NASA is returning to the Moon under the Artemis program. Today, the space agency published an exciting video and announced the next lunar landing astronaut candidates. One of them will be the first woman on the Moon.
Category: Moon Landing
On November 10, 1970, the uncrewed Luna-17 spacecraft launched (see notes 1) and it delivered Lunokhod 1 to the lunar surface on November 17, 1970. Lunokhod 1 was the world’s first automatic self-propelled laboratory, fully controlled from Earth. With Lunokhod 1’s landing on the Moon, a new stage has begun in the exploration of the Earth’s only natural satellite by automatic devices.
For a long time, the Moon was considered bone dry. And that’s not a surprise since our satellite has no atmosphere that could prevent liquid water from immediately evaporating into space. But what remained hidden from even the eyes of the Moon travelers, discovered by the probes, orbiters, and observers: there are enormous amounts of water on the Moon, frozen to ice. And, in time, more and more water on the moon is being discovered. Now, two new studies show that there is probably even more water on the Moon than expected.
Run by a Dutch restoration specialist who remastering historic videos using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Dutch Steam Machine (Dutchsteammachine) channel has published remastered Apollo Moon landing videos, as well as some other vintage space videos, and the results are astonishing.
Apollo Flight Journal channel published a detailed video that shows every second of the complete descent and landing of Apollo 11, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon on July 20, 1969. The video combines data from the onboard computer for altitude and pitch angle (you can see both altitude and pitch angle every second), 16mm film that was shot throughout the descent at 6 frames per second.
The American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, and producer “Mister” Fred Rogers (Fred McFeely Rogers, March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) reads some of Apollo 15 Astronaut Al Worden’s space poems at his TV show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, which ran from 1968 to 2001.
Last week was Apollo 13’s 50th anniversary – the most “successful failure” in the history of space exploration. On April 27, 2016, former NASA astronaut and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell made a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and told the story of the legendary Apollo 13 flight. Here’s the full video of that speech below.
A 3D model of the Soviet N1 Rocket, which was intended to enable crewed travel to the Moon and beyond, Soviet counterpart to the United States’ mighty Saturn V, which was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973 during lunar landings.
The story of Apollo 13 (called a “successful failure” by the mission commander Jim Lovell) goes beyond a tale of survival. The mission also successfully completed a scientific investigation that is still helping to inform our understanding of the Moon to this day. Early in Apollo 13’s voyage, Mission Control sent the spacecraft’s empty S-IVB rocket booster on a collision course with the lunar surface, where a seismometer set up by the Apollo 12 mission would measure the tremors.
The video below, published by NASA Goddard Channel contains archival footage captured by the crew & newly-uncovered audio. It highlights the beginning and end of that impact experiment and shows how current data and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission help us better interpret and analyze the results.
…and may enable us to resurrect extinct species
Life is the last thing you would associate with the eternally dark craters of the lunar poles. But these craters could hold the key to explaining how complex, multi-cellular organisms evolved on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, affording unimaginable insights into our planet’s biological past.