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Thanks to high-resolution imagery of the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base landing site by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), researchers can more clearly see the two boulder-strewn craters that very nearly wiped out Armstrong and Aldrin’s Moon landing.
“We just had to find a smooth place to land,” Buzz Aldrin notes in the book “Men from Earth.” “ The computer, however, was taking us to a boulder field…”
A team led by Arizona State University’s (ASU) Mark Robinson has recreated the astronauts’ view in a new video, using the crew’s voice recording, timings, an onboard 16-mm film of the landing, as well as images taken within the last decade by the LROC camera, ASU reports. The LROC team, says ASU, reconstructed the last three minutes of the landing trajectory (latitude, longitude, orientation, velocity, altitude) using lunar landmark navigation and altitude callouts from the crew’s voice recording.
“From this trajectory information, and high-resolution LROC narrow-angle camera images and topography, we simulated what Armstrong saw in those final minutes as he guided the module down to the surface,” Robinson, LROC’s Principal Investigator, said in a statement.
“Neil still wasn’t satisfied with the terrain,” Aldrin notes in the book. “He stroked the hand controller and descent rate switch like a motorist fine-tuning his cruise control. We scooted across the boulders.”
Armstrong could see the autopilot was aiming to land on the rocky northeastern flank of West Crater (625 feet wide), says ASU. So, he took over manual control and began to fly horizontally, searching for a safe landing spot. At the time, only Armstrong saw the hazard as he was too busy flying the module to discuss the situation with mission control, ASU notes.
The only visual record of the actual Apollo 11 landing is from a 16-mm time-lapse movie camera, running at 6 frames a second and mounted in Buzz Aldrin’s right-side window, Robinson noted in a statement.
After flying over the hazards presented by West Crater’s boulder-strewn flank, Armstrong spotted a safe landing site about 1,600 feet ahead where he carefully descended to the surface, says ASU. Just before landing, the module flew over what would later be called Little West Crater (135 feet wide), a crater that once on the surface Armstrong would visit and photograph.
Among other things, the new ASU video shows the lander’s descent stage on the surface, which was used as a launchpad when the astronauts blasted off for their orbital rendezvous with the lunar command module. Armstrong and Aldrin’s lunar footprints, which ASU says show up as dark thread-like paths, are also visible in the new video.
The lunar surface’s stark and ancient surface remains as beguiling as it’s always been. It’s a sentiment that also wasn’t lost on Aldrin, as he notes in “Men from Earth”:
“Thirty feet below the [lunar module’s] gangly legs, dust that had lain undisturbed for a billion years blasted sideways in the plume of our engine.”
