Moon atlas with images at 24km archive#
Moon atlas with images at 24km professional#

The LRO took this beautiful image of the Apollo 11 landing site in 2013 at 24 km (15 miles) above the surface.

This is sufficiently high-res that you can see the trails (and debris) left by the astronauts.

Moon atlas with images at 24km archive#

You can check out these fantastic images at the LRO image archive site. This second article also points out to how the site was selected - NASA definitely wanted to know as much about the site as possible and the near side was what they had information on.' These days, of course, we have superb lunar images thanks the the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). It gives a very detailed explanation of why the landings needed to be on the near side - radio communications were key as was having some knowledge of the topography, and much more was known about the near side than the far side. gov sites Operational Constraints on Landing Sites. '.We didn't think this was definitive enough so we did an advanced search limiting our search to.

Moon atlas with images at 24km professional#

However, Regular Reader (and professional library) Debra and her colleague Anne did something much better-they limited their search to and found some NASA documentation of their site selection process. We're searching for a complex concept-I'm not sure you could succeed with a much shorter query.Īfter checking out a few other links on the SERP, I was pretty convinced that this was the story. Regular Reader Jon found the Quora site with the query:īoth of these queries are fairly long, but include words that are important for getting the right kind of results. It has lots of citations, illustrations, and it's easy to go from this Quora page to NASA web pages that say why they landed on the near (visible / earth-facing) side: They needed constant communications access, and terrestrial radios don't make it to the other side of the Moon.Īnd, of course, NASA had much better imagery of the Earth-facing side, the better to plan the missions. This query worked reasonably well, and I (like others) found the Quora discussion ' Which side of the Moon did the Americans land on?' Although I'm always suspicious about QA (Question-Answering) sites, this post looks pretty good.

there is no dark side, except in albums by Pink Floyd). I used the phrase 'earth-facing' because I wanted documents that included that terminology (and not 'dark side of the moon,' which I already knew many people get wrong. I used these terms in a long query because I wanted fairly specific documents (in particular, ones that would use words like 'landing sites'). I thought about different strategies for this search, and started with:

Why were all of the landing sites on THIS side? (You'd think the back side would have been more interesting. If you look at a map of the Apollo landing sites, they're all visible from Earth-none are on the back side (that is, the side of the moon that faces away from the Earth). Given this background, our Challenges for this week start with this question of 'why only on one side?'ġ. Here's the map of the landing sites I found with the query: The US sent six missions to the moon (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17). Not my photo, but very similar to what I saw on Jan 1, 2017. Why did they neglect the other side? Was it a kind of strange conspiracy? It struck me the other day: ALL of the NASA landings on the Moon were all on the side of the Moon facing towards the earth. Why did all of the NASA missions land on the side facing the Earth?