NASA Releases New Photos Of Apollo Lunar Landing Sites (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

NASA has released never-before-seen images of three lunar landing sites. These high-resolution stills feature stunningly detailed scenes of abandoned experiment sites and trails made by astronauts' boots and lunar rovers.

At a press conference on September 6, NASA Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green debuted the photos of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 sites, captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

"We can retrace the astronauts' steps with greater clarity to see where they took lunar samples," said Noah Petro, a lunar geologist for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who spoke at the images' presentation, according to NASA's press release.

Arizona State University researcher Mark Robinson, who worked as the principle investigator for the LRO study, explained how these new images differ from previously collected orbital snapshots of the moon's surface. From NASA's press release:

The new low-altitude Narrow Angle Camera images sharpen our view of the moon's surface [...] A great example is the sharpness of the rover tracks at the Apollo 17 site. In previous images the rover tracks were visible, but now they are sharp parallel lines on the surface.

These lunar images also give the viewer a sense of the debris left on the surface of the moon at a time when the amount of space debris orbiting earth has scientists worried. "We've lost control of the environment," retired NASA senior scientist Donald Kessler said in a recent report about space trash, according to the AP. Kessler also suggested that it may become necessary to clean up some of our orbital junk.

NASA is preparing to launch twin probes on a mission to study the moon's gravity. The data collected will give scientists a better understanding of the matter making up the moon--all the way to its core.

Take a look at a comparison of the old and new images from the Apollo 17 landing site (below). Visit NASA's media release to check out more highly detailed images of the lunar surface and play with interactive comparisons of the old and new photos.

LOOK: New, high-res image on top; previous low-res image below

Comments

[bccmeteorites]

08:50 PM on 09/20/2011

I think the detail and clarity on these photographs is rather remarkable . What is even more remarkable is it's almost as though everything was undisturbed by 40 years of cosmic ray exposure and micro-meteorite impact. In space micrometeorites can travel at incredible speeds and would not leave the lunar surface (regolith) in tact. A little over 2 1/2 years after retrieving the surveyor 3 instrumentation for analysis, scientists found damage evidence of high velocity micro-meteorite impact which if these land on the surface would scatter and reorganize the the surface layer called gardening in scientific circles. . This micro-meteorite activity is one reason the lunar surface is ground to a powder.

[Tanrioldu]

04:47 PM on 09/08/2011

Fake. FOX says this never even happened!

[Fred Beggs]

04:13 PM on 09/08/2011

Why is the moon dust settling faster than their bodies?

[ManicDeep]

12:37 AM on 09/10/2011

@Fred Beggs: Fred I guess I should tell you that I've lived in Central Florida most of my life. My father was a Mission Specialist (flight physcian) during Mercury & Apollo Programs. My Brother is an Aerospace Engineer, and worked on many Space Shuttle missions. I was at every launch from Apollo 1 to Apollo/Soyuz. Not to mention most Space Shuttle launches including Challenger. When my Dad or Brother hear people like you voice your uninformed opinions, they laugh. And yes, I do know how much thrust is needed to escape Earths Atmosphere. For instance, for a Gemini Capsule it was 23,000 lbs of thrust. My Father has NEVER told me a lie, and he says it was done, My brother graduated MIT with High Honors, and he says it was done....whose word do you think I'll relie on ....yours ?

[Fred Beggs]

01:51 PM on 09/10/2011

Just remember that same argument in the future when it is about something you doubt.

I told you I am a philosopher not a scientist so you would need a philsopher in the mix to convince me.

Why did we fake so many photographs? I still wrestle with the Radiation Belt and temperatures on the moon.

Module landing thrust.

This is a warning found at Kodak's web site about film and X-rays:

"Airport Baggage Scanning Equipment Can Jeopardize Your Unprocessed Film.
Because your pictures are important to you, this information is presented as an alert to travelers carrying unprocessed film. New FAA-certified (Federal Aviation Administration) explosive detection systems are being used in U.S. airports to scan (x-ray) checked baggage. This stronger scanning equipment is also being used in many non-US airports. The new equipment will fog any unprocessed film that passes through the scanner.

The recommendations in this document are valid for all film formats (135, Advanced Photo System [APS], 120/220, sheet films, 400 ft. rolls, ECN in cans, etc.)."

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/tib/tib5201.shtml
Updated April 8, 2003

Airport Baggage Scanning Equipment Can Jeopardize Your Unprocessed Film

Note: X rays from airport scanners don't affect digital camera images or film that has already been processed, i.e. film from which you have received prints, slides, KODAK PHOTO CD Discs, or KODAK Picture CDs.

Film exposed to heat over 104% is destructive. What was the temperature on the moon?

[ryuzaki]

02:03 PM on 09/08/2011

Nice to see Taurus-Littrow in such crisp detail.

What's tragic, however, is that -- at this very moment -- some alien reptile theorist somewhere is no doubt preparing an internet thesis claiming the craters don't match the ones in the old photos or some other nonsense.

[sunbeltvoter]

10:55 AM on 09/08/2011

Earth, moon, Mars, an asteroid. Someday God is going to get ticked off at all the littering of his creations people are doing.

[huffpostuser77]

10:21 AM on 09/08/2011

Trump is the person who got this mission started. Haha. :) Thanks Trump! We owe it all to you! Now, please run for President again!!!

[zekolama]

08:47 AM on 09/08/2011

These photos are a JOKE! The USA has spy satellites orbiting earth the that can zoom in and photography items as small as 1 meter. And they have the Hubble Telescope that can photograph things light years away.

Yet after 40 years the the best moon landing photos they can come up with are a couple of distant fuzzy and dark images that look like an amateur took them with a zoom lens from their back yard.

WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE?

[huffpostuser77]

10:19 AM on 09/08/2011

http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php?id=77&cat=topten They're not hiding anything. It's just people who are too lazy to actually think or do the research. It's pointless to argue with people like you actually, but I'll still try, by presenting facts. You know, things that are yes/no or true/false that about 99.9% of other people use day-to-day.

[Fred Beggs]

04:17 PM on 09/08/2011

Pictures do not prove anything yet they can be very enlightning as to how they were fabricated. The laws of phyics is that the greater the mass of an object the stronger the pull of gravity. (Thus weight.) Why do we NOT see dust particles from their constant jumping around, as opposed to the slow motion of thier bodies?

[iskra]

12:00 PM on 09/08/2011

You do realize that footprints are smaller than 1 meter yes?

[blasterofparis]

03:24 AM on 09/08/2011

I just know in my heart that no one in a position of authority back in the days of the cold war, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and Watergate would ever lie to us about something like the moon landings. You'd have to be some kind of nutcake to want more evidence.

[Fred Beggs]

04:19 PM on 09/08/2011

LOL, I got your point.

[palindrom]

09:36 PM on 09/07/2011

In the spring of 1971, I saw, with my own eyes, an elliptical mirror, about 10 inches long, that had been to the moon on a Surveyor craft, sat on the moon for several years, and then been retrieved by astronauts. It was in a clean room in the Dudley Observatory, in Albany, New York. It had been sent to Dudley so that the polished surface could be scanned for microscopic impact pits from interplanetary dust. I was a young student; Dr. Curtis Hemenway was my host.

It is, by far, the most amazing artifact I have ever laid eyes on.

[jimboy71]

10:00 PM on 09/07/2011

Tutankhamun's death mask did it for me.

[bccmeteorites]

02:38 PM on 09/16/2011

May 1971

Thirty one months after Surveyor 3 landed, the crew of Apollo 12 photographed the space craft and its landing site, and removed and brought back a number of selected components for engineering and scientific studies. These parts which included the television camera, were analyzed to determine the effect on the hardware of the long exposure to the lunar environment.

Thousands of particles (dust) were extracted and examined by 40 teams of investigators. At the time of these studies, lunar meteorites were not as well know and as plentiful as they are today. If you take the published lab data from Surveyor and compare it to the chemical composition to lunar meteorites you come up with a startling match.

While the lunar dust looks amorphous from say a telescope or a few feet away. Under high magnification it is 100 percent crystalline, and those exact particles can be found in lunar meteorites! Therefore we did land on the Moon.

[palindrom]

12:51 AM on 09/17/2011

I saw the Surveyor 3 mirror with my own eyes soon after it was recovered, sitting in a clean room in Dudley Observatory in Albany, NY.

It is surely the most extraordinary artifact I have ever laid eyes on.

[Loren Johnson]

08:08 PM on 09/07/2011

The types that deny the moon landing and science in general are the same types that tend to buy heavily into G-O-D

[Fred Beggs]

04:25 PM on 09/08/2011

You have got that right. God is a personal experience. I was there when God revealed himself to me, but I wasn't there when they staged the lunar landing and they did the best they could, giving the time they were living in.

Why does the "moon dust" not float a little before it settles, with all the jumping around? Yet, their bodies seem to float.

[Ajtlawyer]

02:59 AM on 09/09/2011

Their bodies aren't floating, they are using muscle power to jump and because of the weaker gravity they can span longer distances than they could've done on Earth. The dust that's kicked up falls with the same speed that they do. Nothing "floats" on the Moon because there is no atmosphere. Go to Youtube and watch astronaut David Scott dropping a hammer and falcon feather from the same height--they hit the ground at the same time. Honestly, to compare moon hoaxers to people who are religious is offensive and insulting. And people who deny the moon landings don't know science and don't care to know. Apollo 11 left a laser reflector on the moon which is still used to measure the distance between the Earth and the moon. How does the laser reflect back unless the reflector was put there by the astronauts? If it was a hoax, why didn't the Soviets prove that it was? Didn't they have more than a little motivation to prove that the US had faked such an accomplishment?

[lordgamble]

06:48 PM on 09/07/2011

Obama gutted NASA so NASA is merely trying to lobby the public for support. Plain old PR at work here.

[Michael D OBrien]

06:58 PM on 09/07/2011

Wrong, Bush gutted NASA................
Nixon downgraded the shuttle or it would have been a far more useful machine!

[longarmss]

06:17 PM on 09/07/2011

What a joke. there now releasing photo 40 years after they where taken. What a joke. To me it look like a ploy by NASA to sell them and get money.

[Tsammael]

06:33 PM on 09/07/2011

Read the article again, these are new photos taken by LRO.

[orbitxal1]

06:33 PM on 09/07/2011

I think these pictures were taken last month after a special orbit lowering maneuver that lasted about 28 days. The LRO spacecraft has now returned to a higher orbit.

[AlyceMD3]

06:00 PM on 09/07/2011

I believe we went to the moon -- several times.
I KNOW there a lot of people posting here who can't spell.

I think I'll go watch Star Trek now.

[Irv George]

05:49 PM on 09/07/2011

Crop circles woot. If you connect the dots you'll find either "say cheese" or "Neil was here"

[tkizzycat]

05:46 PM on 09/07/2011

If you go to the NASA site you can view the photos in a high resolution...If you look closely enough, right around the lunar lander, you will see a couple of coke cans

[Martin Privat]

07:02 PM on 09/07/2011

Ridiculous.