Brand New Look at Apollo 14 Landing Site

By Nancy Atkinson - February 4, 2011 at 11:03 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Apollo-14.png

[/caption]

40 years ago this week, the Apollo 14 crew landed on the Moon. Here's the latest look at their landing site, just downloaded from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Narrow Angle Cameras. Even though LRO has imaged this area before, this seems to be a much better, crisper view of the lander and the ALSEP experiment package left of the Moon by Al Shepard and Edgar Mitchell. Also visible are the tracks left where the astronauts walked repeatedly in a "high traffic zone" and perhaps by the Modularized Equipment Transporter (MET) wheelbarrow-like carrier used on Apollo 14. Below are a couple of close-up looks at the image.

[caption id="attachment_83114" align="aligncenter" width="438" caption="A closer view of the Apollo 14 landing site. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University"]

[/caption]

The LROC folks say that every time LRO passes overhead the different landing sites, the Sun is at a different position so each image gives a different perspective. Additionally, since the position of the lunar modules and other pieces of hardware are very accurately known, the LROC team can check the accuracy of the mission-provided ephemeris.

[caption id="attachment_83131" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Closer yet: Apollo 14, as seen by LRO, cleaned up and zoomed in by Carlos Ayala."]

[/caption]

Thanks to UT reader Carlos Ayala who sent in this this sharpened and enhanced "closer" close-up. He captured the original image on the LRO site, and "using CS3 I enlarged the area and applied a Bicubic smoothing filter to the re-sampled image. The resulting image is set to 1200 x 1200 pixels," he wrote us. Click on the image for a larger version.

You can compare

the old images

with this new one.

Source:

LROC

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com