Video Archive: Looking Back at Apollo 11 45 Years Ago
NASA is marking the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing this month. Here in a series of videos from the archives are some of the events of that fateful mission.
This video, featuring comments from the late Apollo 11 astronaut and research pilot Neil Armstrong, explores the contributions of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) development and flight-testing at NASA’s Flight Research Center, recently renamed in Armstrong’s honor, to the Apollo moon-landing program.
After making the 240,000-mile journey to the moon cruising through open space, the last 300 feet down to landing represented the most difficult and dangerous part of the Apollo missions. The Apollo astronauts needed a way to practice that final descent and landing before Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made the first historic moon landing in their lunar lander named Eagle on July 20, 1969.
In this video: Aired in July 1969 and depicts the Apollo 11 astronauts conducting several tasks during extravehicular activity (EVA) operations on the surface of the moon as well as pre-launch preparations and post launch activities and celebrations.
The story of the first Moon landing in July 1969. Depicts the principal events of the mission, from the launching through the post recovery activities of astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Through television, motion pictures, and still photography, the program provides an “eyewitness” perspective of the Apollo 11 mission.
A documentary of the Apollo 11 launch, lunar landing and exploration and return to earth which included a stay in quarantine.
The Journeys of Apollo is a previously produced documentary narrated by Actor Peter Cullen that relives the 40th Apollo Anniversary and mission to explore Earths neighbor, the moon.
This documentary gives an in-depth look at the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. NASA archival footage, as well as reactions to the mission around the world, shows the enormous impact that the moon landing had.
Restored Apollo 11 EVA.
CBS Television coverage of the July 20, 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, anchored by legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite.
A New Look at the Apollo 11 Landing Site
Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20th, 1969, a little after 4:00 in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time. The Lunar Module, nicknamed Eagle and flown by Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, touched down near the southern rim of the Sea of Tranquility, one of the large, dark basins that contribute to the Man in the Moon visible from Earth. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two hours outside the LM setting up experiments and collecting samples. At one point, Armstrong ventured east of the LM to examine a small crater, dubbed Little West, that he’d flown over just before landing.
The trails of disturbed regolith created by the astronauts’ boots are still clearly visible in photographs of the landing site taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) narrow-angle camera (LROC) more than four decades later.
LROC imagery makes it possible to visit the landing site in a whole new way by flying around a three-dimensional model of the site. LROC scientists created the digital elevation model using a stereo pair of images. Each image in the pair shows the site from a slightly different angle, allowing sophisticated software to infer the shape of the terrain, similar to the way that left and right eye views are combined in the brain to produce the perception of depth.
The animator draped an LROC photograph over the terrain model. He also added a 3D model of the LM descent stage–the real LM in the photograph looks oddly flat when viewed at an oblique angle.
Although the area around the site is relatively flat by lunar standards, West Crater (the big brother of the crater visited by Armstrong) appears in dramatic relief near the eastern edge of the terrain model. Ejecta from West comprises the boulders that Armstrong had to avoid as he searched for a safe landing site.
Apollo 11 was the first of six increasingly ambitious crewed lunar landings. The exploration of the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, when combined with the wealth of remote sensing data now being returned by LRO, continues to inform our understanding of our nearest neighbor in space.
