Can you see apollo landing sites

And one of the experiments is still going. Armstrong and Aldrin placed on the surface a boxy array of mirrors designed to reflect incoming light back to its source without significantly scattering. Several times a month, Tom Murphy, a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego, instructs a telescope in southern New Mexico to beam a laser at the instrument.

The light sprints home in two and a half seconds. During an eclipse, when the near side of the moon is in darkness, the reflectors return to their usual performance. No one has ever returned to the site of Apollo In preparation for a potential moon rush , NASA has created guidelines for future commercial spacecraft that include no-fly zones and warnings to keep a distance. The Apollo 11 site is a historical landmark, and it should be treated as such, says Michelle Hanlon, a co-founder of For All Moonkind, an organization of lawyers who specialize in space law.

Hanlon believes that the Apollo spots deserve the same protections as heritage sites on Earth. If human beings someday inhabit the moon , they might consider doing more than designating the Apollo 11 landing site a landmark. They could cover the area with geodesic domes, as a protective measure against contamination, and let people come a little closer.

Visitors would pop over to an Apollo 11 gift shop to browse rocket-ship keychains and chalky astronaut ice cream. When they peer through the gossamer bubble, inspecting the provincial exploration efforts of earlier generations, those visitors might look closely at the ground near the lunar module. It was an eerie feeling, like being a gnat inside a blowtorch flame.

Some of the deployed scientific equipment taken to the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission, where the Scientific equipment we've installed on the Moon.

Did you know that we brought up a large amount of scientific equipment and installed it on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions? And many others.

That we have the data from these experiments, and that the lunar retroreflectors are still in use today, represent some pretty strong evidence that we did, in fact, land on the Moon. This image, from January 31, , shows sunrise from Alan Shepard's 12 o'clock pan taken near the Without the Sun glare, we can see some detail on the Cone-Crater ridge.

We brought back samples, and learned a ton about lunar geology from them. The final two astronauts to ever walk on the Moon, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, ran into quite a surprise when they did. Schmitt, the lone civilian-astronaut and only scientist to travel to the Moon, was often described as the most business-like of all the astronauts. Which is why it must have been such a shock to hear him exclaim the following:.

The orange soil, at the lower right of the image, really stands out when compared to the colorations Apollo 17, perhaps because they had a geoscientist as one of their moonwalkers, was able to spot this geological oddity that taught us so much about the Moon's origin and composition.

Like any good scientist, or any good explorer, for that matter, Cernan and Schmitt took pictures, collected data, and brought samples back to Earth for further analysis.

What could cause orange soil on the Moon, perhaps the most featureless of all the large, airless rocks in our Solar System? What the analysis back on Earth revealed was fantastic: this was volcanic glass. What occurred was that molten lava from the interior of the Moon erupted, some 3 to 4 billion years ago, up above the airless surface and into the vacuum of space.

As the lava became exposed to the vacuum, it separated out into tiny fragments and froze, forming tiny beads of volcanic glass in orange and black colors. The tin in some of the fragments is what gives the orange color.

Olivine inclusions found in lunar samples have a spectacularly high water concentration of 1, This is remarkable, because it's the same exact concentration as the water found in terrestrial Earth-based olivine inclusions, pointing to a common origin for the Earth and the Moon.

In , reanalysis of those samples found evidence that water was included in the volcanic eruption: with concentrations of water in the glass beads that were formed 50 times as great as the expected dryness of the Moon.

Olivine inclusions showed water present in concentrations up to 1, parts-per-million. Most remarkably, the lunar samples we've found have indicated that Earth and the Moon have a common origin, consistent with a giant impact that occurred only a few tens of millions of years into the birth of our Solar System. Without direct samples, obtained by the Apollo missions and brought back to Earth, we never would have been able to draw such a startling, but spectacular, conclusion.

A fillet-soil sample was taken close to the boulder, allowing for study of the type and rate of erosion acting on lunar rocks. There are many different lines of evidence that point to humanity's presence on the Moon. We landed there and can see the evidence, directly, when we look with the appropriate resolution. We have extraordinary amounts of evidence, ranging from eyewitness testimony to the data record tracking the missions to photographs documenting the trips, all supporting the fact that we landed and walked on the lunar surface.

We have a slew of scientific instruments that were installed, took data, and a few of which can still be seen and used today. And finally, we've brought back lunar samples and learned about the Moon's history, composition, and likely origin from it. There are many ways to prove it, but the conclusion is inescapable: we really did land on the Moon, and we can validate it yet again by performing the right scientific test — through imaging or laser ranging — any time we want.

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Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt with the American flag. Earth glows blue , miles in the distance. Six Apollo missions successfully landed on and departed from the Moon between July and December Top, clockwise: James Irwin salutes the flag at Hadley Rill; Harrison Schmitt collects rock samples in the Taurus-Littrow Valley; Buzz Aldrin's footprint in the lunar regolith; Charlie Duke placed a photo of his family on the Moon and took a picture of it; Edgar Mitchell photographs the desolate landscape of the Fra Mauro highlands; and Pete Conrad jiggles the Surveyor 3 probe to see how firmly it's situated.

The astronauts' tracks as well as the rover and other items are plainly visible. Click for a large version. All the landing sites can be found using these five prominent lunar craters. North is up in this view. Apollo 11 landed on July 20, , on the relatively smooth and safe terrain of the Sea of Tranquility. For an extra challenge, see if you can spot the three craters named for the Apollo 11 astronauts just north of the landing site. They range from 2. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean achieved a pinpoint landing on Nov.

Apollo 14 touched down on Feb.