater. Cernan and Schmitt spent three days exploring the valley before rejoining Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans in lunar orbit. This visualization uses imagery and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's cameras to show the terrain of the valley and the astronauts' view of the faraway Earth. Related pages

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available.Music credits: “Boreal Moment” by Benoit Scarwell [SACEM]; “Sensory Questioning”, “Natural Time Cycles”, “Emerging Designer”, and “Experimental Design” by Laurent Dury [SACEM]; “Superluminal” by Lee Groves [PRS], Peter George Marett [PRS] from Killer Tracks GIFApollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell prepare to plant the American flag on the Moon's surface. Credit: NASA GIFThe Aug. 7, 1972, solar flare was captured by the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. This particular flare — known as the seahorse flare for the shape of the bright regions — sparked a strong SEP event that could have been harmful to astronauts if an Apollo mission had been in progress at the time.Credit: NASA The lunar rover vehicle during the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. The lunar roving vehicle -- which was developed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center -- was used for collecting rocks and data on the lunar highlands. Credit: NASA August 1972, as NASA scientist Ian Richardson remembers it, was hot. In Surrey, England, where he grew up, the fields were brown and dry, and people tried to stay out of the Sun, indoors and televisions on. But for several days that month, his TV picture kept breaking up. “Do not adjust your set,” he recalls the BBC announcing. “Heat isn’t causing the interference. It’s sunspots.”The same sunspots that disrupted the television signals led to enormous solar flares — powerful bursts of radiation from the Sun — Aug. 4-7 that year. Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the solar eruptions were a near miss for lunar explorers. Had they been in orbit or on the Moon’s surface, they would have sustained dangerous levels of solar radiation sparked by the eruptions. Today, the Apollo-era flares serve as a reminder of the threat of radiation exposure for technology and astronauts in space. Understanding and predicting solar eruptions is crucial for safe space exploration. Almost 50 years since those 1972 storms, the data, technology and resources available to NASA have improved, enabling advancements towards space weather forecasts and astronaut protection — key to NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon.Read more on NASA.gov. For More InformationSee [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/how-nasa-protects-astronauts-from-space-radiation-at-moon-mars-solar-cosmic-rays](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/how-nasa-protects-astronauts-from-space-radiation-at-moon-mars-solar-cosmic-rays) Related pages

The camera flies into the Taurus-Littrow valley, revealing the path taken by the astronauts in the lunar rover during Apollo 17's three EVAs. This visualization of the Taurus-Littrow valley, site of the Apollo 17 Moon landing, uses multiple Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter datasets to zoom into the valley and illustrate the paths taken by the astronauts during their three days of exploration at the site. The data includes wide-angle (WAC) and narrow-angle (NAC) camera images, LOLA laser altimetry, and a high-resolution elevation map created from NAC stereo pairs. The imagery was chosen to approximately match the lighting conditions at the time of the landing. Color-coded trails with numbered stops (called stations in astronaut lingo) show where Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt drove their lunar rover — orange on day 1, blue on day 2, and green on day 3. Related pages