Apollo Landing Sites, with Shadows

  • Released Thursday, July 16, 2009
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The six Apollo lunar landing sites are all relatively near the equator on the side of the Moon that faces the Earth. Left behind at each site is the lower half of the Lunar Module, called the descent stage. It carried most of the astronauts' supplies and served as the launchpad for their return trip to the Command and Service Module in orbit around the Moon.

LROC, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, will have a number of opportunities to photograph the Apollo landing sites. Despite the excellent half-meter resolution of LROC's narrow angle cameras, the LM descent stage at each site can fill only a few pixels of these images. If photographed when the Sun is low in the lunar sky, however, the long shadow formed by the descent stage is easily discernable.

This brief animation shows the locations of the Apollo landing sites, with lengthening shadows as each site approaches lunar nightfall. The lighting simulates the angle of the Sun during the second week of July, 2009, when LROC took its first images of the sites. The gold LM markers are about 20,000 times actual size.

An animation showing the locations of the Apollo landing sites

Print-resolution still image showing Apollo landing site locations with short shadows.

Print-resolution still image showing Apollo landing site locations with short shadows.

Print-resolution still image showing Apollo landing site locations with long shadows.

Print-resolution still image showing Apollo landing site locations with long shadows.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Thursday, July 16, 2009.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:54 PM EDT.

Missions

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Datasets used in this visualization

  • [Clementine]

    ID: 8
    Dates used: 1998
    See all pages that use this dataset

  • DEM [KAGUYA: Laser Altimeter (LALT)]

    ID: 546
    Sensor: Laser Altimeter (LALT) Dates used: 2008

    Formerly known as "SELENE".

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • ULCN 2005 (Unified Lunar Control Network 2005)

    ID: 553
    Type: Data Compilation Dates used: 1966 - 2005

    The ULCN 2005 (Unified Lunar Control Network 2005) is a lunar control point network that precisely measured 272,931 pieces of data produced by the USGS using existing lunar imagery or data from the Clementine and other observations.

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.