LROC NAC view of the Apollo 11 landing site (frame M175124932R)

Companion note for the binary image 2011-lroc-nac-apollo-11-landing-site-m175124932r.tif. The .tif is the verbatim source; this sibling note records its provenance and transcribes what it shows so the image is searchable and never needs re-analysis. Do not edit the image.

Provenance

• Instrument: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Operated by Arizona State University for NASA Goddard.
• Source frame: NAC right-camera frame M175124932R. (The “M” + number is the spacecraft-clock product ID; R = right NAC.)
• Acquisition: during LRO’s 2011 low-altitude campaign, when the orbit was lowered to roughly 24 km (≈15 mi) over the Apollo sites, yielding LROC’s highest-resolution look at the landing sites at about 25 cm per pixel. These two low-orbit months produced the best images of the exploration sites to date.
• Original product filename (as uploaded): M175124932R_AP11_25cm_bicubic.echo_4000p_2400p.4silver.tif — a derived display product: the NAC frame resampled (bicubic) to a uniform 25 cm/pixel, 4000 × 2400 px, 8-bit grayscale, contrast-enhanced (“4silver”). Embedded XMP shows Adobe Photoshop processing dated 2013–2014; the underlying observation is the 2011 NAC frame.
• Coverage: about 1 km across, centered on Tranquility Base in southwestern Mare Tranquillitatis. North is up; the Sun is low from the east (long shadows to the west).

What the image shows

A low-Sun orbital view of the undisturbed mare surface, pocked with craters of all sizes, with the human landing site near the left-center and a large rocky crater at right:

• LM descent stage (Eagle) — the brightest small object near image center, casting a short shadow to the west. This is the lower half of the Lunar Module, left on the surface; it is the most reflective man-made feature in the frame.
• Astronaut trails / disturbed regolith — darker (lower-albedo) patches and paths radiating from the descent stage, where boots and equipment churned the bright upper regolith. A distinct dark trail runs east from the descent stage to a small crater.
• Little West crater — the small (~30 m) crater just east of the descent stage at the end of that trail; the crater Armstrong jogged to near the end of the EVA to photograph. (The Mission Report calls it the “33-meter-diameter crater east of the lunar module,” ~50 m east.)
• EASEP experiment packages — one or two small bright features south of the descent stage (the Passive Seismic Experiment Package and the Laser Ranging Retroreflector), with their own short shadows and a scuffed-regolith apron.
• West crater — the prominent sharp-rimmed, blocky ~180 m crater at right (east-southeast), surrounded by a bright, rough ejecta apron strewn with boulders. This is the “blocky crater the size of a football field” Armstrong manually flew past during the final approach; the LM set down west of it, between its ejecta rays — ≈490 m from the rim, ≈575 m from the center by pixel measurement on this frame (refining the 1969 reports’ round “~400 m”; see the discrepancy ledger and the LROC concept).

This is the only direct imaging of the Apollo 11 hardware as it sits on the Moon, and it independently fixes the landing point — something neither the crew nor Mission Control could pin down from lunar orbit in 1969.

Original / citation

NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. LROC NAC frame M175124932R, Apollo 11 landing site, acquired during the 2011 low-altitude (~24 km) campaign at ~25 cm/pixel. Featured by the LROC team and NASA as a “new look” at the Apollo 11 site.