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NASA is restoring and improving the video footage of the Apollo 11 mission and this morning they released some of those videos, including Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon, Aldrin’s first step, and the raising of the American flag.
Update: The tapes containing the original footage were erased to record satellite data. The restorations are being sourced from broadcast TV footage.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the liftoff of Apollo 11. You can follow along on We Choose the Moon, on Twitter, and with a NASA audio program. (Is there a video launch being broadcast anywhere?)
NASA is also releasing “greatly improved video imagery” of the Apollo 11 moon walks. !!! So look for that later today.
Update: Someone should have synced up this video footage of the launch so that people could watch it in realtime.
We Choose the Moon is a site that tracks the activities of the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago. Nice work. The transmissions from the spacecraft, CAPCOM, and the lunar lander are cleverly published to and pulled in from Twitter.
With all this 40th anniversary stuff, I’m having trouble getting my mind around that the first Moon landing is as far removed from the present as the low point of The Great Depression was from my birth (i.e. the Moon landing, culturally speaking, is Ollie’s Great Depression). See also timeline twins. (via jimray)
The scamps at Nature are updating the ApolloPlus40 Twitter account as the Apollo 11 mission happened 40 years ago. (thx, matt)
A fantastic pair of maps, courtesy of Strange Maps:
- A map of the area covered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moon walks, superimposed on a soccer pitch for comparison purposes.
- The same map, superimposed on a baseball diamond.
Update: Here’s a look at the traverse map overlaid on the moon’s surface.
Update: For all you conspiracy theorists out there, LVHRD superimposed the traverse map onto a Universal Studios soundstage.
Did you know that there’s a teensy museum on the moon?
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA’s official channels were unsuccessful.
William Safire, who now does the On Language column for the NY Times, wrote a speech for President Nixon in 1969 in the event that something happened during the Apollo 11 mission to strand the astronauts on the moon.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
(via cyn-c)
Trailer for In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary that “brings together for the first, and possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission that flew to the Moon along with visually stunning archival material re-mastered from the original NASA film footage”. BOY HOWDY! Here’s a review of the film from Ad/Astra, the magazine of the National Space Society.
The issues involved with buying and selling moon dust. Back in 1993, a 200-milligram moon rock was sold for $442,500.
Google Moon: explore the Apollo landing sites in the Google Maps interface.
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