Finding Apollo
Forty years later, we’re about to see what the moonwalkers left behind.
- By Tony Reichhardt
- Air & Space magazine, September 2008
The shadow of their lander dominates a mosaic of the numbered photos Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took out their window before leaving the moon.
NASA/Panorama assembled by R. Farwell for the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
The flag is probably gone. Buzz Aldrin saw it knocked over by the rocket blast as he and Neil Armstrong left the moon 39 summers ago. Lying there in the lunar dust, unprotected from the sun’s harsh ultraviolet rays, the flag’s red and blue would have bleached white in no time. Over the years, the nylon would have turned brittle and disintegrated.
Dennis Lacarrubba, whose New Jersey-based company, Annin, made the flag and sold it to NASA for $5.50 in 1969, considers what might happen to an ordinary nylon flag left outside for 39 years on Earth, let alone on the moon. He thinks for a few seconds. “I can’t believe there would be anything left,” he concludes. “I gotta be honest with you. It’s gonna be ashes.”
There are other signs of aging at Tranquillity Base. The shiny gold foil on the base of the lunar lander is shiny no more—it would have darkened and flaked away long ago. The once-white life support backpacks, tossed out unceremoniously after Armstrong and Aldrin made their brief spacewalks, have likely turned yellow. The TV camera, the seismometer, the discarded hammer—anything made of glass or metal—are probably okay. And the famous bootprints? They may still be as crisp as the day they were made. Or, they may have the thinnest coating of dust from small grains moving around continually on the lunar surface (see “Stronger than Dirt,” Aug./Sept. 2006).
The truth is, no one knows exactly what the Apollo landing sites will look like after four decades. Nobody thought it would take us this long to go back.
And now we are.
New cameras in orbit around the moon have begun returning photos of sights unseen in a generation. Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which arrived in lunar orbit in October, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin’s rocket engine as they touched down in Mare Imbrium in July 1971. They and other Apollo moonwalkers routinely photographed the white patches when they looked back at their landing sites from lunar orbit before returning home. Kaguya’s best camera has a resolution, or ability to separate two objects, of 10 meters (33 feet)—just enough to make out the white patch of disturbed soil. The camera can’t quite resolve the squat, 30-foot-wide base of the Apollo 15 lander sitting in the middle of that patch. But the Kaguya photo shows a dark feature that may be the lander’s shadow.
Until Kaguya, there hadn’t been a camera good enough to spot Apollo artifacts on the moon since the last astronauts left, in 1972. Neither the U.S. Clementine nor the European SMART-1 moon probes, launched in 1994 and 2003, respectively, had enough resolution. (In case you’re wondering, even the best ground-based telescopes can’t make out Apollo hardware on the moon. They have the resolution—some produce sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope—but the objects left by the astronauts aren’t bright enough to be seen.)
So it’s a job for lunar orbiters. Next up is Chandrayaan, India’s first planetary science spacecraft, which is due to arrive at the moon this fall with a camera twice as sharp as Kaguya’s. That should be good enough to see more than smudges in the dirt, according to Mark Robinson, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University whose own high-resolution camera will fly on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in November. “I will be surprised if Chandrayaan can’t detect the [lunar landers],” says Robinson. The bases of the landers, six of which are still on the moon, will be only about two picture elements, or pixels, across in the five-meter-resolution images—not enough for clear identification. But in photos taken at low sun angles, says Robinson, the landers’ shadows should appear as dark streaks up to 10 pixels long. This technique has paid off in the past. Long before the first Apollo landing, scientists studying photos taken by the Lunar Orbiter 3 spacecraft noticed a shadow cast by the Surveyor 1 robot, which had landed on the moon eight months earlier.
If the Chandrayaan scientists are “really, really lucky,” says Robinson, they might also detect the shadows of the lunar rovers, the two-man buggies that astronauts left at the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 sites. The 10-foot-long rovers would be less than a pixel in size, but their shadows could be as long as four or five pixels, says Robinson.
His own instrument on the LRO will do a thorough job of “revisiting” the Apollo sites, beginning in early 2009. The narrow-angle camera can resolve details about the size of a microwave oven. As the LRO spacecraft orbits from pole to pole and the moon turns slowly beneath it, it will eventually get a look at all six Apollo landing sites. The resulting pictures should clearly show the landers and the rovers, says Robinson. Even some of the larger experiment packages left behind by the moonwalkers might be identifiable from their shadows. The LRO images should also show rover tracks and the dark areas where the astronauts scuffed up the lunar soil. The new information can then be used to refine maps of the moonwalkers’ historic traverses.
And that’s just Apollo. Some of the most fascinating pictures the LRO takes will show obscure spacecraft that nobody’s seen, or even thought much about, since they left Earth more than 40 years ago. Phil Stooke, a planetary geographer at the University of Western Ontario and author of The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration, has a list of targets he can’t wait to see, including two Russian spacecraft—Luna 9, which in 1966 made the first soft landing on the moon, and Luna 17, which in 1970 delivered the first geological rover, Lunokhod 1. Neither spacecraft’s location is precisely known, says Stooke. Nor are the exact locations of many of the craters made when orbiters and spent rocket stages crashed into the moon in the 1960s. Altogether, about 100 tons of junk is strewn across dozens of spots around the moon. Over the next two years, we’ll rediscover much of it.
Of course, the LRO’s mission is not finding old spacecraft. The orbiter is producing high-resolution maps for planning the next wave of lunar exploration. But since astronauts aren’t expected to head moonward until 2020 at the earliest, the initial users of the maps are likely to be surface-exploring robots, and the first of those could arrive as early as next summer, in time for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. An intense contest is under way among several groups vying for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded team that lands a rover on the moon, drives it at least 500 meters (about a third of a mile), and returns video and still images to Earth.
Just as the first X Prize spurred aircraft designer Burt Rutan to build a one-man rocketplane that flew to the edge of space and back (see “Confessions of a Spaceship Pilot,” June/July 2005), the Google prize is meant to encourage innovation in robotic exploration of the moon. So far, 13 teams have entered, from as far away as Romania and Malaysia.
The Rutan in this race is Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Whittaker, one of the world’s foremost roboticists. Whittaker-built rovers have explored volcanoes, deserts, and Antarctic ice fields. Last year one of his vehicles won the DARPA Urban Challenge, a road rally for autonomous robot cars, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Whittaker’s X Prize team, Astrobotic Technology, is loaded with experience, starting with project manager Tony Spear, the man who led the NASA mission that in 1996 landed the Sojourner rover on Mars. The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, currently operating the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars, is a partner. Astrobotic’s president is David Gump, a space entrepreneur who in 1989 started a venture called LunaCorp, which also planned to drive a rover around the moon and sell the video. Whittaker was to have built the robot. Although LunaCorp folded in 2003, Gump is betting that it was mostly because the company was ahead of its time.
Not that Astrobotic’s proposed “Tranquillity Trek” to the Apollo 11 site will be a cakewalk. For one thing, says Gump, the mission will cost about $100 million—far more than Google is paying in prize money. While he looks for financial backers, the technical team is working feverishly, trying to hold on to the possibility of a launch next year. Astrobotic claims that once it raises the money, it can be on the moon within 18 months.
After landing, Astrobotic’s rover will have just 14 days—a lunar day—to reach the Apollo 11 site and take pictures. Equipping the robot to withstand the frigid, two-week lunar night would have complicated the engineering and driven up the cost. So this will be a short, focused sprint to Tranquillity Base. The rover moves at “about a human walking pace,” says Gump, and will have to reach its destination before nightfall, so success requires a precision landing. The team expects to come down about half a mile from its target, with a precision measured in meters—unprecedented accuracy for a robotic planetary lander.
This is where another Astrobotic partner, Raytheon, comes in. The company built the Navy missile that intercepted and destroyed a military reconnaissance satellite falling from orbit last February. Astrobotic will license the Raytheon “digital scene matching” technology used in cruise missiles—which compares real-time pictures of the looming target with photos stored in an onboard computer—to ensure precise navigation.
Another serious contender to win the Google prize is Quantum3, based in Vienna, Virginia, and led by NASA veterans including Courtney Stadd, the agency’s former chief of staff, and Liam Sarsfield, its former deputy chief engineer. Quantum3 is counting on a new method of landing that Stadd says is different from what other teams are using. Then, instead of rolling on wheels, the lander will “hop” around the surface with small rocket blasts. The price tag, says Stadd, is much lower than $100 million, but is still more than the Google prize money. Like Astrobotic, Quantum3 is heading for the Apollo 11 site. As of May, Stadd still hoped his team could make it there by the 40th anniversary, in July 2009.
All the proposed traffic around Tranquillity Base makes some in the space community worry that the historic Apollo sites will get trampled. Beth O’Leary, a New Mexico State University anthropologist who has led a campaign, so far unsuccessful, to declare the Apollo 11 site a national historic landmark, is concerned that the robots could inadvertently destroy a priceless artifact. Despite the best intentions of the X Prize teams, she says, “it’s untried technology.”
So far, it’s a controversy without much argument. “Our top priority is protecting Apollo 11 from any disturbance,” says Gump. “We’re not rolling over any footprints.” Astrobotic’s rover will stay outside the perimeter of Armstrong and Aldrin’s farthest travels, he says. Pictures of the lander will be taken from a “respectful distance” with a telephoto lens.
Gump hasn’t given much thought to what the pictures will show. But he looks forward to the adventure playing out on live TV, “like opening Al Capone’s vault.”
Might the photos, like the vault, prove disappointing? There’s a chance—a very remote one—that the lander has been destroyed by a meteoroid. We know of at least one Apollo artifact that’s still intact, though, right where Aldrin left it on July 21, 1969. Tom Murphy and his colleagues at the University of California at San Diego still interact with it regularly. Every few nights, they point a laser at a quartz prism on the surface. Then the scientists time the beam that bounces back, a measurement useful for gravitational physics studies. In the two years he’s been pinging the Apollo retro-reflectors, Murphy has become increasingly puzzled. Despite the exquisite sensitivity of his instrument on Earth, the signal that bounces back from the moon is 10 times weaker than it should be. After ruling out other explanations, Murphy has come up with a tentative theory: The reflectors left on the moon have degraded over time. Maybe, he thinks, they have been lightly etched by all those sharp dust grains bouncing around for years on the lunar surface. If so, the once-pristine glass may now be frosted, which would explain the loss in signal strength.
It’s the kind of thing NASA engineers planning the next lunar outpost would love to know. The rest of us just want to find out what happened to the flag. We may not have long to wait.
Lunar Litter
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind 66 items at Tranquillity Base, from their removable lunar overshoes (which actually stamped the iconic bootprints in the dust) to a “urine collection assembly, large” and sick bag (presumably unused — none of the Apollo 11 astronauts reported throwing up during the mission). Armstrong and Aldrin stuffed personal items in a large bag and threw it overboard just before leaving. Other objects still on the surface include tools; a TV camera, its stand, and cable; and a clothesline-like contraption for hoisting equipment back into the lander at the end of the moonwalk. The astronauts also left a mission patch memorializing the astronauts killed in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire; medals honoring Soviets Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and Vladimir Komarov, the first person to die during a space mission; a silicon disk etched with messages from world leaders; and a small, gold olive branch as a sign of peace.
Comments (30)
The object whose fate I'm interested in learning about is Surveyor 4. It was on its terminal descent in July 1967 when radio contact was lost. The loss was about the time of the burnout of its big retrorocket and perhaps the retro exploded, blowing Surveyor to bits. Or maybe the radio just failed and it mutely landed itself on the moon? I'd love to see a photo that gives us the answer all these decades later--is it there intact or scattered in pieces over the lunar surface?
Posted by Tom Frieling on July 21,2008 | 10:45 AM
I'd be interested in seeing the footprints of Al Shepard and Edgar Mitchell, to find out how close they actually got to the edge of Cone Crater.
Posted by Greg Czinke on July 21,2008 | 01:23 PM
I heard that the Upper stage of the Apollo 16 Lunar Module Orion crashed in unknow location over the Moon. It could be interesting to find the crash site of Apollo 16. In the future, I could be usefull to recovery those artifacts of the first lunar wave of exploration in order to understand who to make better and endurance machines
Posted by Francisco Galue on July 21,2008 | 03:26 PM
I agree with comments posted earlier about seeing how far Apollo 14 got to the edge of Cone Crater. I know it is inpossible at this time, but it would be interesting to see just how far Al Shepard hit his golf ball. We also need to protect & preserve these landing sites as not just a national treasure but a treasure for the entire earth.
Posted by Ken Reed on July 22,2008 | 09:49 PM
I will bet the gold balls that were hit are still there but buried a few inches under the lunar dust? How much do you think "Tiger" would pay for one of those? Bill
Posted by Wiliam B. Pace on July 24,2008 | 04:17 PM
I would be interested to know whether LRO will be able to peer into the dark depths of the polar craters, especially after the upcoming crash into one of them to ascertain whether water is present; if LRO could evaluate the crater left from the impact that may also provide convincing evidence of frozen water at the poles. After that, it would be fascinating to look at the Ranger crash sites and compare them to the original video to determine what effect their impacts had on the local landscape, and hopefully use that information to calculate the mass required to create similar craters (although speed of approach may be vastly different), and maybe even estimate the current rate of impacts if some Ranger craterlets have suffered impacts since their origin.
A good look at some of the known volcanic areas on the Moon would be equally fascinating in order to identify possible continued activity, as has been reported by some amateur astronomers.
Hopefully, the pictures of the Apollo landing sites and the other spacecraft might finally convince all the disbelievers that America did fulfill its promise to reach to the Moon and Man has taken one small step for Mankind.
I totally agree with the other comments posted: these sites should be considered the first of the Seven Wonders of the New World and must be preserved as best we are able - even if the flag is white now. (The second will be the landing site of the first Mars expedition and the third will be the drill site into Europa..)
Posted by Roger Davies on July 24,2008 | 12:06 AM
I really dont see what all the FUSS is about here.
JT
www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com
Posted by JIm Jones on August 4,2008 | 08:22 AM
Planting flags on exotic locations might be not so wise anyway. The flags will surely disappear sooner than the person who left them.
Posted by Nikita Kondraskov on August 4,2008 | 10:04 AM
One of Shepard's balls is visible in AS14-66-9337, lying in a small crater along with the "javelin" that Mitchell tossed.
Posted by Phil on August 4,2008 | 07:56 PM
I believe that the Apollo Landing sites should be preserved as they are and not be the center of a "race" to see who can get there first. We accidentally can and possibly will disrupt the delicate state of theses historical landmarks. The moon is large enough for new landing sites to be discovered and viewed on television.
Posted by Todd on August 6,2008 | 02:57 PM
As lead test technician for the Apollo CSM's at Downey California, I can hardly wait to hear and see what will be discovered when "the Hand of Man" returns to the moon by any means. I am stunned and a bit disappointed that we have taken so long to return.
Posted by Ed Roos on August 7,2008 | 05:45 PM
To commemorate Apollo 11 at 40, we've teamed up with Space Center, Houston and introduced: Moon Dust Pens Apollo 11 Commemorative Collector's Edition.
www.moondustpen.com
Made with "JSC-1A" lunar soil simulant, the only simulant produced and developed to support NASA's further exploration and research of the lunar surface, our products help to raise money for the Manned Space Flight Education Foundation for space, science and math educational programs for our children and our future !
For unique, one of a kind collectables, check us out! Thanks,
Rich Butler, Creator of Moon Dust Pens
Posted by Rich Butler on August 7,2008 | 10:47 PM
I think the study of materials might lead us back there, if only to grab a few samples.
What you have are 50 year old machines that have been under continuous exposure to the elements of space and moon life... I'd be curious to see how they degrade over time so we can apply that knowledge to make new ships last longer.
Posted by Maxwell on August 27,2008 | 04:57 PM
In Star Trek TNG, "Traquility Base" was enclosed and memorialized, much like the USS Arizona in Hawaii, for future generations to ponder and be inspired by. We should consider this when the time comes. We can achieve great things as a species when properly inspired. It almost makes up for our behavior as a species the rest of the time, when we're not.
Posted by Ed Pratt on August 31,2008 | 02:00 PM
I would like to work even as a volunteer on one of these teams trying to send a rover to the moon or to review some of these pics in trying to locate various artifacts.
I am also a licensed private pilot and admit that I would like to visit at least the fringes of orbital space and maybe even the moon within my life time. It would a risky adventure like the Apollo program but still cool.
Posted by Tim on August 31,2008 | 11:58 PM
i can't wait to see the pictures of all the spacraft.
Posted by shannon pettigrew on November 25,2008 | 08:37 AM
I would love to see these pictures. It is history preserved but it is still an adventure. I can still remember the Apollo 11 moon landing, and now to see some other sites up there with man made objects is just awsome indeed. The dream is still alive and well.
Posted by Ed on December 6,2008 | 12:05 PM
Can't they just point the Hubble towards the Moon and take photos of these sites? Shouldn't be too hard to do, huh?
Posted by Shepherd on December 26,2008 | 11:13 PM
can i see an image of apollo 11?
Posted by akrto on February 20,2009 | 01:15 AM
I was 11 years old when they went there and even at that age of 11 I knew how monumental it was. It is going to be 40 years this summer and we have not yet matched what they did then. We need another JFK to inspire us th=o challenge us to move on with man kinds journey,I only hope I live to see us go back or at least make a commitment to go to mars. We can do it if we set our goals to.
Posted by Eric Snyder on April 24,2009 | 10:44 PM
So do the Van Allen Radiation belts exist or not? The google contest will not get very far if radiation is to be an insurmountable culprit.
Any ideas guys?
Posted by Reggie Harris on May 29,2009 | 02:25 AM
did the moon landing really happen? i see most of you fellow comentators asking really good questions on here but will we ever get any real answers from nasa? or the goverment? im no noone to say that its not true but i have recently have been watching a lot of documentaries and reading about how some people believe it was a giant conspiracy. i'de like to believe that it were true and that the US did send a man to the moon.. but why are they barely recently deciding to send other people to the moon? and you would think that with the use of technology the price to visit the moon by now it would be a lot more cheaper.. so i ask you guys is it really possible to go to the moon now?
Posted by lumberg on June 4,2009 | 12:19 PM
Prior to Apollo, Lunar Orbiter 5 ,sent to the moon in 1967, had a camera that took photos of 36 selected areas of the moon with a 2meter resolution.
Never since have any of the many lunar orbiters sent to the moon carried a camera payload capable of resolving Apollo remnants.
Even Japan, the world's foremost leader in camera technology, opted not to send a camera aboard Kaguya with sufficient resolution to photograph Apollo remnants.
Very strange.
A major pillar of the scientific method is "independent verification". If Apollo was a lie, the same people that lied are doing the verifying.
Sad.
Posted by Neil on June 10,2009 | 12:05 AM
Shepherd, that is a common question but in actuality the Hubble does not have the resolution to see Apollo artifacts on the lunar surface.
Posted by Rick on June 28,2009 | 08:37 PM
Sadly, the ultimate fate of the Apollo artifacts left on the moon will be to be scavenged, sold off to wealthy collectors, or chopped up and included in trinkets. Just as the Titanic is slowly being scavenged and sold off despite the voices of those who wish to preserve it in place.
This is the inevitable result of the push towards the "privatization of space." Space activities will be driven solely by what makes a buck instead of any sense of common purpose, common goals, or common history. Quite sad.
Posted by MD Rackham on July 17,2009 | 01:02 PM
It was a great program...Apollo. I was a young boy, recently graduated from school. I got a job at Grumman Aerospace on the LM and worked on every LM that went thru plant 5, from 1967-1971....including the 10 LTAs ( LM Test Articles, not vehicles but test vehicles used to test the Saturn booster and other systems). We had the world by the tail and let go....and now...look at the USA...oh, sorry, no politics should be spoken about here. The Space program got us leadership in many industries: computers, chemistry, materials, rocket science. Had we kept up the pace, we would have solved many of the problems we now face. Remember,....we developed fuel cells that were generating electricity back in the 1960s....had we continued the research, would we have an all electric fuel cell car, today? point to ponder....Now I am selling off my Apollo collectibles to make ends meet...sad.
Posted by anthony barbuto on August 23,2010 | 08:58 AM
if armstrong and aldrin left their life support systems on the moon, how
could they possibly survive an instant case of the bends? they would have
had to open the hatch and would be exposed to the vacuum of the moon.
Posted by david on September 9,2010 | 07:04 PM
To David on Sept 9, 2010. Good question, but look a the paragraph again. They only left their life support backpacks behind, not the EVA suits that they were wearing, and would have protected them during cabin depressurization. They left behind their backpacks and other 'expendables' to lighten the LEM ascent stage before lift-off.
Thanks, Air & Space for a great article.
Posted by Robert Bass on May 20,2011 | 10:07 PM
Hi Robert, thank you for response of may 20, 2011. you are correct about armstrong and aldrin leaving their backpacks behind. I suppose they had a check valve on their space suits that kept them from deflating. What i was really thinking about was a statement made by aldrin that he made on a radio
show saying "we depressurized and dumped our space suits overboard." The radio interview was coasttocoastam. The date was 7-31- 06. A review of this interview is listed in the coastotocoast archive. Did you hear this remark? Maybe my memory is not real accurate but I always thought it was.
Posted by david on August 3,2011 | 07:01 PM
At least three Apollo sites still have the flags on the pole. This can be determined by the LRO images of the Apollo sites taken at different Sun angles, especially at the lower angles. The flag poles cannot be resolved, even a shadow cast of the pole, but the 3 ft by 5 ft flag shadows can be seen. Since the flags are (of course) mounted above the surface of the Moon, at low Sun angles the flag shadow moves significantly away from where the pole is pounded into the lunar surface.
Posted by James Fincannon on September 12,2011 | 02:53 PM