The First Scientific Map of the Moon (1679) Millions watched as astronaut Neil Armstrong put boots to the moon in 1969. It was, as he famously remarked, one “giant leap for mankind,” but from a scientific standpoint the territory was far from virgin. Nearly 300 years earlier, engineer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, astronomer to Sun King Louis XIV, made lunar history in 1679, when he published the first scientific map of the moon, above. Needless to say, the event was not televised and Cassini never had the opportunity to walk on the surface he studied.
Instead he observed it through the eyepiece of a telescope, a relatively new invention. His predecessors, including Galileo, used the then-revolutionary tool to delve deeper into their own lunar obsessions, making sketches and performing experiments designed to replicate the craters they noticed in the moon's crust. He also used his powers of observation to expand human understanding of Mars, Saturn, and France itself (which turned out to be much smaller than previously believed). Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch Camera E-8. Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969. During a recent dinner a few friends and I found ourselves reminiscing about formative moments in our collective youth. The conversation took a decidedly downbeat turn when a nationally televised moment we all remembered all too well came up: the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
Like millions of other schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broadcast, and became witnesses to horror. “It was NASA’s darkest tragedy,” writes Elizabeth Howell at Space.com, an accident that “changed the space program forever.” The contrast with our parents’ indelible memories of a televised space broadcast from seventeen years earlier could not be starker. We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site.
But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’” Read more about this extraordinary event at NASA and Kottke. via Kottke Related Content: Red planet: A full-bodied shiraz could keep astronauts upright on Mars. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin sat in the Lunar Module and slowly worked through their checklists, they munched on ham and salad sandwiches.
On such an historic occasion you’d think they might have popped a fine bottle of red. It would have actually done them good. A new NASA-funded study from Harvard University suggests that a regular glass of vin rouge may solve the crippling effects of long-term space flight, a fundamental challenge to humans exploring other planets. Mars is about nine gravity-free months from Earth. By the time the astronauts reach the red planet – with its gravitational pull about 40 per cent that of Earth’s – their muscles will have wasted and they’ll hardly be able to stand, let along walk around looking for Martians.
How to keep astronauts upright “As the new space race hurtles forward, researchers are asking: how do we make sure the winners can still stand when they reach the finish line?” Out in space, muscles and bones weaken. Diet could save the day. Astronauts blast-off on moon landing anniversary. Fifty years ago the Cold War between America and Russia helped fuel the space race that resulted in the historic lunar landing in 1969. Decades later and a Russian, American and Italian are sitting side by side in a spacecraft as they hurtle through the atmosphere. The Russian space capsule with three astronauts aboard has lifted off on a fast-track trip to the International Space Station (ISS) on the 50th anniversary of the US moon landing.
The Soyuz craft is carrying Andrew Morgan of the United States on his first spaceflight, Russian Alexander Skvortsov, the Commander on his third mission to the space station, and Italy’s Luca Parmitano, who previously flew in 2013. The patch on the crew’s spacesuits to mark this expedition echoes the one from NASA’s moon mission. The capsule entered orbit nine minutes after lift-off from Russia’s launch complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan and will dock with the ISS about six hours later after just four orbits. “The ’60s were very turbulent. The 'lost' first words of the second man of the moon | The New Daily The 'lost' first words of the second man of the moon. Buzz Aldrin has spent a lifetime being asked about Neil Armstrong’s famous first words upon stepping onto the moon for the first time, one time offering the view that “I was pretty close to him when he said that”. But often lost in the mix is the larger-than-life Mr Aldrin’s own words when leaving the Eagle lunar lander and stepping onto the moon.
At the time Commander Armstrong’s “one small step” words were the lead story throughout the world, a fact one South Australian journalist listening in to the NASA radio live feed lamented in a memoir about reporting for the Adelaide News. Aviation reporter Barrie Tornquist was invited by NASA to listen to the astronaut’s conversations from a studio behind the Adelaide Post Office, where a Woomera radio link to the moon was being relayed. “No one on earth at that time, save radio engineers taking Woomera’s relay from our 120 degree slice of space could hear what the second man to walk on a body in space said,” the late Mr Tornquist wrote.
NASA. Moon Landing in Context. Earthrise. Moon landing – News, Research and Analysis – The Conversation – page 1. The future of lunar exploration and space travel will be possible only through advances in robotic design and implementation. When Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon 50 years ago this month, Australians saw the images first. Australia even defied bad weather to bring the historic images to the world. Just 12 people stepped on the Moon during the Apollo missions, but they left more than just footprints. It's a legacy that needs protecting from damage by any future Moon missions. Episode 3 of the To the moon and beyond podcast takes a look at who some of the key players are in the 21st century space race and what they are competing for. While the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing is an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, it's worth reflecting upon the creative vision that made it possible.
They reflect wider concerns about the US – and its leaders. 50 years after Apollo 11, a new exhibition considers artistic responses to our celestial neighbour. Apollo 11 astronaut returns to launch pad. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins has revisited the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida where he flew to the moon 50 years ago along with Buzz Aldrin and the late Neil Armstrong. “Wonderful feeling to be back at launch pad 39A,” Collins, the command module pilot for Apollo 11, said in an interview on the pad with Kennedy Space Centre Director Bob Cabana, himself a veteran of four space shuttle launches and a former shuttle commander.
In the iconic 1969 moon mission, Collins, now 88, stayed in lunar orbit while his crew mates Armstrong and Aldrin stepped foot on the lunar surface, an event that marked a pre-eminent chapter in human spaceflight. Aldrin, 89, was to join Collins on the launch pad but cancelled. Armstrong died in 2012 at the age of 82. Collins referred to an often quoted September 1962 speech by President John F. Kennedy vowing to put a man on the surface of the moon by the end of that decade. “Well I love the word Artemis, the twin of Apollo. Bendigo's Mike Tobin played a vital role in the Apollo 11 Moon mission. Bendigo’s Mike Tobin started his career as a tea boy and went on to monitor the vital signs of the three astronauts in the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission. Mr Tobin was quite alarmed when Neil Armstrong was about to leave the lunar module to take that “one giant leap for mankind”.
While Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin “were sitting quite calmly chatting away”, this all changed when they landed. “When it was time to leave Armstrong’s heart rate went to 210 [beats per minute],” Mr Tobin said. The average resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. “It was obvious that what Armstrong was about to do was having a profound effect on him. “‘Is this guy alright, is this all going to happen okay? '” When Armstrong touched down on the Moon his heart rate eventually decreased. Monitoring vital signs from the Australian Alps “I felt very, very privileged,” he said. “You can’t do something like that without it making a permanent imprint.” From tea boy to Moon mission. Buzz Aldrin: The man who should've walked first. There’s a five-year-old kid sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV.
His freckled face is framed by a severe short back and sides haircut. There’s a loose tooth he’s forever probing with his tongue. There’s a meat pie on a plate next to him turning cold. There’s a baby crying in the background. Easy for a kid this age to be distracted. But not today. He squints at the screen doing his best not to blink in case he misses something. His ghostly white figure lumbers and blurs across a grey alien landscape. That’s the plan, anyway. There will be weekend getaways on the moon. But as he grows older, that sense of awe and hope … it crackles and fades, too. It’s like replacing the trip of a lifetime to Europe with a bus journey to Canberra. The kid never loses sight of Armstrong.
His number two and a man with a more interesting name, Buzz Aldrin, fills the vacuum instead. Years pass. A few months later a type-written letter arrives in the mail. More years pass. Bugger that. What the Moon landing reveals about the inner workings of your brain | The New Daily What the moon landing reveals about your brain. If you are over the age of about 55, chances are you don’t just remember the Apollo 11 moon landing, you also remember exactly where you were when you saw it. So, if you were at school on July 21, 1969, you may also able to recall the look of the TV set itself, the name of the teacher who wheeled it out in front of the class and the spirituous smell of the faint blue Gestetner-printed handouts. Magda Szubanski can clearly recall being marched out of class as an eight-year-old and “herded into the sick bay” to watch the men on the moon. She also remembers being told to “shut up” by her teacher, Mr Arblaster, for chattering too much about the astronauts and their historic mission.
Meanwhile, at the Australian army base in Nui Dat, Vietnam, singer-turned-soldier Normie Rowe was repairing an armoured personnel carrier. He has a clear memory of the transistor radio he listened to the lunar landing on — it was National brand and had cost him $5. Why we remember this so clearly A collective memory. What you didn't know about the Apollo 11 landing. The first man on the moon: How Australia saw history.
John Sarkissian is an Operations Scientist at the CSIRO Parkes Radio Observatory. He was technical adviser and telescope operator on the Working Dog movie The Dish. In 2001, in the Astronomical Society of Australia’s journal, he published On Eagle’s Wings: The Parkes Observatory’s Support of the Apollo 11 Mission. He sets the story up as a nail-biter: “Six hundred million people, or one fifth of mankind at the time, watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. "Three tracking stations were receiving the signals simultaneously. They were CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope, the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station outside Canberra, and NASA’s Goldstone station in California… “During the first few minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between the signals from its two stations at Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, searching for the best quality images.
“But it almost didn’t happen.” “As the LM undocked from the command module to begin the descent, Armstrong reported, ‘The Eagle has wings’.