Today marks the 40th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 and the first manned mission to land on the moon. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long and 37 years since we’ve been back.
I remember watching all of the Gemini and Apollo missions as best as we could with our black & white television and roof-top antenna, listening to Walter Cronkite wax poetically about our accomplishments, and even get teary-eyed at certain significant moments. Our family was in the maritimes on summer vacation, and I remember being awakened early in the morning to watch various events.
To mark this historic occasion, several groups have released some interesting items that you might like to check out.
First, The Boston Globe has a feature called the Big Picture. Among the various items they have covered, there is a recent release of some amazing images for the Apollo 11 Mission.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/07/remembering_apollo_11.html
NASA has released some restored videos of the moon walking. (These are not the Lost Tapes – just restored versions of known tapes). These are quite large so you need some bandwidth or time.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11.html
Alternatively, there is a 2min YouTube montage created by Phil Plait from these videos. (YouTube loses some of the fidelity of the restored videos.)
NASA is also doing a real-time replay of the entire mission in audio streaming. It started this morning with the launch and will run for the entire 9 days of the mission (Jul 16-24) so you can jump in at any time to hear what was going on at the time. This includes sleep periods, cruise time to/from the moon, etc so there will be lots of quiet times too.
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_radio/index.html
In a similar vein, there is a website which has produced a flash recreation/animation of the moon mission in “real-time”. I haven’t really tried to follow this since the text doesn’t seem to display very well on my screens. But some of you may find this interesting.
http://wechoosethemoon.org/
I’ve been trying to follow LRO/LCROSS mission to the moon. There has been a rumour going around that NASA has planned the timing of this mission to be able to capture high-res images of the Apollo 11 landing site. If true, then these may be released on or about the 20th. At full resolution (70cm/pixel), you’d be able to make out a fair amount of detail from the landing site, including clear indication of the lander, tracks, and some equipment left behind. Unfortunately the website for this mission is not releasing intermediary images (or at least I haven’t found any) to give me an indication of how close they are imaging Mare Tranquillitatis. And their satellite tracking program doesn’t allow you to see much in the past or future of where the satellite will be on any given day. But keep an eye of the LRO website just case something does become available.
http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Happy Anniversary
