List of highways numbered 45

Apollo 11 Landing Site 3D Flyaround; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Tranquility Base Images 2014 NASA

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• published: 19 Jul 2014
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more at http://scitech.quickfound.net "Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20th, 1969... 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." Public domain film from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_Base Tranquility Base (Latin: Statio Tranquillitatis) is the site where humans first landed on the Moon and walked on another world, on the flight of Apollo 11. American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module Eagle at approximately 20:17:40 UTC on July 20, 1969. Six hours later, they left the spacecraft and spent 2 hours, 31 minutes on the lunar surface, examining and photographing it, setting up some scientific experiment packages, and collecting 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of dirt and rock samples for return to Earth. They lifted off the surface on July 21 at 17:54 UTC. Tranquility Base has remained unvisited since then. Its lunar coordinates are 00°41′15″N, 23°26′00″E, in the south-western corner of the lunar lava-plain called Mare Tranquillitatis ("Sea of Tranquility"), east of the craters Sabine and Ritter, north of the crater Moltke, and near a rille unofficially called "U.S. Highway Number 1"... For more than two years, NASA planners considered a collection of 30 potential sites for the first manned landing. Based on high-resolution photographs taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, and photos and data taken by the unmanned Surveyor landers, this list was narrowed down to five sites located near the lunar equator, ranging between 45 degrees east and west, and 5 degrees north and south of the center of the Moon's facing side; these were numbered 1 to 5 going from east to west. Site number 2, centered at 0°42′50″N 23°42′28″E, was the Sea of Tranquility site ultimately chosen. Since a precision landing was not expected on the first mission, the target area was an ellipse measuring 11.5 miles (18.5 km) east-west by 3.0 miles (4.8 km) north-south...the actual landing...was...within the target ellpise... About 100 man-made objects -- and footprints left by Armstrong and Aldrin -- remain at Tranquility Base... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is a NASA robotic spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon in a low 50 km (31 mi) polar mapping orbit. The LRO mission is a precursor to future manned missions to the Moon by NASA. To this end a detailed mapping program will identify safe landing sites, locate potential resources on the Moon, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. The probe will make a 3-D map of the Moon's surface and has provided some of the first images of Apollo equipment left on the Moon. The first images from LRO were published on July 2, 2009, showing a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds). Launched on June 18, 2009, in conjunction with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), as the vanguard of NASA's Lunar Precursor Robotic Program, this is the first United States mission to the Moon in over ten years. LRO and LCROSS are the first missions launched as part of the United States's Vision for Space Exploration program. The total cost of the mission is reported as US$583 million, of which $504 million pertains to the main LRO probe and $79 million to the LCROSS satellite...