Posts tagged with “Apollo”
Apollo
I just finished reading Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Scott, and it is an absolute must-read if you’re a fan of the moon landings.
LRO sees Apollo landing sites
NASA has posted photos of the Apollo landing sites as seen by the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter (LRO). This is the first time the sites have been photographed, as no Earth based telescope, or even any satellites such as the Hubble Space Telescope, have the resolution to resolve anything on the moon that’s smaller than about a mile wide.
The giant Apollo 11 post
Jason Kottke posted an enormous collection of links, videos, an articles related to Apollo 11. I haven’t had any chance to look through these yet, but I definitely plan on taking a couple hours and reading just about everything.
Apollo 11 Videos
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA released several restored videos of the mission. I went ahead and put the videos on Viddler, so they’re easy to embed. My favorite is the intro video:
Abandoned Spaceships and Moon Buggies
I was poking around NASA’s site today, looking for more information about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which today entered Moon orbit, and I came across a great article about abandoned spaceships and rovers on the moon.
Included in the article is a video of Apollo 17’s lunar module taking off from the surface of the moon (embedded below). This is the only footage ever recorded of a LM leaving the lunar surface, and it is also the last footage ever recorded on the moon.
To record the video, they used a camera on the lunar rover, which was positioned a fair distance away. One reason previous attempts to record the lift-off failed was the positioning of the camera–if it was too close, it was knocked over by the power of the rockets.
(Note: I uploaded the video to Viddler, so I could embed it here; as far as I know, all NASA videos and images are available for public use, so I shouldn’t be violating any copyright by posting this here.)