With the goal of finding Moon rocks older than the young ones found previously in the lunar maria, Apollo 16 set down in a region of the lunar highlands known as the Cayley Formation, in April 1972.Īpollo 17, the last of the manned Moon missions, set down in the Taurus-Littrow Valley in December 1972, where the astronauts searched for primordial highland material. The rover made it possible for the astronauts to cover significantly more territory than earlier missions did. The first mission to use a lunar rover was Apollo 15, which touched down on in Hadley Rille near the Apennine Mountain range. LRO captured an image (shown right) of the lunar module Antares’ descent stage in a 500-meter-wide photo. In February 1971, Apollo 14 landed in the Fra Mauro region. (Click to enlarge.) Photo Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.įour months later, Apollo 12 set down on the Ocean of Storms, south of Copernicus Crater and just a short distance from the Surveyor 3 probe. Descent stage of lunar module Antares in center image width is 500 meters. The astronauts also paid visits to small craters surrounding the landing site, as well as the place where the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe landed two years earlier: This LRO image shows the areas visited by Apollo 12 astronauts in 1969.NAC image of the Apollo 14 landing site acquired 25 January 2011. Scientists say the two bright streaks forming an "L" shape around the ALSEP experimental station are reflective cables leading to two of the scientific instruments left behind. The Apollo 12 picture shows the tracks left by Pete Conrad and Alan Bean after NASA's second moon landing in 1969. Unfortunately, not even the latest imagery is sharp enough to show the golf balls that Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard said he sent flying for "miles and miles and miles" on the moon in 1971. "Those are too small to be resolved," Robinson said. You can also see a detailed image of the Antares lunar module's descent stage near the Fra Mauro crater, and the tracks left by the astronauts and their rickshaw-style cart as they moved around the surface: This picture from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows tracks left behind by Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell as they roved around the lunar surface. Later, the scientists figured out that the excess "stuff" was actually packing material for the instruments, as well as insulation that was blown off the descent stage during the Apollo 17 astronauts' takeoff.Īpollo 14's experimental package, known as ALSEP, is visible as a bright spot on the new LRO image below. "There seemed to be too much 'stuff' on the ground," he told reporters. Robinson said the new imagery initially raised questions about the debris that was scattered around the descent stage. You can make out the lunar module's descent stage (dubbed "Challenger"), as well as the module's experimental pallet, the ladder leading down to the lunar surface (it's a bright prominence at the 9 o'clock point on the inset enlargement of Challenger) and the life-support backpacks that Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt threw out of the ascent module just before they took off (labeled as PLSS. The picture of the Apollo 17 site in the moon's Taurus-Littrow valley is sharp enough to show the tracks of the astronauts and their lunar rover in unprecedented detail. This image from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the tracks and the trash left behind by the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. "When I first took a look at these images, my jaw flopped to the ground," Noah Petro, a member of the LRO research team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in a video featuring the new imagery. Each pixel covers just 10 inches (25 centimeters), as opposed to 20 inches per pixel previously. That means the resolution for these three landing sites - Apollo 12 in 1969, Apollo 14 in 1971 and Apollo 17 in 1972 - is twice as sharp as that seen in the previous images. Because of adjustments in the car-sized probe's orbit, lately it's been flying as low as 14 miles (22 kilometers) above the lunar surface. But these particular images are special because they were taken from the closest vantage point the orbiter will ever have during its $504 million mission. LRO's high-resolution camera has been looking at the whole moon, including all six of the Apollo landing sites, for the past two years.
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