New pictures reveal what Man has left on the Moon
For four decades it has sat in bleak isolation on the lunar surface, unseen to the human eye and gathering dust. Now, in new photographs released by Nasa, the remainder of the spacecraft that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the final leg of their voyage to the Moon can be seen for the first time, right where they left it.
The image is part of a series of photographs shot by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, an unmanned satellite launched from Florida last month as part of a $580 million exploratory mission to map the Moon in new detail.
Other shots beamed down — all taken between July 11 and 15 — show the landing sites of all but one of the lunar landing missions that followed Apollo 11. In the case of the Apollo 14 site, where Alan Shepard teed off two golfballs after landing with his colleague Edgar Mitchell in January 1971, even the footprints of the astronauts and the marks made in the dust while trundling a wheelbarrow carrying Moon rocks are still visible.
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The image is part of a series of photographs shot by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, an unmanned satellite launched from Florida last month as part of a $580 million exploratory mission to map the Moon in new detail.
Other shots beamed down — all taken between July 11 and 15 — show the landing sites of all but one of the lunar landing missions that followed Apollo 11. In the case of the Apollo 14 site, where Alan Shepard teed off two golfballs after landing with his colleague Edgar Mitchell in January 1971, even the footprints of the astronauts and the marks made in the dust while trundling a wheelbarrow carrying Moon rocks are still visible.