The Taurus-Littrow valley
Click for full image.
It might not be Apollo 11, but during this 50th anniversary week of that mission, why not look at where the last Apollo 17 crew landed, in the middle of the Taurus-Littrow valley, as shown on the right in a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LR) image released by the LRO science team in 2018.
The image illustrates how ambitious NASA had become by this last Apollo mission. The Apollo 11 site was chosen because it was flat with as few risks as possible. By Apollo 17, the Apollo engineers and astronauts were quite willing to drop the LM down into this valley between gigantic mountains. Granted, the valley was more than 400 miles wide, but considering the risks of every Apollo flight, the choice was daring to say the least.
Taurus-Littrow also has a cluster of craters believed to have been formed by material flung out from the formation of 86-kilometer-wide Tycho crater about 100 million years ago. Tycho is 2250 kilometers from Taurus-Littrow, but the impact that formed it was violent enough that it cast material far across the Moon.
Nor is this location the most spectacular on the Moon. In fact, considering that all the manned and unmanned missions in total have probably covered less ground than a New York cab driver does in a single day, we have seen almost nothing there.
Click for full image.
It might not be Apollo 11, but during this 50th anniversary week of that mission, why not look at where the last Apollo 17 crew landed, in the middle of the Taurus-Littrow valley, as shown on the right in a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LR) image released by the LRO science team in 2018.
The image illustrates how ambitious NASA had become by this last Apollo mission. The Apollo 11 site was chosen because it was flat with as few risks as possible. By Apollo 17, the Apollo engineers and astronauts were quite willing to drop the LM down into this valley between gigantic mountains. Granted, the valley was more than 400 miles wide, but considering the risks of every Apollo flight, the choice was daring to say the least.
Taurus-Littrow also has a cluster of craters believed to have been formed by material flung out from the formation of 86-kilometer-wide Tycho crater about 100 million years ago. Tycho is 2250 kilometers from Taurus-Littrow, but the impact that formed it was violent enough that it cast material far across the Moon.
Nor is this location the most spectacular on the Moon. In fact, considering that all the manned and unmanned missions in total have probably covered less ground than a New York cab driver does in a single day, we have seen almost nothing there.