The Apollo 12 Landing Site

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    ID: 4989 Visualization

    Apollo 16 Lands in the Lunar Highlands

    April 18th, 2022
    (updated Aug. 25th, 2023)

    The camera flies from the east to the Apollo 16 landing site, then flies north to North Ray crater. Includes an introductory slate, astronaut audio, and music.Music provided by Universal Production Music: The Orion Arm – Christian Telford, David Travis Edwards, Matthew St Laurent, and Robert Anthony Navarro.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. || Apollo 16 landed on the Moon at 8:23 p.m. Houston time on April 20, 1972 (April 21 at 2:23 UTC). Their site north of Descartes crater was the only Apollo site in purely highlands terrain, where the surface is older, lighter in color, and more heavily cratered, in contrast to the darker basalts of the maria. Commander John Young and Lunar Module Pilot Charlie Duke explored the surface in their lunar rover, traveling a total of 16.7 miles (26.9 km) and collecting 211 pounds (95.7 kg) of samples, while Command Module Pilot Thomas K. Mattingly performed experiments from orbit.For the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 mission, the video presented here uses elevation maps and images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to visualize the area around the landing site and the routes taken by the astronauts over three days of extravehicular activities (EVAs). The video begins with the camera flying west over the terrain the astronauts saw as they came in for a landing, and it ends with a dramatic view of North Ray crater, the destination of their EVA on Day 3. ||

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    ID: 4918 Visualization

    Apollo 15 Stand-Up EVA

    July 30th, 2021
    (updated Aug. 25th, 2023)

    FULL VERSION with Music: Excerpts of Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott's stand-up EVA audio are combined with visuals of the Hadley-Apennine region created from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data.Music provided by Universal Production Music: “Spread Our Wings” – Ben BeinyWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. || Apollo 15 landed on the Moon at 5:16 p.m. Houston time (22:16 UTC) on July 30, 1971. Two hours later, Commander Dave Scott and Lunar Module Pilot Jim Irwin depressurized the cabin of the Lunar Module and opened the top hatch. Scott then stood on the ascent engine cover, poked his head through the hatch, and for the next 25 minutes described and photographed the terrain of their landing site in the Hadley-Apennine region. This was the stand-up extravehicular activity (SEVA), an opportunity to quickly survey and report on the lunar landscape they'd be exploring over the next three days.For the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 15 mission, the video presented here uses elevation maps and images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to visualize the Hadley-Apennine terrain. The camera pans across the Apennine mountains and Hadley Rille that border the region, then flies low over the surface to features that were explored up-close by the astronauts. The visuals are matched to audio excerpts of Commander Scott's descriptions during the SEVA.Because of its unique timing, Apollo 15 was the only mission to include a stand-up EVA. It was also the first of three missions to bring a lunar rover, an electric Moon car that allowed the astronauts to travel a total of 17 miles (28 km) and collect 170 pounds (77 kg) of samples. ||

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  • 
    ID: 4883 Visualization

    Apollo 14 Hike To Cone Crater

    Feb. 8th, 2021
    (updated May 3rd, 2023)

    Full Video with Narration: This video describes the hike toward Cone crater by Apollo 14 astronauts Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell, using a visualization created from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data.Music provided by Universal Production Music: “Taking Flight” – Ben Beiny.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. || Apollo 14 landed on the Moon a little after 3:00 a.m. Houston time on February 5, 1971. The landing site in the Fra Mauro highlands had originally been the destination of Apollo 13 ten months earlier. The site is on the edge of a debris field created by the impact that formed Cone crater, 330 meters in diameter and about 1.5 kilometers away.On their second moonwalk, astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell hiked toward the crater, collecting samples of crater ejecta along the way. In theory, rocks blasted from the impact that lay closer to the crater were from deeper beneath the surface, creating a sequence that sampled the lunar crust down to the depth of the crater. But navigating to the crater was difficult. It was on the far side of a fairly steep incline and was never visible to the astronauts as they walked toward it, and they struggled to match features on their map with what they saw on the ground.Images of the site from the Narrow Angle Camera on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter record the path of the astronauts as a clearly visible trail of darker, disturbed regolith. Although they didn't know it at the time, Shepard and Mitchell came within 40 meters (135 feet) of the rim of Cone crater, close enough to collect some of the deepest ejecta, but not close enough to actually see the crater itself.This visualization uses LRO images and elevation data to recreate EVA 2, the hike to Cone crater. The camera flies near the ground, along the outbound path taken by the astronauts. Stops along the way are labeled with distance and elevation information. The journey ends by showing how close the astronauts came to a spectacular view of the crater. ||

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  • 
    ID: 4803 Visualization

    Apollo 13 S-IVB Impact Site

    April 6th, 2020
    (updated Aug. 25th, 2023)

    The impact of the Apollo 13 S-IVB is seen as a brief flash on the night side of a waxing gibbous Moon. The camera then flies very close to the surface to show an LRO image of the impact site. || Seventy-eight hours into the flight of Apollo 13, Capcom Vance Brand in Mission Control informed the astronauts that the third stage of their Saturn V rocket had hit the Moon. Commander Jim Lovell replied, Well, at least something worked on this flight.One day earlier, a catastrophic failure of an oxygen tank in the Service Module left the crew without power, air, and water in their Command Module, forcing them to use their Lunar Module as a lifeboat. The Moon landing, and all of the science they would do on the lunar surface, was lost. The only major science objective that yielded results was the intentional impact of their booster.After sending the astronauts out of Earth orbit on a path to the Moon, the detached upper stage of the Saturn V rocket, called the S-IVB (“ess four bee”), was aimed squarely at the Moon. Its impact at 77:56:39.7 mission elapsed time was detected by several scientific instruments left on the surface by Apollo 12. A seismometer (a moonquake detector) recorded the tremor, and particle detectors sensed molecules from both the impact itself and the resulting deflection of the solar wind.More than four decades later, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission located and photographed the Apollo 13 S-IVB impact site about 135 kilometers west of the Apollo 12 landing. In this visualization, we first see the location of the impact on the night side of the waxing gibbous Moon. (It isn’t certain whether the impact could have been seen from Earth in this way, but the energy of the impact was roughly twice that of the bright flash recorded on March 17, 2013.) The view then zooms rapidly to the LRO image of the impact crater before pulling back to show its location relative to the Apollo 12 landing site.The close-up NAC (Narrow Angle Camera) view is a detail from image M140087684L and has a resolution of 50 centimeters per pixel. The wider view, at 100 meters per pixel, is a detail from the LROC WAC global morphological map. ||

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  • 
    ID: 4731 Visualization

    Apollo Landing Sites with Moon Phases

    March 29th, 2019
    (updated Aug. 25th, 2023)

    The six Apollo landing sites are revealed chronologically as the phase and libration of the Moon is shown throughout the Apollo era. Annotations describe the landing sites and the durations on the lunar surface. || The NASA Apollo missions landed at six sites on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. As seen in this visualization, all of the sites are near the equator on the near side (the side facing the Earth), and all of the landings took place fairly soon after local sunrise, when the lunar surface was cool and the shadows threw the terrain into high relief, making navigation easier.Between each landing, the Moon is shown going through its monthly cycle of phases. The time between landings is especially long between Apollo 12 and 14, since Apollo 13 suffered a major equipment failure and was unable to land. The text includes the total number of hours that the Lunar Module (LM, pronounced "lem") was on the surface along with the number of hours that the astronauts were actually outside — extravehicular activity or EVA in astronaut speak.The precise landing site coordinates are those recently determined from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) narrow angle camera images of the sites. The coordinates are listed here and in Coordinates of anthropogenic features on the Moon by Wagner et al. in the February, 2017 Icarus. The surface times are from Apollo by the Numbers by Orloff. Also see the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, a complete and thoroughly annotated transcript of astronaut activities on the Moon.The amount of time that the astronauts were able to stay on the surface increased with each mission. Distance traveled during EVAs on the last three missions were greatly extended by a lunar rover, a battery-powered dune buggy that allowed the astronauts to visit and sample places several kilometers away from the LM. ||

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  • 
    ID: 4185 Visualization

    A New Look at the Apollo 11 Landing Site

    July 18th, 2014
    (updated Aug. 25th, 2023)

    Apollo 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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