Modern satellite imagery and three-dimensional modeling create a multimedia view of how Apollo 11 played out on the lunar surface
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When Apollo 11 happened in real time, people back home could follow along with grainy, though exhilarating, video footage. Yet they had little sense of where on the moon the action was happening and how far the astronauts explored. Now, three-dimensional computer models based on recent satellite imagery can re-create each step of the mission and the terrain it covered.
Based on the 2012 photograph of the landing site from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a height map of the surface shows the contours of the moon where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traveled. Also visible are the positions of the lander, the experiments they set up and even the astronauts’ footpaths. Armstrong’s “one small step for man” was followed by many more, as he and Aldrin set up equipment and explored the lunar surface.
Among the experiments they set up were the Passive Seismic Experiment Package. Although lasting only three weeks, the seismometer detected lunar “moonquakes” and provided our most detailed look at the moon’s internal structure.
Another experiment, the Laser Ranging Retroreflector, consists of a series of reflectors with the property to always reflect an incoming light beam back in the direction it came from. It provided many important measurements, including data from the moon’s orbit and the rate at which the moon is receding from Earth. This is the only Apollo 11 experiment that is still returning data from the moon.
Going to the other side of Double Crater, Armstrong and Aldrin set up the television camera that provided the world with some of the first stirring moments of human activity on the moon. Six other cameras were also used by the astronauts.
Not far from the camera we find the Solar Wind Composition Experiment. It consisted of a foil sheet that was deployed on a pole facing the sun. The foil was exposed to the sun for 77 minutes, allowing solar-wind particles to embed themselves into the foil, which was returned to Earth for lab analysis.
As the two astronauts moved about the surface, they left behind a trail of disturbed moon dust. This darkened trail can still be seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—an echo of the history they made. From this record, we can see that the farthest trip from the Eagle was an unplanned jaunt by Armstrong to the edge of Little West Crater, a distance of about 200 feet.
Satellite imagery helps preserve the details of this historic mission, but those details ultimately will be lost to time: extreme temperatures, solar radiation and the unrelenting bombardment of micrometeorites on the lunar surface are eroding the footprints and will eventually wipe out even the machinery.
Little by little, Tranquility Base is disappearing.
