The regolith is fine-grained, but also contains rocks, some partly buried. This was Buzz Aldrin's and taken during experiments on soil mechanics. Iconic NASA photograph of an astronaut bootprint on the Moon. The hypothetical thick dust acquired the nickname "Gold dust." Gold always followed his ideas doggedly, and never gave up on them even after Apollo 11 landed safely and Neil and Buzz did not sink up to their knees. Gold envisioned that fine powder was levitated by electrostatic forces and flowed downhill to accumulate in the lunar maria, making the maria not merely dark, low-lying lava plains, but hazardous dust bowls. But there was this one persistent astronomer, Tommy Gold, a professor at Cornell University. Send help!" In truth, few scientists and engineers involved in the Apollo program thought that the lunar surface was so dusty and fluffy that spacecraft would sink through it.
#First man on the moon mission windows
This might be a biased view, but these were important discoveries in 1969 and have stood the test of time.Īrmstrong said, "The Eagle has landed." He did not say, "OMG, we can't see out the windows because we sank into the dust. I list my top three favorite discoveries. In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing (July 20, 1969) my focus in this article is on what we learned about the Moon and our Solar System from just this single mission. NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University photo. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin spent about 2.5 hours exploring and photographing the surface, deploying experiments, and collecting samples. LM is the Lunar Module Eagle (used to get to and then off the surface), PSEP is the Passive Seismic Experiments Package, and LRRR is the Lunar Ranging Retroreflector. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image of the Apollo 11 landing site, with traverse marked by astronaut boots. In the left, middle ground is the Lunar Ranging Retroreflector and in the background is the Lunar Module Eagle. This NASA Apollo 11 photograph shows Astronaut Buzz Aldrin deploying the Passive Seismic Experiments Package. The mission successfully demonstrated how humans can explore the Moon and other planetary bodies, and involved big lessons in space suit design, mobility, sampling gear, dealing with dust being kicked up (though not billowing because there is no air), and testing sampling tools. In a mere two and a half hours, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected 21.8 kilograms of rock and regolith, traversed the lunar surface a total distance of ~1–2 kilometers, deployed experiments (notably a seismometer to detect moonquakes, a lunar dust collector, laser-ranging retroreflector, and solar wind collector to determine the composition of the solar wind), and made measurements of the soil mechanics of the surface. The idea of a substantially molten Moon and the production of magmas in the interior for at least 800 million years indicated a hot origin, changing our perspective on planetary origins.Īpollo 11 Samples, Sampling, and InstrumentsĪpollo 11 set the stage for continued exploration of the Moon. This was a startling idea because the prevalent pre-Apollo view was that the Moon (and other planets) formed cold. If correct, they said, it implied that the Moon had been molten when it formed, allowing the plagioclase to float atop a globe-encircling ocean of magma. These were composed mostly of the mineral plagioclase feldspar and were interpreted by two investigators as representing the lunar highlands.
A gigantic surprise was the presence of some rocks unrelated to the basalts. The surface is composed of a blanket of fragments of rocks, minerals from the rocks, breccias (rocky mixtures formed by impacts), and impact-produced glass-rubble we call the regolith. Nor were the maria, as one astronomer alleged, composed of fine-grained dust that accumulated in these low areas, creating deep layers of dust so weak that spacecraft would sink in them. The rocks collected were dominated by unusual (compared to Earth) high-titanium basalt lava flows, not unmelted primitive lunar material as one school of thought claimed. The spacecraft (Eagle) landed on Mare Tranquillitatis. The first human mission to the Moon was a monumental human achievement with vast political ramifications, but it was equally revolutionary in what it taught us about planet formation and the nature of the surface of an airless body. Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawaii The Apollo 11 mission showed that the Moon formed hot, that it was magmatically active for at least 800 million years, and that the surface-blanket of dusty rubble contains a treasure trove of evidence of how the Moon formed.
Scientific Discoveries from the Apollo 11 Mission (July 16, 2019) Scientific Discoveries from the Apollo 11 Mission, PSRD.
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