Hyperwall: Scouting the Apollo 11 Landing Site
The earliest close-ups were taken by Ranger 8 in 1965. The Ranger spacecraft were equipped with multiple video cameras that sent back still images every few seconds. The Rangers didn't orbit the Moon. They were instead designed to impact the surface. This allowed the cameras to take extreme close-ups in the final few seconds before impact.
The Lunar Orbiter program comprised five spacecraft, all of which took pictures from orbit. To achieve the highest possible resolution with the technology of the time, the cameras recorded images onto 70 mm film that was automatically developed onboard. The developed film was then scanned in strips by a video camera that transmitted the image, one strip at a time, back to Earth.
Lunar Orbiter used Kodak Bimat Transfer Film, similar to Polaroid instant film. The splotchy streaks visible in some Orbiter images are the result of the Bimat webbing sticking to the emulsion as it was peeled away, which tended to happen when the Bimat material was left in contact with the film for too long.
The images here can be found at the following locations.
- Apollo 10 Image Library of the Apollo Flight Journal
- Ranger 8 Camera B at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
- Lunar Orbiter Photo Gallery at LPI
- Apollo photographs at the National Archives
- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera
This overhead image from Lunar Orbiter V is possibly the best pre-landing image of the Apollo 11 landing site, circled in green. The small crater at 3 o'clock within the circle is Little West, which Neil Armstrong walked to during his time on the surface. The well-defined crater about three circle-widths to the right is West. Ejecta from West comprised the boulder field the astronauts avoided during the landing. Image 76 H3.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Image processing
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Noah Petro (NASA/GSFC)
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Technical support
- Ian Jones (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
- Laurence Schuler (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Datasets used in this visualization
LRO NAC (A.K.A. Narrow Angle Camera) (Collected with the LROC sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related pages
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ID: 4185 Visualization
A New Look at the Apollo 11 Landing Site
Read moreApollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20th, 1969, a little after 4:00 in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time. The Lunar Module, nicknamed Eagle and flown by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, touched down near the southern rim of the Sea of Tranquility, one of the large, dark basins that contribute to the Man in the Moon visible from Earth. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two hours outside the LM setting up experiments and collecting samples. At one point, Armstrong ventured east of the LM to examine a small crater, dubbed Little West, that he'd flown over just before landing.The trails of disturbed regolith created by the astronauts' boots are still clearly visible in photographs of the landing site taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) narrow-angle camera (LROC) more than four decades later.LROC imagery makes it possible to visit the landing site in a whole new way by flying around a three-dimensional model of the site. LROC scientists created the digital elevation model using a stereo pair of images. Each image in the pair shows the site from a slightly different angle, allowing sophisticated software to infer the shape of the terrain, similar to the way that left and right eye views are combined in the brain to produce the perception of depth.The animator draped an LROC photograph over the terrain model. He also added a 3D model of the LM descent stage—the real LM in the photograph looks oddly flat when viewed at an oblique angle.Although the area around the site is relatively flat by lunar standards, West Crater (the big brother of the crater visited by Armstrong) appears in dramatic relief near the eastern edge of the terrain model. Ejecta from West comprises the boulders that Armstrong had to avoid as he searched for a safe landing site.Apollo 11 was the first of six increasingly ambitious crewed lunar landings. The exploration of the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, when combined with the wealth of remote sensing data now being returned by LRO, continues to inform our understanding of our nearest neighbor in space. ||
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