Apollo 11 lander spotted by lunar satellite

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) , which reached orbit around the moon last month , passed over the Sea of Tranquility on Sunday and spied the Apollo 11 lunar module descent stage, still resting on the surface.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which reached orbit around the moon last month, passed over the Sea of Tranquility on Sunday and spied the Apollo 11 lunar module descent stage, still resting on the surface.

The lander set down on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in 1969 is at the center of this image, a small white dot [arrow] with a long shadow stretching to the right. Each pixel in the photograph, which comes from the LRO's Narrow Angle Camera, is 1.14 meters across, so the Apollo 11 craft is just a few pixels wide.

NASA today announced that the orbiter had photographed all the Apollo landing sites other than Apollo 12, a destination that should be imaged in the next few weeks.

For a game of extraterrestrial Where's Waldo?, try spotting the lander in the full Apollo 11 image returned by the LRO. And for more on the historic first moon landing as its 40th anniversary approaches, see our In-Depth Report on Apollo 11.

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